The Hunger Games Gobbles Up $155 Million in Opening Weekend

Mar 26, 2012

The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games blew past all analyst’s expectations and posted a monstrous $155 million three day domestic opening weekend total for Lionsgate Studios. The huge take is the third best in history and the best ever debut for a non-sequel. Interest in the film was high going into the opening due to a well oiled multimedia campaign and The Hunger Games is currently scoring an 85% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Reviews are exceedingly positive for the movie and well over 80 percent of audience members would recommend seeing it.

The Hunger Games set a record for first day grosses by a non-sequel on Friday when it pulled in an estimated $68.25 million while also setting a slew of IMAX records as well. The debut ranks behind only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 with $169.2 million, and The Dark Knight at $158.4 million. It’s important to note, the final Harry Potter film was extremely front-loaded as its opening weekend gross represented 44.4% of its final domestic tally whereas The Dark Knight’s total was 29.7% of its total domestic take.

All of this should be good news for WizKids, as they have three new products based on the series: The Hunger Games: District 12 Strategy Game, The Hunger Games: Jabberjaycard game, as well as a set of 27 collectible, pre-painted miniatures to be sold in the ever present WizKids blind booster format.

One final item about The Hunger Games opening weekend, that brought a smile to my face, is the fact the film scored a bigger opening than any of the four Twilight films so far. Hooray! It remains to be seen what kind of staying power the film will have but it’s highly unlikely that it will be as front-loaded the Twilight franchise – the total domestic box office for New Moon (48.2%) and Breaking Dawn (49.1%) was achieved in the opening weekend as word of mouth of how awful those two movies were (and let’s be honest, the entire series and the books they’re based on are horrible) quickly spread.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...