Hunger Games Wins Massive $155 Million Box Office Weekend

The Hunger Games scored big over its opening weekend, earning $155 million in the United States to take the No. 1 spot at the box office while claiming one of the best openings of all time ahead of Spider-Man 3 ($151.3 million) and the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 ($138.1 million). The $155 million take is also the largest opening of all-time for a non-sequel based movie.

Based on the best selling novel by Suzanne Collins the movie stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth.

The movie also managed to rake in $59.3 million in 67 worldwide markets for an international take of $214.3 million in less than a one week period of time.

The films producers Lionsgate also revealed that the movie was No. 1 in almost every single foreign market while performing especially well in English speaking areas such as Australia where it took in $6.7 million and the U.K. where it earned $7.5 million.

While an impressive opening weekend the movie failed to surpass The Dark Knight (2008) which debuted with $158.4 million and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2(2011) which took in $169.2 million.

Hunger Games was helped along by an average CinemaScore of A+ by audiences 25 and younger and A- for audiences over 25. CinemaScore reports that 39% of the audience was younger than 18. Lionsgate’s own exit polling also revealed that 44 percent of all audience members were under 25-years-old.

According to Lionsgate executive vice president of distribution David Spitz:

“The numbers just kept growing and growing. And based on the trajectory of the weekend, we are going to have an unbelievable hold. We are going to play and play. I think that when we initially looked at this property, we thought we were going to have Twilight numbers in terms of females, but we didn’t.”

The movies $155 million take was also helped along by its massive hold on US theaters where it played on 4,137 traditional theaters and 268 IMAX screens. Based on that number of screens the movie turned in a record $40,000 average per screen for a nonsequel 2D outing.

While Hunger Games definitely ate up a good amount of the weekend box office Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum watched as their 21 Jump Street had another decent outing with $21.3 million earned which takes it’s domestic earnings to $71.1 million, not bad for an R-rated film that debuted outside of the more traditionally R-rated friendly summer months.

Falling back to No. 3 was Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax which took in $13.1 million for a total domestic gross of $177.3 million. The Lorax is especially satisfying for its producers because of its rather cheap $70 million budget.

Does Hunger Games’ huge weekend box office earnings surprise you?