‘The Dark Knight Rises’ And ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ Both Opened Simultaneously In China

In America you almost never see two films targeting the same audience released wide on the same day, this is sort of an unwritten rule among studios to make sure films don’t directly compete with the same audience. In China, film releases are programmed by a state-owned organization who are not afraid of pitting two western Box Office titans up against each other in a single weekend.

As a result, yesterday both The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises hit Chinese cinemas, both playing to big numbers.  While both films did big day one Chinese business there has to be a winner, and surprisingly Spider-Man pulled in about a million more for the day.

While Spidey won the general box office, The Dark Knight Rises did do huge numbers as a 2D film and in IMAX . In fact both grosses represent a rather great opening day, suggesting that the direct competition might not have  as big of an impact as you would generally think.

The big day pushed The Amazing Spider-Man to over $700 Million worldwide. The movie fell short of the Raimi trilogy’s lofty domestic numbers, but all told the Sony reboot is a tremendous success in a summer where it was overshadowed by two of the biggest comic book films of all time.

Interesting international box office numbers, which is nice to see based on how much of a dud the domestic box office has been in the last few weeks.