After a massive opening weekend domestically, followed by surprisingly big weekday totals, The Hunger Games has finished its first full week of release with roughly $188 million domestic. Now, it appears likely to add another $60 million or more to that total as it enters a second weekend with strong buzz suggesting fans are heading back for a second helping, giving it a domestic total of about $248-250 million after its second weekend. I personally think there's a chance the film might be even stronger than expected going into this weekend, and could end up with a domestic weekend total of $65-70 million.
Overseas, the film had a (relatively) less impressive opening weekend tallying around $59 million — to put that in perspective, remember John Carter opened to $70 million overseas amid universal mainstream press derision (including mocking of foreign audiences, particularly Russians, for attending the film). This weekend, The Hunger Games will probably add another $35 million in receipts to its foreign totals, on top of somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $10 million from the last four weekday totals, for a foreign box office total of about $104 million by the end of business Sunday. That might even be a low figure, since the weekday totals could be quite a bit stronger, and it might end up with weekend numbers closer to $40-45 million, especially since it still has some notable overseas markets in which to open.
Those numbers would put The Hunger Games at a global box office of at least $350+ million, and maybe as high as close to $370 million. My own guess is that it will sit around $360 million in global box office after the weekend is over and all the numbers are updated. We'll probably only have the domestic numbers by Monday, with foreign totals taking a few more days to come in.
At this rate, if those numbers hold up, the film should be approaching the neighborhood of $450 by the end of its third weekend in release, heading fast toward the $500 million mark. It is already the second-highest grossing 2012 release so far, behind only Journey 2: The Mysterious Island , and will easily leap to first place after this weekend. Keep in mind, The Hunger Games is not a 3D release, so its success at the box office comes without the same added "oomph" that will help films like The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Hobbit as they rack up hundreds of millions of bucks at theaters.
Can The Hunger Games hold strong enough to stay in the race with those other blockbusters, and challenge them for the top spots in the box office race this year? I think it can and will, and I'm guessing it finishes in the top-five highest grossing films of the year when the dust settles, with this film and The Dark Knight Rises being the only two non-3D films in the top tier. It will have to work hard, though, to beat out the final installment of the Twilight series, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. That film's fanbase will most likely drive the fourth film in the series to the highest box office total of the entire franchise, but I'm thinking it will finish somewhere around $750 million, and that The Hunger Games will top that figure.
Time will tell, of course, and for Lionsgate it's a win-win situation, since they now own the rights to BOTH franchises. What's great about it, for audiences and cinema, is that along with The Hobbit it means three out of the top six highest-grossing films this year will be movies that relied either on a dominant female audience, or (in the case of The Hobbit) a decent mix of both male and female attendance, helping further erode the traditional Hollywood belief that the only audience that matters is the young male demographic.
I'm obviously a big fan of superhero films and comic book adaptations, but quite frankly I think even the superhero film genre would benefit from trying to appeal to more than just the traditional young male fanbase — especially if it leads to changing the usual extreme "whiteness" of the casts of the films. I mean, let's be honest, how many non-white faces did you see in Superman Returns or the previous Spider-Man movies, despite being set in major cities where you'd expect a more diverse citizenry? How many main characters and supporting characters in those films, or in most of the X-Men films (a franchise all about diversity and accepting people's differences, yet where most of the main characters are consistently white) and most other comic book superhero films, are non-white? Not many.
Of course, a lot of fans will respond to this by pointing to one or two characters here and there, but overall the truth is these films tend to lack much representation of the fact large numbers of non-white people live in the USA. The Iron Man franchise and the current Batman franchise are exceptions that have incorporated a lot more racial and gender diversity. Christopher Nolan's Gotham City in fact has probably the most non-white supporting cast of any superhero franchise I've seen. But those are exceptions to the rule, and the rule is simple: white faces, especially guy faces.
In the last few years, the most popular and highest-grossing superhero films (Batman's and Iron-Man's franchises) have moved away from the constant "white male faces" problem. Now, the young adult fiction franchises are further demonstrating the box office strength of diversity. So I'm cheering for The Hunger Games, and yes I'm cheering for Twilight as well, because they are helping break the glass ceiling that's existed far too long in studio blockbusters, and they are helping solidify the message that it's time for Hollywood to look beyond just young white dudes as a target audience.
Follow me on Twitter, on Google+, and on Quora. Read my blog.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment