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.