People would not be nearly as depressed at these results had the box office sites been more realistic in their predictions. 200M was really pushing it, but when BOM said 215M that was all hype. I can understand people getting caught up in the hype, but I said for months people needed to keep their expectations in check.
No doubt the shootings are having an effect, but if it ends up at 170M, I'd say it's actually doing very well in wake of the shootings. The shootings had no effect on the midnight shows because no one knew about it, and 30M was way too low to break the record. At a minimum it had to have beat Potter's midnight.
I had midnight pegged at 35 as I was looking at it in comparison to the Twilight films. Alot of people predicting 100M opening day were calling for a 50M midnight, which was just pure hype, but alot of the reputable box office reporting sites went with the hype. Now of course they couldn't possibly have guessed what would have happened in the next 24 hrs, but I suspect even if nothing had happened, the weekend record was still pretty safe.
Alot of us were pointing out that with Avengers most of the theater chains were operating at or near capacity. AMC's credit card system was brought to a screeching halt, and we really saw for the first time since the mid 90's before the building of alot of the mega screen theaters, that we were reaching the tipping point.
Again, for DKR to have made 200M it needed a 20% boost in attendance. A boost so big it hasn't happened from a previous attendane record holder since Spider-man 1 increased 22% over Harry Potter 1.