It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that The Hunger Games had a very successful second weekend after posting the third biggest opening in movie history with $152 million.
While there were new films that came along for The Hunger Games’s second week, namely Wrath of the Titans and Mirror Mirror, they were no match for the long awaited adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular young adult series.
In its second week in theaters, The Hunger Games pulled in $61.1 million, and there’s even a story on MTV.com that wonder if Games in its third week will “sink” the 3D conversion of Titanic. While $61.1 million is a 60% drop, it’s still not chickenfeed, and even with that drop it effortlessly beat out two new comers.
As Entertainment Weekly explains, this is the same level of box office drop that Iron Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, and it’s an even better drop off than, you guessed it, Twilight: Breaking Dawn, which went down 70% in its second week.
What also makes Hunger Games a box office landmark is it made $251 million in ten days. This is the same amount of time Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest made $250 mil, and the only other films that made that much in less time were the last Harry Potter, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which took nine days to reach that mark, and The Dark Knight, which made that amount in eight days.
As the box office punditry puts it, this is also the fastest a “non-sequel” made this kind of money, and EW predicts it’s going to finish in the same range a little bit under the Pirates sequel, somewhere in the range of $375 million.
While we don’t know yet how much the movie’s impact is pushing book sales, there’s no doubt tons of books are going to move from the success of the film, and as we just reported on TG, sales of the Games books has put it in the same league as Twilight.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that the current book sales are “bigger than expected,” and there’s 36.5 million copies of the series in print, a big jump from 23.5 million, putting it past Twilight, which has 30 million copies in print.
