Hunger Games Poised To Break Box Office Records

The highly anticipated movie, “The Hunger Games,” opens this weekend and box office experts are predicting some pretty big numbers. Tracking services are giving a conservative estimate of $82 to $115 million for the movies opening weekend, while some studio insiders predict that “The Hunger Games” could rival movies like “The Dark Knight” with a $140 million debut.

According to Box Office Mojo, the biggest movie opening of all-time goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 which opened with $169,189,427 in July of last year. “The Hunger Games” would have to exceed expectations to take down Harry Potter, but the movie could beat out Alice in Wonderland which has the biggest opening ($116,101,023) for a March opening.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that several box office observes, as well as rival studios, are predicting that “The Hunger Games” will gross $130 to $140 million this weekend.

Lionsgate is hoping that “The Hunger Games” will become the next “Twilight.” But some experts say that that is setting the bar to low. “Twilight” opened with a $69.6 million weekend which was largely driven by a young female audience. “The Hunger Games” is appealing to young, old, female, and male.

A veteran film executive, said:

“They are hitting it out of the park when it comes to all audience segments. No matter how you slice and dice it, this is an all-audience, four-quadrant movie.”

Unaided awareness was already hovering at 21% but jumped up to 29 percent this week. Definite interest for the movie rose from 60 percent to 62 percent. Fifty five percent of females under 25 said that “The Hunger Games” is their first choice for a movie this weekend and Forty percent of women above the age of 25 said that they were hoping to catch the new movie.

THR reports that the male numbers are equally impressive. Approximately 35% of males, regardless of age, have “The Hunger Games” as their top movie choice this week.

Are you going to see “The Hunger Games” this weekend?

Here’s a trailer for the new movie.