The Hunger Games Wins $155 Million Opening Weekend
by Joal Ryan - E! Online
To say The Hunger Games has caught fire is understatement: The film will gross a historic $155 million in its opening-weekend box-office debut, its studio estimated this morning.
The Friday-Sunday take is the third-biggest in Hollywood history, blowing past the blockbuster hauls of the Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean and Twilight movies, among others.
And the records keep coming for Katniss Everdeen and company…
WATCH: The Hunger Games Premiere, Every Amazing Minute of It!
The Hunger Games is now the biggest nonsequel opener, and the biggest nonsummer opener.
Its haul was on the very upper end of outsized projections, projections that had been fueled by monster advance-ticket sales.
The film opened at midnight Friday, taking in nearly $20 million from those screenings alone. By the end of its first day, it had collected $68 million, the fifth-biggest single and opening-day grosses ever. On Saturday, it collected another $51 million. Lionsgate was calling for a $36 million Sunday.
The Hunger Games did this all without 3-D, but with some help from IMAX, where it showed on 268 screens (out of 4,137 total), and came away with $10.6 million, the most ever in the format for a 2-D nonsequel.
The Jennifer Lawrence-led movie was mostly driven to its great heights by women, with females comprising 61 percent of its weekend audience, per the polling data.
Proving its reach beyond the young-adult market that was targeted by the Suzanne Collins books, more than half of Hunger Games moviegoers, 56 percent, were aged 25 and older.
Another good sign for the franchise-to-be: Audiences who saw the movie liked it—a lot, grading it an A.
The first sequel, Catching Fire, is already in the works, and set for a November 2013 release.
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