Box-Office Oracle: ‘The Hunger Games’ is Positioned for a Massive Opening
By
Laremy Legel
There’s one game in town this weekend, and it’s The Hunger Games. Will it break Alice in Wonderland‘s record? Can a movie crack the top ten without even hitting a million dollars? All those questions and more answered now, let’s break this thing down!
Laremy predicted the #1 movie correctly 3 Weeks In A Row
The March (and Spring) record is $116.1 million, set by the aforementioned Alice in Wonderland. This means I not only have The Hunger Games breaking that record, but shattering it with the potential to go even higher and that’s without Alice‘s 3-D surcharge.
In terms of looking at this weekend’s competition, The Hunger Games will have a 400 theater advantage, and a much more rabid fanbase. As such, would $155m shock me? Nope, but it’s hard to predict a $37,500 per theater for a film that’s (kinda, sort of, is) about rounding up children to have them murder one another.
The sequel is already scheduled for November of 2013, and they are talking about how to tackle the extremely difficult third book (two-parter?) and this initial installment could lead to a billion dollar worldwide number. No matter how you look at it, in terms of movies, this is the biggest story of the year so far.
I’m putting in a 35 percent bleed, partly for run-off, and partly because it’s nice counter-programming against The Hunger Games. And did y’all notice that $42m production budget? That’s downright efficient by comparison to some recent titles we’ve talked about.
And now we’ve reached the “less than half a million people will even bother” stage of Oracle. This film sports a $40m production budget and no earnings to speak of. Sad.
