Last year saw the birth of what is expected to be one of the biggest movie franchises in modern Hollywood. Adapted from Suzanne Collins' best-selling book, Gary Ross' The Hunger Games shattered records when it came out last March and wound up making more than $400 million domestically - good enough for third place on the 2012 yearly box office rankings behind only The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. The franchise is only expected to grow bigger next month with the release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and like most blockbuster movies these days it will be released on the biggest screens available: IMAX. And with every IMAX release, of course, comes a special IMAX poster - which you can see above.
Looking at the poster in high resolution - which you can do over at Badass Digest - you can see that there is a lot of stuff going on here. The most eye-catching images are of Katniss framed with giant wings in the middle, the Mockingjay pin above the banner, and the blindfolded President Snow at the bottom, but inspecting the details you can see all kinds of different statues, buildings, flags, weapons, heroes and futuristic guards. It's a busy design, but a cool one overall.
As the poster notes at the very bottom (we're talking below the date and the tagline), there is one special thing that differentiates The Hunger Games: Catching Fire from most IMAX releases. Like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the film actually features scenes that were filmed using the giant IMAX cameras. This is certainly the best way to get the most out of an IMAX experience, but what's unclear at this point is just how much of the movie was made in the larger format. You can find out more about the release in the featurette below:
Picking up where the last film left off, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire begins as Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutchinson) continue to be celebrated for their victory in the 74th Annual Hunger Games. While great for the duo from District 12, this is bad news for President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who quickly realizes that Katniss is being seen as a revolutionary figure. In order to nip the problem in the bud, it's announced that the 75th Annual Hunger Games - known as the Quarter Quell - will be a special event that has winners from previous years reentering the arena - and that includes Katniss and Peeta. Liam Hemsworth (Gale Hawthorne), Woody Harrelson (Haymitch Abernathy), Elizabeth Banks (Effie Trinket), Lenny Kravitz (Cinna), Stanley Tucci (Caesar Flickerman), and Toby Jones (Claudius Templesmith) all reprise their roles from the first movie, while new additions include Philip Seymour Hoffman (Plutarch Heavensbee), Jeffrey Wright (Beetee), Sam Claflin (Finnick Odair), and Jena Malone (Johanna Mason). Look for the movie in theaters on November 22nd.
