Box Office: 'Hunger Games' Scores $17M Thursday, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part I had a somewhat lower Thursday/midnight debut compared to The Hunger Games and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. But that doesn’t mean it will have that much lower of a debut figure come Sunday.
Lionsgate (Lions Gate Entertainment LGF -4.97%) and Summit’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part I began its sure-to-be-huge debut weekend with $17 million in Thursday grosses. The Jennifer Lawrence star vehicle, which opened at 8:00pm last night, pulled in about 14% more than the $19.74m that The Hunger Games pulled in just at midnight alone in April 2012 and 32% less than the $25.25 million earned by Catching Fire‘s $25.25m in Thursday previews over this weekend last year.
It’s still among the bigger Thursday/midnight gross on record, behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II ($43.5m), The Dark Knight Rises ($30.6m), Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 ($30.4m), Twilight Saga: Eclipse ($30.3m), Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn I ($30.1m), Twilight Saga: New Moon ($26.3m), $24m earned by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, the $22m earned by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the $18m earned by The Dark Knight way back in 2008.
The reason this year’s Hunger Games Thursday box office report looks an awful lot like last year’s Hunger Games box office report (yes, I copied last year’s text and make appropriate changes accordingly) is because there haven’t been a bunch of super-huge Thursday debuts this year, with just two (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy) topping $10 million in Thursday previews.
I imagine the comparison will look a lot different this time next year when we discuss the Thursday figure for Mockingjay part II with the Thursday figure for Avengers: Age of Ultron and other lower-grossing debuts that could nonetheless bring it some interesting multipliers (think Fifty Shades of Grey, Pitch Perfect 2, Jurassic World, and/or Furious 7… wow, Universal/Comcast CMCSA -0.61% is going to have a nice 2015). But yes, Mockingjay part I is easily the biggest Thursday box office debut of 2014 by a healthy margin and perhaps only looks lower in comparison to itself.
It is tempting to be pessimistic and presume that a lower Thursday number for the sequel means a much lower overall debut figure. But first let’s first be optimistic and presume that the film is not more frontloaded than the first Hunger Games and Catching Fire and that the core fan base that showed up last year is pretty much the same, give or take, that showed up last night. As I’ve said before, when you start with a $152 million weekend and then follow it up with a $158m weekend the next year, you can only go up so high.
The fact that the Thursday number didn’t approach the record books may merely mean that the sequel’s fans were willing to wait for the conventional weekend showtimes, which is par for the course for this specific franchise and especially true with this “half of one movie” schtick. A Thursday/midnight-to-weekend ratio (about 15.8% of its weekend earned last night) similar to Catching Fire would give Mockingjay part I a $108 millionweekend. A similar performance to the original Hunger Games (around 13%) gives this new film a $131m weekend total.
