Having long been anointed next-big-thing status now that the Harry Potter movies have ended and the Twilight series is drawing mercifully to a close, The Hunger Games fulfilled its destiny by earning $155 million on opening weekend, just edging out 21 Jump Street, which made $21.3 million on its second week. To put The Hunger Games’ numbers in perspective, that’s $142.6 million more than the Zac Efron vehicle Charlie St. Cloud made on its opening frame. Or to put it in perhaps more meaningful perspective, $155 million is the third-largest opening weekend ever and the best for a non-sequel, falling short only of The Dark Knight and the last Harry Potter movie. For that fraction of the population who would rather see a creepy drama about a young woman tracking down the mother who tried to abort her, October Baby proved to be solid counterprogramming. Working the same evangelical network that turned Fireproof and Courageous into hits, the film cracked the Top 10 with $1.72 million on only 390 screens.
In limited release, The Raid: Redemption became the rare festival midnight favorite to find traction in the real world, riding good buzz about its relentless action sequences to a per screen average of $15,786. Also performing solidly was Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, with $4,138 per screen on 29 screens, benefitting perhaps from the coveted A.V. Club bump. That left poor Musical Chairs eating the specs left by the crumbs: Its $1,000 per screen on nine screens will not be enough to buy that used ’03 Honda Civic off the lot.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.