This probably isn’t the way Christopher Nolan had intended for The Dark Knight Rises to be projected. According to sources who attended last night’s press junket screening in Los Angeles at the AMC at Citywalk theater, the summer’s biggest film (in the most literal sense, as its being presented in IMAX) made it about an hour and fifteen minutes into the movie before the sound went out of sync and the computer that drives the projector ultimately crashed. 

Deadline reports: “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.”

This is usually where we’d inject some joke about this being exactly what Warner Bros. gets for not inviting Film School Rejects to the junket, but it’s ultimately just too bad. I’ve had technical problems happen at screenings before — usually for inconsequential films like The Pursuit of Happyness or Gamer — and it’s always a bummer. One would assume that this would not skew reviews in any way, but some junket press can be pretty grumpy at 8am. Here’s hoping other IMAX theaters around the country don’t have similar bad luck in 12 days when they have to show it to the people who really matter.