The Dark Knight Rises Tickets Are Getting Scalped Like It Was A Concert

As a younger Batman fan, I had a number of friends who were not so much excited to see Batman Begins, as excited to see me see Batman Begins, and then hear me gush in the car about it at two-thirty in the morning afterward. The summer after I graduated from college, when my best friend and I shared an apartment and a streak of joblessness, we deliberately made room in our tight budgets for only two summer movies: Hellboy 2 and a midnight showing of The Dark Knight.

Tonight, I am not going to see The Dark Knight Rises, because I have to get up tomorrow morning and do my job, and I’d rather do it on a good night’s sleep. Part of me is a little sad about this; the surest sign that I am a grownup now than anything else. Most of me is really looking forward to that sleep. I just want you all to appreciate it when those posts show up tomorrow.

Wait, this post was supposed to be about TDKR tickets? Right, right. Okay. Here we go.

According to The Wall Street Journal, tickets to sold-out midnight IMAX screenings of The Dark Knight are going for $65 to $100 on Craigslist and StubHub, a markup usually only reserved for one-time-only viewings like sports events and concerts. Yes, yes, in a way, there’s only going to be one midnight release of The Dark Knight Rises. But then it’s going to be playing in a billion theaters for a billion days. I’m not here to denigrate the enthusiasm that would cause a person to spending between three and five times the normal ticket price for a movie, but I am here to say “Wow, The Dark Knight Rises. Wow.” From the WSJ:

“Movies like ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ come along once every few years,” said one ticket broker, Steve, who declined to provide his last name, but said he works for a company that sells tickets to sports, concerts and other events. Steve was asking $100 on both Craigslist and StubHub for tickets to the Thursday midnight IMAX screening at New York City’s AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13. He said he has sold about 150 of the 200 tickets he purchased the moment they went on sale.

While many of the tickets have gone for the asking price, he said the average sale is $65 apiece. The prices for “The Dark Knight Rises,” he added, are higher even than for this year’s most successful film to date, “The Avengers.”

Projections don’t currently expect The Dark Knight Rises to exceed The Avengers‘ opening weekend box office, which was bolstered by 3-D ticket sales. But we’ll see if it does manage to bust the opening weekend record set by its predecessor The Dark Knight, the 2-D movie with the highest opening weekend box office in history. The money for scalped ticket prices, while a sure signe of interest, naturally, do not wind up affecting box office returns.

(The Wall Street Journal via The Hollywood Reporter.)