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Felix Quinonez: I believe the shooting had a huge impact on the film's box office and to a smaller extent some people's perception of it. As for the box office, I think it impacted more than just its opening weekend numbers. I think it changed the whole conversation. Had there been no shooting, the movie would have opened bigger. Some people even thought it could beat The Avengers. And when a movie opens that big it becomes a sort of self generating buzz machine. Stories on its amazing box office performance would have been all over the news, giving the movie a lot of free advertising, making it an even more "must see" movie. People would also have been talking about how good it is (it got an A cinemascore), which, combined with the coverage of its box office performance would have made some of the people who weren't going to see it change their minds. All of a sudden they would want to see what all the hype and buzz is about.

But instead at the end of the weekend the only coverage the movie was getting was about the terrible shooting and the victims. Instead of talking about the quality of the movie people were talking about the deaths of these people. They were asking themselves whether or not it was safe to go to the movies. We all know nothing compares to the loss of lives and I'm not at all trying to suggest otherwise. (I know that should go without saying but this is the first time I wrote anything about box office numbers since the shooting and it feels kind of wrong, so I had to state it.) That being said I believe the shooting robbed the movie of hype, buzz and the most effective kind of advertising; the kind that comes from people they trust. And its box office numbers weren't even announced until Monday afternoon. Even then it was a low key event so I'm wondering if there were a lot of people who didn't even hear about how much money it made.

As for the perception, I believe that for some people this movie went from being "must see" to "I'll wait for it to come out on DVD." It didn't really change anything for me. I saw it the next day, I saw it again yesterday and I will try to catch a matinee this week. But I have to admit even I felt a bit uneasy the first time I watched it and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who felt that way.

Edwin Davies: I personally think that it is pretty much undeniable that the shooting has had an effect on the performance of not only The Dark Knight Rises, but every film in release at the moment. We saw that last weekend when every film tumbled drastically in a way which could only be explained as the repurcussions of this tragedy. That does not mean that the film was responsible for the event, but it has been inextricably linked to senseless death of 12 people because no one can report on the aftermath without mentioning the context in which the shooting took place. The way that rolling news coverage works means that the facts of the incident have been recounted and repeated over and over and over in the past week and a half, so the connection between the film and what happened at an exhibition of it can now never be severed. That the film in question was one of the most anticipated of the year and a massive media event already has only only amplified that impression. This is why a single, isolated incident has had such a drastic effect; everyone was excited about the Dark Knight Rises and focused on it last weekend, so when a tragedy like that happens when everyone is watching, it shatters the illusion of safety and escapism that draw people to the movies.

As we go forward and move away from the event, I think that people will return to theaters and check out The Dark Knight Rises, but the film is never going to regain the momentum that it had prior to that Friday morning.

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