As expected, The Hunger Games had an enormous three day weekend, pulling in a cool $152 million.
Right now, The Hunger Games is not just a movie and a book series but a cultural phenomenon, which is hardly surprising considering the anticipation for the film, which is probably only second to The Dark Knight Rises, which comes out in July.
As box office pundits reported everywhere, the Hunger Games opening makes it the third biggest box office opening behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which scored $169.2 million, and The Dark Knight, which scored $158.4 million.
As Boxofficemojo states, “The odds were definitely in The Hunger Games favor this weekend,” and Variety confirms the film “should stay hot at the box office.”
As Andrew Stuart writes, the film is “positioned to further dominate the domestic market by taking advantage of a five-week period light on four-quadrant fare,” (four-quadrant meaning men and women under twenty five, and men and women over twenty five). Stuart also noted this is also a month “light on tentpoles” that Games can smash through like a semi.
The Hunger Games got an A on Cinemascore, and reports also mention instead of just young girls, there’s also been a 40% male turn out to the film as well. As director Gary Ross told Variety, “I imagined that it could do very, very well, but certainly not this much.”
He also mentioned he didn’t feel “no more pressure than I put on myself normally” making the movie. “There’s something kind of humbling about hiking in the woods to make a movie every day. We didn’t feel like we were part of a large Hollywood system.”
And Suzanne Collins, creator of the Hunger Games series, is the latest JK Rowling style success story, but she may now become the next David Chase (The Sopranos) in the sense that she created a huge phenomenon, but is fleeing from the spotlight like a deer in the headlights.
According to Foxnews, Collins, who is fifty years old and has two children “famously avoids interviews,” and her previous credits were writing for the Nickelodeon shows Clarissa Explains It All and Oswald.
As Foxnews also points out, the first Hunger Games spent over 100 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List, and Collins is the first young adult author who has sold more than a million ebooks on Kindle.
