EXCLUSIVE: Sources are saying that the aorta of the weekend box office, Comscore’s Rentrak system, is down Friday. Talk about bad timing, coming on the opening day of Warner Bros’ The Batman. But I hear Comscore is feverishly working hard to get the system back up soon this afternoon.
I’m told that there was an unplanned outage in the hosting facility where the server resides. There’s been wild rumors out there that there was a fire in the Portland, OR, offices — that is not the case. Warners is also not hiding grosses here, which occurred when Tenet debuted back in late August 2020, when movie theaters were first reopening during the pandemic.
Comscore’s Rentrak portal is the crossroads of the box office: It’s where theaters’ point of sales are immediately funneled, and it’s what the studios use to make projections, drill down on individual markets and schedule theatrical releases. Nothing diabolical here in the outage here, I understand.
Comscore provided no comment.
The Batman racked up $21.6 million in its first three days of previews and scored 4 1/2 stars on Comscore’s audience survey PostTrak. The Matt Reeves-directed movie is poised to gross well beyond $100 million this weekend.
We’ll update you when Rentrak is back online.