It's bizarre to remember that, just a year and a half ago, The Hunger Games was seen as a bit of a gamble-- a modestly budgeted book adaptation featuring no real stars, and awkwardly dancing around the fact that it was a movie about kids killing each other. Now, on the eve of Catching Fire's premiere, everyone in the movie is a star, Jennifer Lawrence is a really big star, and the movie is inevitably going to win its weekend, and may well be on its way to becoming one of the year's biggest films.
We'll have the midnight box office numbers for you tomorrow, but in the meantime Fandango has the data to suggest just how big Catching FIre will be. The ticket seller announced that Catching Fire currently makes up 85% of their ticket sales, meaning that while some people still may be catching Thor: The Dark World or The Best Man Holiday, most of them are grabbing their bows and arrows and deciding between Team Peeta and Team Gale. Right now it's outpacing even the likes of Iron Man 3 in sales, and has already become the top advance ticket-seller of the year. That's not a huge surprise, of course-- as devoted as superhero movie fans can be, fans of book series are even more hardcore, which is why I saw kids under 10 at every single midnight Harry Potter screening I ever attended. Whether that means Catching FIre will wind up being bigger than Iron Man 3, currently the year's biggest film, remains to be seen .
Early tracking suggested that Catching Fire could break the November box office record currently held by The Twilight Saga: New Moon, but based on the already existing fan frenzy it seems like it could go a lot further than that. Catching Fire. The sequel is converting even people who didn't read the books, like Eric, or people who insisted that Sam Claflin would make a terrible Finnick, like me. Even if you couldn't tell Peeta from Gale when The Hunger Games first came out, by now you might be intrigued enough to check it out. Let us know in the comments if you're seeing Catching Fire this weekend, and while we're talking about Fandango, check out the completely charming interview that Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson did with them, proving that pretending to fight to the death in the arena actually establishes a pretty good bond.
