While Friday’s usually are good sized opening days at the box office for movies, especially among younger audiences, Saturday’s tend to be even busier since it can draw in a more diverse demographic. Which paints a pretty good picture for the Lionsgate release of The Hunger Games, which is on track to be the biggest movie for Lionsgate yet. Their current record holder is Farenheight 9/11 from the previous decade which brought in around $113 million in box office receipts. The closest that came to being toppled was with The Expendables, which hit $103 million. The Hunger Games had a very strong midnight showing around the country by bringing in $19 million and it’s Friday take is now at $68 million. Initial tracking for the film and box office projects has it aiming its mark at the $140 million for the weekend, so it looks to be a big winner for the company and pretty much guarantees that Catching Fire will go into production quickly.
A bit of anecdotal information; For our local 16 screen Regal theater, this weekend that took nearly every showing of every other movie they have outside of 21 Jump Street and The Lorax and removed all showings except for a post-7pm showing. So there’s at most one or two showings that day. Every other screen during the daytime hours and most of the evening has been given over to The Hunger Games. And at the first showing of the day at noon that we went to, it was nearly sold out.
Here’s the top five as listed for Friday.
Title |
Friday | Total | |
| 1 | The Hunger Games | $68,250,000 | $68.2 |
| 2 | 21 Jump Street | $6,250,000 | $56 |
| 3 | The Lorax | $3,200,000 | $167.4 |
| 4 | John Carter | $1,359,000 | $58.6 |
| 5 | Project X | $625,000 | $50.4 |
