As expected, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 1 opened big this weekend, pulling in $123 million since the Thursday midnight shows, but this actually is a fairly significant drop from Catching Fire, which opened to $150 million last year. It's also well below the "Part 1" installments of the Twilight and Harry Potter franchises as well. What does that mean? Hopefully that people have caught on to this incredibly lame, purely financially motivated tactic of splitting the last part of a trilogy into two unnecessary pieces. Mockingjay's reviews suffered for that too, which may have lessened the must-see factor for a series that until this point had shown some crossover appeal to non-book fans than those previous franchises did. But it doesn't really matter, because it's still a huge hit, still opened massively overseas (bigger than the last one even), and will still be at least the second highest grossing movie of the year, behind Guardians of the Galaxy.
In second place was Big Hero 6, which fell just 20% and is holding strong, adding $20 million for a $135 million total, well on its way to grossing $200 million, while Interstellar also held fairly well, for a new total of $120 million. Unfortunately, perception of Interstellar is being based on the performance of Christopher Nolan's other films, so it's being seen as a relatively soft success compared to Inception and The Dark Knight. Meanwhile, Dumb and Dumber To fell hard, dropping 62% for fourth place, but Thanksgiving weekend is likely to give every movie a boost this coming week, as one of the busier moviegoing holiday breaks of the year.
Top 5:
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 1- $123 million
- Big Hero 6- $20 million
- Interstellar- $15 million
- Dumb and Dumber To- $13.8 million
- Gone Girl- $2.8 million
Things are heating up in limited release as well, with several Oscar season movies set to open or expand in the coming weeks. The Theory of Everything and Birdman seem to be doing fairly well as they platform out (Birdman is coming up on $15 million total), while Foxcatcher maintained its high PTA in its second weekend. A bigger success is The Weinstein Co.'s St. Vincent, which has done extremely well, amassing $36 million so far to become the second biggest indie hit of the year, behind Grand Budapest Hotel. Next weekend is the kid friendly Penguins of Madagascar and the limited bow of The Imitation Game on two screens, while everything else tries to boost its earnings over Thanksgiving weekend. See you next Sunday, where we find out how they did, and have a happy Turkey Day everyone!
