Hollywood studios withhold box-office results after Aurora shooting
Director Christopher Nolan (C) poses with cast members attending his Hand and Foot print ceremony in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood on July 7, 2012 in California.
Hollywood studios banded together in the aftermath of the Colorado shooting to withhold box-office reporting through the weekend.
The Associated Press reported that while "cash registers have indeed been running at theaters worldwide this weekend," the mass shootings that left 12 dead and 58 wounded at a screening of the "The Dark Night Rises," has silenced the usual box-office tradition of boasting.
The unusually show of harmony in a volatile industry was started when Warner, the studio behind Batman, decided to hold off on released their debut numbers for the final movie in their Batman trilogy. Other studios then followed suit, saying that they would not issue their usual Sunday estimates, the Guardian reported.
Studios will wait instead until Monday to release the final dollar counts for the weekend.
But what does Hollywood's radio silence really mean?
There will be no top-10 lists for movie fans to argue over.
There will be no studio executives haring their audience's age and gender breakdowns.
No analysts will crunch numbers to determine if this weekend was a better weekend than the same one last year.
But, there's really no doubt that “The Dark Knight Rises” will be the number one film in the United States and beyond. Before Warner opted against reporting weekend box-office results, the studio announced that the film took in $30.6 million domestically from shows that started just after midnight Friday.