Hunger Games looking like $60-75m on Friday — will John Carter catch some overflow or be trampled?
To no one’s surprise, Lions Gate’s Hunger Games looks on pace for a record setting weekend. It booked $19.75m in midnight shows, and as of 4pm Deadline Hollywood and others are forecasting a final tally for Friday of $60-75M and a final tally for the full weekend of $135-150m. (Comment: We’re reporting this here because what happens with Hunger Games affects John Carter. How it will affect it — we’re not sure. With numbers the high, there could be “blockbuster spillover” effect ….. or it could have a negative impact. We’ll see.)
Here is the full article:
FRIDAY 4:10 PM, 4TH UPDATE… EXCLUSIVE:My movie studio sources are telling me that the Friday gargantuan opening box office for Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games is ranging from a low of $60M to a high of $75M today from 4,137 North American theaters. That number includes the record-setting $19.75M midnight grosses. For the 3-day weekend overall domestic blockbuster number, my insiders are predicting a low of $135M to a high near $150M. This is a huge bonanza for the studio and not much less than its motion picture revenue for recent quarters. Meanwhile Lionsgate sources are telling me that the hotly anticipated pic did a matinee per-screen average of $7,800. Now that number is rising past $9,900 at this hour. That’s better than The Dark Knight ($9,806) but not Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part Two ($11,300) and Twilight Saga’s Breaking Down Part One ($9,310) and New Moon ($12,600).
Read the rest at Deadline Hollywood
COMMENT: We’re reporting this because it has an impact on John Carter. But what will the impact be? Is this bad news for John Carter as everyone thinks? Or good news because Hunger Games is soooooooo big that there will inevitably be overflow and JC may catch some of the overflow? We can hope for the latter — we’ll see.
8 comments
More and more it starts to feel John Carter was dissed by mutual (silent) consent of the “top critics”, press and Disney (Pixar envy?). I do not know why and for what, but the press Hunger Games gets in comparison is ridiculous. For example The New Yorker has a long article explaining the world and background of HG at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/14/100614crat_atlarge_miller
Where were articles analyzing the Barsoom books, their style and relation to world today??? That would have helped immensely.
All this tells a lot of this world: a predictable scifi story of kids killing each other is a hit and an imaginative scifi adventure/love story is not.
PS. I’m looking forward to see Blu-ray release of JC in 2D. 3D was incredibly hard to watch.
PPS. I hope JC gets Oscars for music and visuals. That would only be fair.
Re: Spillover. At the other theater by my house they have a hunger games screening every 15 – 30 minutes. I don’t know how there can be much spill-over. Check these out
9:45am 10:00am 10:30am 10:45am 11:00am 11:25am 11:40am 12:10 12:25 12:55 1:10 1:25 1:40 1:55 2:10 2:35 2:50 3:20 3:35 4:05 4:20 4:50 5:20 5:45 6:00 6:15 6:30 7:15 7:30 7:45 8:00 8:15 8:30 8:45 9:00 9:15 9:30 10:30 10:45 11:00 11:45 12:00am
My smaller theater has one show an hour.
I would love to see John Carter make some decent cash at the box office because of overflow with the release of The Hunger Games. Will have to just wait and see. On a side note I will definetly be buying the Impending John Carter Blu-ray day one of it’s release.
The thing I don’t like about that is that they are doing 65m in one day and your theater was only 1/4 full — that means they are on so many screens that there may not be spillover……:-(
It makes me sick to see the support this crappy teen fiction is getting. If this was 1975, and SF fans had a choice between a multi-million $$ JC adaption and teeny-bopper angst remake of “The Most Dangerous Game” there’s no way THG would win!! WHAT THE F***K has become of the SF community?!?! When did we start listening to mainstream critics? When did we start running with the herd? When did we turn our back on the rich heritage of SF that is our inheritance?
I feel sick at heart to see what a pack of trend-following, group-think-victim, fashion-conscious, illiterate, comment-section-back-biting-trolls SF fans have become. Once upon a time, *we* were the forward thinkers; we had the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Arthur C Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, Stanislaw Lem, Harlan Ellison, Carl Sagan etc. etc. on our side.
Now?
Harry Potter & Hunger Games.
It makes me want to screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam!!!!!
Just saw the Hunger Games… must say it was pretty good. The theater I go to is pretty slow. Our theater was less than 1/4 full, so it was a nice viewing experience.
I don’t know Dotar, it seems poor John Carter just keeps getting buried:) Maybe the viewers will get so sick of the loud teen audience (I’ve heard that some of the audiences are pretty rowdy) that they’ll walk out and exchange their tix for John Carter!
You know the hype for HG is crazy. People are going dressed up like the characters. There were even a bunch of girls at school today with home-made Hunger Games T-shirts… like the type you see people make for The Price is Right.
If Hunger Games was not a solid movie, I think JC wold have a chance… but it’s a very solid film. The development of the main character was well done- they made her very endearing. I wish they would have developed John Carter that well.
Yup. That’s why I put in the comment at the end:
COMMENT: We’re reporting this because it has an impact on John Carter. But what will the impact be? Is this bad news for John Carter as everyone thinks? Or good news because Hunger Games is soooooooo big that there will inevitably be overflow and JC may catch some of the overflow? We can hope for the latter — we’ll see.
And also the bit in the headline about — “will John Carter catch some overflow”.
Like it or not, what the competition is doing, and how it affects JC, is part of the story we’re covering.
Isn’t this website “thejohncarterfiles?” Not “thehungergamesfiles” ???