Everybody knew The Hunger Games was going to be an enormous movie, that’s a given, and it indeed pulled in an enormous haul of $307 million world-wide. While it clearly beat the original’s opening weekend by a good $9 million domestically, it still hasn’t beaten the current record set by Iron Man 3.
Still, $161 million domestic and $146 million overseas is a nice haul, and one any studio would certainly be happy with. Worldwide, Catching Fire also made major strides from the original’s debut, which pulled in $218 million world-wide.
As The Wrap tells us, this weekend Catching Fire made for 72% of all box office action this weekend, but as it turns out, the opening weekend record is still being held by Iron Man 3, which made $174 million domestically. After a lackluster second installment, fans were clearly eager for a better Tony Stark movie, which was what they got this summer. (The Avengers still has the biggest domestic opening with a whopping $207.4 million.)
So superhero movies and dystopian stories are still the big thing, at least for the next couple of years. The Hunger Games saga will finally wrap up at the end of 2015, and this may also be when comic films will finally peak with Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Batman Vs Superman, which could put a big dent in the genre if it’s a POS. Yet as the Hunger Games opening weekend gross proves, that’s the only cloud on the horizon so far, and it’s still far away in the future.
