Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
March 26, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: The Hunger Games became the third largest opener of all-time, as well as the strongest Lionsgate performer of all-time after only three days in release. How impressed are you by this result? Where does this rank amongst the biggest box office surprises of all-time? Where does the Hunger Games franchise go from here?
Tom Houseman: A couple of weeks ago I was talking to David Mumpower about The Hunger Games, and he guaranteed at least $100 million on opening weekend. I scoffed and guffawed, assuring him that the opening film based on a series of books aimed at teenage girls had a ceiling of $80 million, and I would be expecting closer to $70 million. I have learned once again to never doubt D-Mumps, but I don't think even he would have predicted $150 million. That's more than double what Twilight managed. The craziest thing of all? This might end up being only the third highest opening weekend of the year. The Dark Knight Rises is almost certain to beat it and The Avengers might have a shot as well.
Felix Quinonez: Obviously, this is an insane number. I actually didn't think it would make too much more than $100 million, if that. To me, it looked like this was going to be another case of a movie not living up to the insane hype. I thought people had lost their heads a little when they were predicting $130 million and that by the end of the weekend they would be brought back to reality by a smaller but still huge opening weekend. Now I might be getting caught up with the craziness but I think you have to go back to Spider-Man to find another opening as impressive as this. Before Spider-Man, no movie had opened to $100 million and I know that's become a lot more common these days but every other movie to do that after Spider Man was a sequel, except Alice in Wonderland and that was in 3D. So for Hunger Games to come and make $152 million on its opening weekend is nothing short of amazing.
Edwin Davies: I am absolutely flabbergasted by this result. Last week, I said that I thought it would beat Alice In Wonderland, but I was expecting, at most, $120 million, not for it to hop, skip and jump right on in to the record books like this. Seriously, this is the first entry in a new franchise and it finished less than $20 million behind the biggest opening OF ALL TIME. How crazy is that? It's even more impressive when you consider that it's a 2D release, so it actually probably sold as many if not more tickets than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 managed in its opening weekend. This is pretty unprecedented, I'd say, since even if you look at something like Spider-Man or Alice In Wonderland, those were non-sequels, sure, but they were based on source material that built up huge cultural awareness over many decades, whilst The Hunger Games was published less than four years ago.
In terms of where the franchise goes from here, I think that The Hunger Games has a very good chance of reaching $300 million - though that all depends on how well it holds up next week - and that Catching Fire may very well take the title for biggest opening weekend, assuming that The Dark Knight Rises or Breaking Dawn Part 2 don't do so in the meantime and set the bar ridiculously high. Seriously, if this is what happens with the first film, imagine what could happen now that even more people are are aware of the franchise.
Jim Van Nest - I was positive we'd see a $100 million opening. I also had a feeling that if it was close to Alice in Wonderland, somehow, it would find away to clock in at $117 million, to give it the "highest March opening of all time." As high as I was on the movie, I never thought $150 million plus was possible. That's just crazy. What this has me wondering is what the sequels will do. Catching Fire should be just as huge, if not more so. But what of Mockingjay? As it's widely considered to be the worst of the three books, I wonder if this could be the odd series where the final film(s) actually drop, instead of increase. But that's quite a ways down the road. We still have Catching Fire's $180 million plus opening weekend to predict and talk about.
Bruce Hall: I'm not surprised. Not surprised one bit. I'm not trying to say I called this, but the word I think I used last week to describe the potential of this franchise was "massive." And that's only because I wanted to avoid using the word "Twilight"...oh, crap. But seeing as how the Hunger Games series of books is superior to...that other one...in every way imaginable, I see the box office potentially peaking with the final installment. There will be no Hunger Games fatigue. I'm not saying that the opening weekend for each sequel will necessarily top this result, just that I would not be surprised if each cume ultimately outstrips the last one.
Max Braden: I find the number astounding, because on all fronts it seems like this movie should have been an underdog compared to book-to-screen projects like Harry Potter or Twilight. I would love to know the demographic breakdown of audiences that went to see it. I think it's fair to say that teens were the primary drivers behind this weekend. What interests me about that is that it seems to be a significant shift from the box office from when I was a kid. Recently I was thinking that prior to 1980 (and I'm biased here because I don't have much movie memory earlier than that), there were very few movies about teenagers. You either had Funicello's party movies or Disney fare. Big earning movies were aided by teenage money but often starred adult actors. But once you got into the 1980s, suddenly you started seeing teenagers as stars, in stories about teenagers: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, all the John Hughes movies and "The Brat Pack," even The Goonies and countless raunchy comedies. That seemed to open up a market where teens really became the box office target demo. Look at Titanic, reportedly benefiting from multiple ticket sales to teenage girls. In the early 1980s or before, it would have been unthinkable to produce a movie like The Hunger Games with kids - you would have cast it with adults, as they did in The Running Man. But here in the last decade we have Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games all doing huge business by starring kids and teens and marketing to them. That's a significant shift in the last three decades that I think has really only become apparent in the last ten years, and doesn't show any sign of reversing in the next ten.
Kim Hollis: "The audience for the film was 61% female, with 56% of ticket holders over the age of 25." (from The Wall Street Journal)
Brett Beach: If Kim hadn't popped in with the stat, I would have, for this becomes another example of an event movie driven by females, but with infinitely more of a crossover potential than either the Twilights or (obviously) Sex and the City. The older skewing audience also suggests that this has the potential to pull in continued business for a while longer and not fall off a cliff next weekend. I think what astounds me is how this is comparable in many ways to the launching of the movie franchise of Harry Potter, but with one twist: As I understand it, HP had already sold millions upon millions upon millions of books in the window between the first novel being published in the UK (June '97) and the movie's release (November '01). The Hunger Games has done extraordinarily well in sales but has still sold significantly less. It also had a slightly smaller window from publication to film (Sept '08 to March '12) but seems to have made up for it with the deafening buzz and excitement leading to... $152 million. I would rank this in the top echelon of surprises if only for how quickly expectations were pushed upward over the last six to eight weeks and how this exceeded all of them. The one thing I do wonder about - and I don't know if this plays in the franchise's favor or not, is that the books are already well done and finished. With HP new books continued to run alongside the films for a stretch and with Twilight, Breaking Dawn came out months before the first film. I do think it was very smart to schedule the second film for so far out (Nov 2013, in Twilight's old stomping ground) and the indication, with the cast contracted for three more films, is that Catching Fire or Mockingjay may be two films (whether or not it is warranted as all the novels appear to be the same length).
Max Braden: In the words of Emily Litella: "Oh. ~Never mind.~"
David Mumpower: Nature abhors a vacuum. I had not anticipated that this philosophy would ever come into play in the box office realm yet it has. In the wake of Harry Potter's final curtain call, The Hunger Games has taken the stage as the new entry that appeals to everyone with its impossibly commercial nature. It begins not far behind where Harry Potter ended, at least in terms of opening weekend. And only one Harry potter release earned north of $320 million, which seems like the floor for what The Hunger Games will earn during its domestic run.
Tom was thoughtful to mention a private conversation here in this thread, but I cannot take a victory lap here. As he and others have opined, I would not have expected $152 million. How could I? We are talking about a $36 million (or 31%) bump from Alice in Wonderland. I have stated many times recently that I consider the premise of The Hunger Games to be impossibly commercial. Even so, I am flabbergasted by the way that North American audiences ceded the film status as a linchpin franchise. It has not been treated like nor performed as a new franchise entry. Analysts kept describing The Hunger Games as the next Twilight, yet after only one film, it has already opened better than any of the four Twilight releases. And all of those are MASSIVE! The original question regarding how surprising a turn of events this is may be answered honestly as the most shocked I have been since The Passion of the Christ. The Hunger Games may yet usurp it as the most shocking box office performance I have ever covered.
Reagen Sulewski: While I'm generally loathe to credit competition or lack thereof for the success or failure of a particular film, as we've seen many blockbuster films go head to head before and both come out fine, this does feel like a canny exploitation of a relatively sparse market. Where this film might have gotten a bit lost in between Dark Knight and Spiderman and Avengers etc. etc., in March, it had the whole hype machine to itself. And this is a definite showcase of how the hype machine can build on itself and turn into a runaway. It's sort of the positive spin on what happened to John Carter.
Tim Briody: I can't add anything else here that's not already been said. We were expecting something huge and got something even...huger. Every single time you think the box office has run out of ways to surprise us, something else comes along. After Friday's numbers came out, I made the then-bold prediction that Catching Fire and Mockingjay both break the opening weekend record, whatever it happens to be at the time of release. After this, that doesn't sound as crazy anymore.
Kim Hollis: I mentioned last week in Monday Morning Quarterback that I was feeling that a result somewhere in the $140 million range wouldn't be out of the question. Now, I was still low even at that, and I admit that I'm surprised that we've got the third best opener ever on our hands. I'm also very surprised at the fact that it did so well on Friday, Saturday and Sunday proper, not necessarily needing midnight sneaks to bolster that number. All I can say is that it's one thing when we here at BOP have awareness of a movie. It's something else altogether when my non-BOP friends are buzzing about something, and I have to say the noise was deafening over the last several weeks.