Yesterday’s studio estimate for THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) seemed high, with a Sunday drop predicted to be by far the lowest in the Top 10, so it’s not much of a surprise to see the weekend number reduced now that final figures are out, down $3M from $161.1M to $158.1M. Even with the change, Catching Fire remains the biggest non-summer opener ever and healthily ahead of the start for the first Hunger Games. But it’s no longer the highest-opening 2D movie, and it slips from #4 to #6 on the list of all-time opening weekends, in both cases because it’s now behind The Dark Knight ($158.4M) and The Dark Knight Rises ($160.9M).
$3M here or there isn’t a particularly major concern for a blockbuster like Catching Fire. The bigger box office question is how it will hold during the 5-day Thanksgiving holiday. In each of the last 2 years, Thanksgiving was dominated by one of the Breaking Dawns, which were extremely front-loaded. After the usual Monday plunge, they each had modest increases on Tuesday and Wednesday, then a big drop on the holiday itself, followed by roughly doubling on Friday, then a tiny drop on Saturday and a big one on Sunday. The result was that in the full week after their opening weekends, the Breaking Dawns made an amount equal to about 61-62% of their opening weekends. If that model holds for Catching Fire, it would be at around $255M by Sunday, still narrowly ahead of Hunger Games, which was at $248M after 10 days of release. But there’s definite potential upside for Catching Fire, which has more of an older audience that isn’t quite as female-skewing, which may make it less front-loaded.
Incidentally, Catching Fire wasn’t the only movie to indulge in some wishful thinking with its weekend estimates. For some reason, DELIVERY MAN (DreamWorks/Disney) thought it was worth exaggerating by 3% to push its weekend above $8M, when its real total was an even more horrific $7.9M, and the expanding NEBRASKA (Paramount) was overstated by 7%, giving it a less impressive $11.6K per-theatre average.
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