DS somewhere between $30 to the low $40 million
Well, that's more in keeping with what I've been thinking all along, rather than the $60 million Empire Magazine was forecasting. And even though it's hard to know how things really will play out, with
The Avengers being as huge as it is, that's going to cut into all the other films playing this upcoming weekend, not just DS. Plus, when I said -
More IMAX theaters for DS certainly won't hurt.
- I wasn't really thinking because even though DS will be jumping from 225 IMAX theaters to 300, which means it will be playing in 75 more theaters than it was originally going to, it will be sharing those theaters with
The Avengers. And even if as Variety says, the theaters equally divide showings between DS and
The Avengers, not only would that still mean that DS will lose 300 showings per day (based on 4 showings per day at 225 = 900 showings vs. 2 showings per day at 300 = 600) for a total loss of 900 showings over the entire weekend, who knows what times of day DS will show and what times
The Avengers will show. There's certainly no guarantee that DS will get the showtimes that would be more likely to be highly attended. So, in the end DS is probably still going to get screwed by the new deal...
And an interesting thing in all this is that I have 3 IMAX theaters in my vicinity that I could potentially choose from (with one being much closer than the other two), and even though they always have Friday's showtimes up on their Web sites by this time on Tuesdays, none of them have their showings up yet. And when I called each theater to check for Friday's showtimes, I was told that they're not available yet because they haven't been decided...
Though as far as the foreign box office goes, none of this will matter one iota. In fact,
The Avengers has already been playing in most foreign markets for weeks already, so it won't factor anywhere near as much when it comes to DS' box office take outside the US as it will in the US.
2 days 13 hours 6 minutes 34 seconds until the day the Depp/Burton Dark Shadows is released(ET)!!