‘Dark Knight Rises’ Press Screening Goes Horribly Wrong

99.9% of the time, news of a projector snafu at a press screening isn't news. In fact, it's anti-news, the kind of thing that shouldn't matter to anyone except the poor writers who have to go out of their way to get to a second screening (and it's a known fact that movie writers don't like to leave their caves unless they absolutely have to). However, when that news of a broken projector involves an early screening of a little movie that some people want to see called 'The Dark Knight Rises,' it somehow mutates and evolves into something resembling news.

Deadline has the lowdown on what happened. It was one of those Super-Secret Press-Only No-Guests screenings and it was happening at the Universal Citywalk AMC (not exactly known for being the best theater in Los Angeles, but eh, moving on). Anyway, the screening started fine, but things went horribly wrong during a reel change about an hour into the conclusion of Christopher Nolan's Bat-Trilogy, where the dialogue went out of sync by about ten seconds. Here's what happened next:

"The movie was stopped and the lights went up. A 40-year employee of IMAX said that this has never ever happened to him before. After 20 minutes the man came out again and said the sync computer had failed and could not be rebooted. A computer is now being taken out of IMAX headquarters in West Los Angeles and installed in the AMC Universal location overnight. Reporters were asked to return to the same theater Saturday at 8 AM to see the film. Warner Bros reps asked that everyone see the movie in its entirety and not just from where it left off.”

And that's that, we suppose. The bright side of this situation is that the IMAX tech failed for an audience of press several weeks before the film's official opening and not an audience of hardcore Batman fans on opening night. Imagine the horror: you wait four years to see the next adventure of Bruce Wayne, only to see your dreams crushed thanks to a "sync computer" problem. A blessing in disguise for the folks who were planning to see the film at the IMAX at Citywalk, really.

'The Dark Knight Rises' opens for regular folk on July 20th.