‘Catching Fire’ does just that

As predicted, records were shattered this past weekend, thanks to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’s fantastic bow. The sequel to 2012’s Hunger Games (and we thought that film was popular) earned $161.1 million domestically and $307.7 worldwide. Here’s how it stacks up against previous cinematic and pop culture phenoms:

• Catching Fire had the highest-grossing November opening of all time. The old record-holder, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, debuted to a paltry (it’s all relative) $148.2 million.


• Catching Fire had the fourth highest-grossing opening ever. Its cume ranks just behind The Avengers’ $207.4 million, Iron Man 3’s $174.1 million, and the last Harry Potter movie’s $169.2 million.


• Katniss & Co. just barely dethroned The Dark Knight Rises, which got bumped down a peg to the No. 5 slot on the list of most successful domestic opening weekends. Knight opened to $160.9 million back in 2012.

Catching Fire is also Lionsgate’s most successful release to date. It had the 12th most lucrative international opening ever.

Some other movies made some money this weekend, too, although their stories are less uplifting. Thor: The Dark World earned $14.1 million, the most money of any film that was not Catching Fire. As its total suggests, The Dark World suffered a freefall of a drop in sales, down 61% from last week. The Best Man Holiday, last weekend’s surprise success story, also staggered, falling 58% to gross $12.5 million. While reverberations from the revolution brewing in The Hunger Games' Panem have clearly hurt the cinema’s other offerings, neither The Dark World nor Holiday has been fatally wounded. The Thor sequel will likely finish out with a little over $200 million, while The Best Man Holiday will probably top out at $75 million.

Similar reassurances cannot be made on behalf of Vince Vaughn’s latest vehicle, Delivery Man. The comedian begat a bomb with his tale of a boy-man sperm donor whose contributions result in 500+ children. Delivery Man grossed $8.2 million, less than half of each of Vaughn’s last two films, The Internship and The Dilemma. At least Vaughn can take comfort in knowing other name stars, at least those who were not christened Jennifer Lawrence, have also seen their stock fall this season. Both Runner Runner, starring Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake, and The Counselor, whose credits read like the guest list for Vanity Fair’s Oscar party (Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Michael Fassbender, and Brad Pitt) opened to less than $10 million. Times, they are a changin’.

One thing, however, remains constant: the undeniable appeal of Judi Dench. The grand dame’s Philomena opened in four locations and earned a respectable (how could it could have been anything other than?) $133,716, or $33,429 per theatre.

Neither has Tom Hanks lost his enduring appeal. The actor’s Oscar contender Captain Phillips sailed past the $100 million domestic mark this weekend, its seventh, with no sign of slowing pace.

‘Thor’ proves its mighty earning mettle

As predicted, Thor: The Dark World ruled the multiplexes this weekend. The latest Marvel action (with a hefty dose of comedy) flick earned $86 million at the domestic box office and $180 million worldwide. It looks as if the lauded sequel will soon out-gross its predecessor: By the end of  summer 2011, Thor had earned a successful $450 million worldwide, while The Dark World has already amassed a stellar $327 million after only two weeks. Many are crediting Thor’s appearance in 2012’s The Avengers with increasing interest in his character. The “Avengers Effect” was certainly in play for Iron Man 3, which saw a significant boost in sales over Iron Man 2 (36%) after it opened post-Avengers. Not everyone is thrilled with what is undoubtedly a blockbuster debut, however. 3D attendance was down from the first Thor, and 3D sales made up just 39% of The Dark World’s overall gross, falling short of Gravity-influenced expectations. But that’s splitting hairs on a well-coiffed head. Lacking as it does any significant competition, Thor is expected to hold onto its title for some time.



Unfortunately for everyone else, standing next to a Norse god is bound to dwarf you.  This weekend’s No. 2, Bad Grandpa, earned just $11.3 million, down 44% from last weekend. The good news? Even with the inevitable dropoff, Grandpa is the second highest-grossing Jackass film of all time, on track to earn well over $100 million.

Third and fourth place just missed out-grossing Grandpa. Free Birds and Last Vegas earned $11.2 and $11.1 million, respectively. Their overall cumes are equally waddle-neck-in-neck:  Audiences have more or less ignored the critics and helped Free Birds earn $30.2 million and Last Vegas $33.5 million to date.



Dropping faster than an intergalactic deity to Earth, Ender’s Game suffered a sales dip of 62% to earn $10.3 million. That brings the film’s total up to $44 million, which, considering its advance hype, production costs and this weekend’s steep sophomore dropoff, qualifies it as a bomb. Expect the film to hang around for another week or two, but once Katniss and co. stage their multiplex takeover come November 22 for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Ender’s Game will be all but over.

Not so with Steve McQueen’s everyone-loves-it 12 Years A Slave. After expanding wide to 1,144 locations, Slave earned $6.6 million to bump its total earnings up to $17.3 million. The rollout, and profits, will continue this coming weekend when the film screens at roughly 1,300 theatres.



Finally, with the weekend’s smallest opening, The Book Thief earned a solid $108,000 from four locations. The film, though, isn’t tracking too hot on Rotten Tomatoes – 59% rotten – and Fox has yet to announce further expansion plans.

Wildly successful 'Hunger Games' earns $155 million

Attracting both fans of the book and the average moviegoer, The Hunger Games earned $155 million this weekend, topping even the highest predictions. There are few franchises that I can really get behind, so I'm pleased that the adaptation did so well--the third-highest opening ever (unadjusted). With so many theatres available for opening weekend, this movie should have a steep drop next week. Looking at the charts featuring the highest opening ever, it's impressive how much variation there is in the "opening weekend percent of total" column. The two Twilight movies just below Hunger Games' spots earned 48-49% of their total from their first weekend. The Dark Knight earned just 29% of its total from the first weekend. Hunger Games should fall closer to Twilight than The Dark Knight, but that still would put the movie at over $300 million domestically.

Although plenty of critics have savaged The Hunger Games, many have also come out on the positive side. In exit polls, moviegoers gave the futuristic movie an "A" rating. This would bode well for weeks to come, but pretty much everyone I know that was interested in the franchise has seen it already. Coming weeks should see repeat viewers, laggers, as well as people curious about the fuss.

Even with The Hunger Games to contend with, 21 Jump Street racked up $21.3 million in its second week. The comedy dropped 41%, in line with most of the other movies in the top ten. The exception? John Carter, just three weeks after the $250+ million film debuted, dove 63% to $5 million. Disney's epic is officially a flop.

In eighth place, October Baby rallied up $1.7 million. The anti-abortion drama may have gotten additional momentum from the Republican political arena, where women's health issues have been in the forefront. Since it released on just 390 screens, it had a healthy $4,400 per-screen average.

The ultra-violent The Raid: Redemption earned $15,700 per screen at fourteen locations. Foreign movies with lots of combat tend to do well at home, and this one had great reviews to boot.

This Friday, Snow White redo Mirror Mirror will release opposite the epic sequel Wrath of the Titans.

 

'The Hunger Games' bets on a $100+ million opening weekend

This weekend's box-office total for The Hunger Games will be somewhere in the low nine digits. The first film installment of the young-adult franchise already earned $25 million last night during midnight and 3 am screenings, including some on IMAX screens. Thanks to the flexibility of digital, adding screenings, showing a film on multiple screens or in bigger auditoriums is easier than ever, so exhibitors should be able to meet demand. In fact, the movie will be in 4,137 theatres but on over 10,000 screens, something that just wasn't possible before the rise of digital. With 35mm, showing a movie on more than one screen was done through interlocking prints, a labor-intensive process that also requires that all the theatres have the same showtime.

Critics have been kinder to The Hunger Games than they have to Twilight, giving it an 86% positive rating. Given that critics are often older than the typical fanboy or fangirl, this speaks to the fact that the movie is tracking well across all four quadrants. Even though The Hunger Games was a young-adult novel, many adults picked the books up, so it makes sense that these demographics would also express interest in the film version. As a fan, I can report that my expectations were met--and exceeded. This movie left me more satisfied than 90% of the literary adaptations I see. Not everyone sparked to how the adaptation handled the whole kids-fight-to-the-death in a futuristic world premise. FJI critic Daniel Eagan acknowledged that fans won't be disappointed, but found the adaptation "both digressive and hurried," without providing answers about what the Games really symbolize. I predict fans will go ga-ga and this futuristic adventure will do big business opening weekend and beyond.

No other big movies opted to release this weekend, but the small and spunky The Raid: Redemption (13 theatres) should satisfy those disappointed with The Hunger Games' PG-13 rating. "Full of dynamic physical stunts and imaginative death blows," the super-violent Indonesian actioner "balances moments of intense quiet with fresh crescendos of visceral violence," according to THR's David Rooney.

Joining the parade of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies, 4:44 Last Day on Earth (3 theatres) comes from the well-regarded director Abel Ferrara. Frank Lovece praises the work as "stunningly believable," with natural dialogue and "a fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude that is both bracingly raw and real and occasionally uncomfortable."

On Monday, we'll see just how high The Hunger Games soared, while learning what movies managed to thrive during a weekend so dominated by one offering.

 

'The Hunger Games' promises big, but it also delivers

Over 2,000 screenings of The Hunger Games have sold out on Fandango. Estimates that the movie could earn $80 million have now been upped to $130-140 million, according to THR. This week, fans lined up at a NYC Barnes & Noble fourteen hours in advance in order to meet the cast. The Regal Union Square had five or six screenings scheduled on Saturday when I checked a few weeks ago. Now it has twenty-five.

I'm happy to report that enthusiastic fans will not be disappointed with that adaptation of Suzanne Collins' franchise. Less excited family and friends who are dragged along to the show may also be pleasantly surprised. At the all-media screening at AMC's Lincoln Square Cinema in New York City this Monday, the crowd was incredibly responsive to the movie--plenty of collective "awwws" and chuckles. The movie itself exceeded my expectations. I had been a bit worried about the CG elements based on the trailer, but they looked much better on the big screen. The games themselves weren't shown in any of the advance material, so the second hour was pure, no-idea-what-it's-going-to-be-like enjoyment. Here are some of the things about the adaptation that I liked best--or least.

The movie trusts its audience. In the book, the heroine is a mother figure to her younger sister, Prim, while her mom suffers from severe depression. In an early scene, Prim looks to her mother for approval but it's Katniss who responds. In a gesture, the actors convey what's going on. No dialogue necessary.

CG that overwhelmed and underwhelmed. Katniss' neighbor and fellow competitor Peeta has a talent for camouflage, and the movie uses CG to great effect to make him look like he's covered in bark, a rock, etc. On the flip side, the tracker-jackers look like regular bees, and the muttations' faces resemble killer animals, not the dead Tributes (participants in the games). However, even I was wondering how they would pull off the muttations. Instead, Katniss and Peeta hear the voices of the fallen. The auditory cues are just as unsettling, and certainly a lot easier (and cheaper) to pull off.

It's more to the spirit of the book than the letter. There are a number of small changes from the page to the screen. The mockingjay pin has a different origin. Katniss' dress during the interviews doesn't burn into a mockingjay pattern (but how would they do that, anyway?). None of the changes bothered me. I would rather the filmmakers move things along rather than contort the screenplay in order to maintain some artifact that just can't be explained properly in a movie. This was a lesson learned from the early Harry Potters, in my opinion.

The action sequences are great. What I loved about the novels is that the action isn't one of brute force, but cunning. Instead of people chasing after each other and having a fight, it's more of a cat-and-mouse game. It's very reminiscent of Drive's opening car chase scene, which involved parking the car as a means of evasion--a scene beloved by myself and many other women I've talked to. The emphasis on strategy partially explains why women in particular are drawn to the series. Strategic bombing of supplies. Letting loose a nest of insects. Hiding and waiting. These are the kind of weapons and tactics I find most engaging.

This weekend, theatres will be flooded with happy fans. I'm already thinking about the next adaptations in the trilogy. Catching Fire, the next film in the series, should easily be a success. Thinking oh-so-far ahead, the series might run into trouble during Mockingjay, as Slate writer Erik Sofje points out. Perhaps Lionsgate's plans to turn the book into two movies may end up helping, not hurting, the action-filled finale. But that will be years away, and this weekend is all about welcoming one of the most satisfying literary adaptations I've seen in a long time.