UFC 150: Dana White Blames Poor Gate On Dark Knight Rises Shootings, Wildfires

UFC 150 was not a success at the box office, drawing 15,000 fans and $650,000. As Luke Thomas pointed out last night on Twitter, the last time the UFC was in Denver, they pulled in $2,000,000.

UFC president Dana White has his own, somewhat bizarre, theory of why the show under-preformed at the gate (via MMA Junkie):

"It was the worst gate since 2007 for a pay-per-view, without a doubt," White said following the post-event press conference.

...

"We've been talking abbot it - the shootings here, the fires - it's been a really bad summer for this place. Once all that stuff was going down, we thought, 'It's not going to be a good gate here.'

Tickets for the show went on sale on June 15, it wasn't until almost a month later, on July 20, that the Aurora shootings took place at the premier of Dark Knight Rises.

While potential monetary losses or some related to the Colorado wildfires could have had some impact on the gate, I have a hard time believing that they're fully responsible for a gate that is only 32.5% of the last UFC trip to the area.

SBN coverage of UFC 150: Henderson vs Edgar II

White also went on to say that he "knows" that the box office had nothing to do with main eventers Frankie Edgar and Ben Henderson. The two men sold 375,000 PPV's for their UFC 144 meeting, a show that also heavily featured Quinton Jackson in the lead-up while UFC 150 had very little by way of big selling names on the card.

We probably won't get an accurate view of how well this show sold on PPV as there were some problems with ordering on DirecTV. There has been some talk that the show was completely unavailable for DirecTV customers, but I watched the show on DirecTV PPV, as did a few family members and at least three friends I spoke to.

This is going to be a weird show for getting a true handle on how well it did from a business perspective.