Whether you want to blame it on the runaway early summer success of The Avengers or the impact of real life tragedy, suffice it to say that The Dark Knight Rises hasn’t delivered the box office numbers that many in the industry were expecting from the final film in such a popular franchise. In fact, as Movies.com reports after a little number crunching on Box Office Mojo, The Dark Knight Rises — which is not expected to surpass The Dark Knight – has currently sold 12 million fewer tickets than Tim Burton’s Batman.
What’s more, as Michael Izzo of Business Insider points out, once you adjust the numbers for ticket inflation, the total domestic gross for Batman is almost $505 million, compared to the $407.5 million currently pulled in by The Dark Knight Rises — even though the latter movie had the best opening weekend of any 2-D film to date. Kind of shocking, right? We had no idea that Michael Keaton had that kind of box office pull. Or maybe it was all Nicholson. Either way, we never would have guessed that Burton’s 1989 film could potentially outperform Nolan’s latest.