While the third ‘Hunger Games’ movie easily finished at the top of the box office this weekend, it didn’t perform as well as the first two installments. Nor did it come close to performing as well as expected.
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‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1<\/strong>‘ closed out the three-day weekend with $123 million, making it the highest debut of 2014. At the same time, that’s quite a disappointment for the franchise. Even after accounting for the decline in Thursday night numbers, ‘Mockingjay’ was predicted to open around $148 million. Even with that prediction was down a few million from the respective $152.5 million and $158 million openings for ‘The Hunger Games<\/a>‘ and ‘Catching Fire<\/a>‘. The 22% franchise drop that it actually experienced is a harsh and drastic decline. Blame is being placed on the fact that the third book in the series is the least liked by fans, but I wonder if and how much of the drop was due to Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photo scandal (not that there’s any way to quantify the effect).<\/p>\n Overseas, ‘Mockingjay’ was actually up from ‘Catching Fire’. It debuted in all but two of the major international markets and grossed $152 million. Just like the majority of the domestic let-downs this year, foreign earnings are still up.<\/p>\n After slipping 42%, ‘Big Hero 6<\/strong>‘ landed in the #2 spot with $20 million. Seventeen days into its run, Disney’s animated superhero flick has brought in $135.7 million. The upcoming Wednesday release of ‘Penguins of Madagascar’ is expected to steal some of this movie’s thunder, but since ‘Penguins’ is based on a TV series, I wonder how many parents will want to pay for their kids to see something they can get for free on television?<\/p>\n In its third weekend, Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar<\/strong>‘ suffered its biggest decline so far with a 47% hit, which actually isn’t too bad. The additional $15.1 million put the film in third place and pushed its domestic run up to $120.6 million. Without any big event movies opening for a few weeks, IMAX is still working in its favor. Internationally, ‘Interstellar’ has pulled in $329 million, pushing it well on its way to the half-billion mark.<\/p>\n Last weekend’s top movie, ‘Dumb and Dumber To<\/strong>‘, had a major 62% drop-off. It tanked from first to fourth place with a disappointing $13.8 million sophomore weekend. After ten days, the comedy sequel has grossed $57.4 million.<\/p>\n Rounding out the Top 5 once again was eight-week-old ‘Gone Girl<\/strong>‘. Its $2.8 million weekend pushed the film’s domestic run up to $156.8 million. David Fincher’s thriller has also earned $170.9 million overseas.<\/p>\n Weekend estimates have yet to be announced for limited releases ‘Happy Valley’ or ‘V\/H\/S: Viral’.<\/p>\n 1. ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1’ (Lionsgate) – $123,000,000<\/p>\n 2. ‘Big Hero 6’ (Buena Vista) – $20,086,000<\/p>\n 3. ‘Interstellar’ (Paramount) – $15,100,000<\/p>\n 4. ‘Dumb and Dumber To’ (Universal) – $13,820,000<\/p>\n 5. ‘Gone Girl’ (Fox) – $2,815,000<\/p>\n 6. ‘Beyond the Lights’ (Relativity) – $2,630,000<\/p>\n 7. ‘St. Vincent’ (Weinstein) – $2,354,000<\/p>\n 8. ‘Fury’ (Sony) – $1,900,000<\/p>\n 9. ‘Birdman’ (Fox Searchlight) – $1,855,000<\/p>\n 10. ‘The Theory of Everything’ (Focus) – $1,500,000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While the third ‘Hunger Games’ movie easily finished at the top of the box office this weekend, it didn’t perform as well as the first two installments. Nor did it come close to performing as well as expected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":66475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[743],"tags":[7679,178,7559,7680,2951,7683],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66473"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66476,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66473\/revisions\/66476"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Top 10:<\/h2>\n