THE HUNGER GAMES: BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES’ earns $19.2M in the film’s domestic opening day

THE HUNGER GAMES: BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES’ earns $19.2M in the film’s domestic opening day.

The year is 2012, The Hunger Games has hit theaters and the renaissance of Young Adult fiction and dystopian films begins. The Hunger Games franchise has drawn in billions of dollars including the book trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Other YA adaptations followed suit, but none hit the mark like the world of Panem and its districts working towards freedom against the corrupt capital. Now, eight years after the release of Mockingjay – Part 2, Lionsgate has revived the series with a prequel that takes place 64 years before our heroine Katniss Everdeen enters the game arena. Franchise director Francis Lawrence returns to tell the tale of a young eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow, who would eventually become the sinister tyrannical President of Panem, in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes came in with $19.1M Friday. Though right in the range of where we saw it yesterday, the Suzanne Collins prequel is bound to file under the $50M+ projection with $44M-$46M per industry estimates.

After The Marvels posted a franchise low for the Marvel Cinematic Universe of $46.1M, isn’t Songbirds and Snakes also a misfire? Not necessarily, and at a $100M-plus production cost, 65% of which is funded by foreign sales with another $20M in German tax credits, the Lionsgate Francis Lawrence directed movie is structured completely differently financially than the $200M The Marvels. Lionsgate has largely covered their nut and exposure, while in standard fashion, giving up any upside in foreign.

The challenge here for Lionsgate is launching this movie all along, aside from the actors strike, is the fact that the Collins novel wasn’t a big hit like the others, hitting shelves during Covid and 3.5M novels sold. The other factor that can’t be ignored is that Hunger Games die-hards were upset when the studio split up Mockingjay into two movies.suspended advertising on Twitter