Poll: Will The Dark Knight Rises Cross $1 Billion Worldwide?

With Christopher Nolan spending most of his days right now tied to the desk of his editing room putting the final touches together on The Dark Knight Rises ahead of its release this July, there has been very little actual news regarding his final Batman film recently. There was of course that flurry in December, just after filming had been completed, when we got that awesome poster, and the blood-pumping prologue (for those who were lucky enough to see it anyway) and the melancholy and dark tone of the first full-length trailer but then Warner Bros put the marketing for the film back on hold to allow Nolan peace to complete his movie. We've had nothing new to report on in weeks but let's not get downbeat about these things. Less than six months ahead of the release of any film like this is usually my favourite time. It is close enough that you can genuinely start to be excited and you can see that calendar date approaching and not looking as impossibly far ahead as it once did but also it's not yet close enough for you to feel like you've been spoiled on every single twist and turn in the movie. The film at this point is still more your imagination of what it could be than what you have seen and what it will be. Usually that would indicate a film that can't ever live up to the hype or what your brain tells you it could be. There is a re-release of a certain George Lucas movie right now that is a perfect indication of this. Lucas never had a chance of living up to the story that was in your head for decades of how Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi first met and became friends and fellow Jedi's. But now and again, a movie does live up to how you imagined it could be. Chris Nolan's 2008 phenomenon The Dark Knight was one such movie and it actually went beyond what we expected from it. Can magic strike again four years later? Can The Dark Knight Rises, which has more hype than any movie in living memory, reach the $1 billion mark the last movie did? That's the question for you my dear readers today. Back in the summer of 2008, the hype for The Dark Knight felt like pop culture lightning in a bottle. There was the expectation for The Joker's (Batman's biggest villain draw) first big screen appearance in almost twenty years, the added factor that there was the curiosity of Heath Ledger's final full performance and the tragic surrounding his death, and the fact that Batman Begins was such a good movie that fans were no longer concerned that the franchise was another Batman & Robin malarkey that stopped far too many people from seeing that first movie in theaters. Does The Dark Knight Rises have the same kind of buzz right now that the last movie enjoyed? Yes it does, unquestionably. No movie brings more hits, more emails, more comments on this site than the Batman saga... more so than it did in 2008 and in the build up to the previous film's release. The curiosity of Heath Ledger's performance has now made way now for the curiosity of what Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard are going to bring to the table. But let's not be mistaken. The main factor in The Dark Knight's box office success was just how kick-ass the movie was. I saw the film multiple times in theaters and I know so many others did. It was this multiple viewing factor that gave it such a longevity in theaters, the same reason why Titanic had kept rolling the numbers in months and months after its release over a decade earlier. So it could turn out that the major factor in whether The Dark Knight Rises beats the $1 billion mark of The Dark Knight is whether it is an awesome movie. That obviously we can't answer except to say rarely does a third movie out better an awesome second film (Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi, Spider-Man 2/Spider-Man 3, Godfather 2/Godfather 3, Terminator 2/Terminator 3) but Nolan has yet to make a film that didn't live up to his last. So guys on this quiet Sunday the poll is above. Will The Dark Knight Rises cross the $1 billion mark The Dark Knight achieved four years ago? Comments welcome...