Hunger Games finale disappoints at box office

While it’s hard to imagine any movie that makes upwards of a hundred million dollars in the span of a few days being considered a failure, the earnings were the lowest of any Hunger Games film debut.

It’s not like Lionsgate is going to be losing money on this film, as it’ll continue to do well at the box office, but the fact that the “payoff” film did worse than a fairly mediocre Part 1 is fairly surprising. It has landed on the No. 1 spot both in the domestic and global markets, grossing $146 million overseas.

With the weekend box office down 11 percent from last year, it remains to be seen whether 2015 will indeed become a record-breaking $11 billion year as many predicted at the outset.

Spitz remained unfazed by the dip in box office earnings. It cost a reported $200 million to make. The movie based on Suzanne Collins’ novel collected $101 million in the US and Canada over the weekend, topping the box-office chart as per Rentrak estimates but fell short of the analyst estimate of $120 million.

For most films, the figure would be a coup, but the latest chapter of “The Hunger Games” collected the lowest opening take among the four films in the series. The latest James Bond film only added $14.6 million, bringing its domestic haul to $153.7 million.

Mystery thriller “Secret in Their Eyes”, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts, debuted at No. 5 with $6.6 million.

As for “Games”, what accounts for the movie’s opening weekend performance? “And also to end, after such a long time when we’ve been away from home for so long, with the lines, ‘What now?’ ‘We go home.’ It was really just unusual and poignant”.

Liron Suissa, a marketing executive for the company hanging the film’s posters in Israel, said it was far from the first time his firm has felt this “unofficial coercion” from the haredi community.

In limited release, the Weinstein Company scored with “Carol”.

Universal had more trouble finding its audience for “Legend”.

Then again, while $248 million total is an impressive number, last year’s Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1 opened at $274.9. The violent gangster picture about the Kray twins saw Tom Hardy doing double duty as the crime boss brothers, but critics were lukewarm, and the picture nabbed a so-so $83,000 from four theaters for a per-screen average of $20,271. As such, considering that Mockingjay – Part 1 clocked in with $121 million after its first weekend, it would appear that interest in the dystopian YA series began to wane as it neared its two-part finale. Expect the experiment to spawn more split movies.