Tutankhamun is a big draw right to the end

The Philadelphia Inquirer

With only one weekend to go, the Franklin Institute wanted to cram every last second it could into its nearly eight-month King Tut exhibit.

So it did just that. The doors to Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs have been open since Friday morning at 8:30, allowing visitors to come calling at the throne of the legendary boy-king at all hours. . . . .

Since opening in early February, the exhibit has shattered attendance records. As of 5 p.m. yesterday, 1,284,766 people had seen Tut, nearly 30 percent more than the museum originally predicted.

Corbin estimated that the final attendance would be 1.29 million, making the show the most-visited traveling exhibit in the country this year and the second-most-visited traveling show in U.S. history, behind the King Tut exhibit in Chicago in the late 1970s.

Even with the show's runaway success, one more question needed to be answered about Tut: Could the 3,000-year-old pharaoh get people to come out in the middle of the night to see him?

Turns out he could.

Between midnight and 7 yesterday morning, 652 people filed into the museum to get a chance to see the show. "There were never fewer than 100 people every hour," Corbin said.