BATTLE OF THE SOUNDTRACKS: THE DARK KNIGHT ROSE
Batman pwned The Avengers last weekend. Not at the box office, where The Dark Knight Rises’ three-day U.S. gross ($160 million) fell short of The Avengers’ ($207m). No doubt some of the shortfall was due to some devastating extenuating circumstances, though it was still the highest weekend take of a 2-D movie to date.
However, The Dark Knight Rises soundtrack — an original score by Oscar-nominated ace Hans Zimmer — moved over 33,000 copies in its first week, coming from out of nowhere to outsell the Avengers Assemble soundtrack/rock comp, which sold just over 27,000 its first week out of the gate.
Apparently, Five Finger Death Punch’s album-only, karaoke-level cover of Faith No More’s “From Out of Nowhere” wasn’t enough to lure fans into buying the entire Avengers soundtrack. And Amazon did give away the album’s marquee track, the first real Soundgarden single in 15 years, for a week — and it’s available as a single-song download. So it’s still a pretty close contest.
MetalSucks had been watching this faceoff; last week, we took a look at two dominant types of movie soundtracks, contrasting movie scores with rock-song compilations. This respectable showing in box office and Nielsen SoundScan stats should prove that there’s room for both in the marketplace, so the producers of the inevitable Batman reboot don’t have to go out of their way to include an Evanescence song.
Did you buy the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack? Do you like Five Finger Death punch? Would the Batman movie have been better with some Gojira or Shinedown? Tell us in the comments section.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zdoUwoSrM&feature=player_embedded
-Ferris
D.X. Ferris wrote the 33 1/3 series book about Slayer’s Reign in Blood, writes & draws the webcomic Suburban Metal Dad, and runs Pentagrammarian, the world’s only heavy metal grammar & usage website (that we’re aware of). You can follow his bullshit on Twitter here, here, and here.
