Promoting his indie genre-bender Detention today in Los Angeles (in theaters Friday), Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson found himself in the line of questioning about the much-discussed ambiguity surrounding director Gary Ross's potential return to the franchise. “I think Gary’s the man," he diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter. "Gary is in my mind is the only one that could ever direct the second one. That’s what I’m sticking to.” (UPDATE: Looks like Hutcherson'll have to readjust his thinking - Ross is officially out of the running for Catching Fire.)
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Mattel has unveiled the first look at their Hunger Games-themed Katniss Everdeen Barbie doll ($29.95), available for pre-order today and on shelves in August, and the result is... kinda close to what I envisioned when I read Suzanne Collins' novels. Not that District 12's underfed hunter gal ever hewed that close to Barbie's usual unattainably bosomy dimensions in most readers' minds, but something in Katniss-Barbie's face is appropriately feline, with just the merest hint of the full-lipped pout that Jennifer Lawrence brought to the screen.
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Despite last week's report to the contrary, it's not especially surprising to hear that Gary Ross is not quite out as the director of the Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire: Various sources have followed up initial word of Ross's franchise departure with news of predictable-enough salary disputes over ridiculously large sums of money that would push any spin machine into overdrive. UPDATE 4/10: Ross is officially out of the running to direct the Hunger Games sequel.
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This just in from CheapOair, offering travel deals to the Charlotte, NC area that played host to the Hunger Games production. "Visit the DuPont State Recreational Forest (also known as the arena in the movie) where you can find a dramatic landscape of waterfalls, hideaway lakes, streams and pines, as well as the spot where Peeta camouflaged himself in the movie, and traces of the pyrotechnics from the fireball sequence." While you're at it, how's about a lovely spring picnic on the site where children lost their lives fighting to the death in the movie? Sign me up!
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You had about as much chance of winning last Friday's lotto jackpot as either Wrath of the Titans or Mirror Mirror had of knocking off the blockbuster incumbent Hunger Games in the box-office sweepstakes, but at least the two new releases didn't have a totally losing ticket. Meanwhile, at least one aggressive holdovers is making its money the old-fashioned way. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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After years of foisting dashed-off 3-D — and its inflated ticket prices — on movie audiences, studios may have found their most reliable ally yet in shoring up box office: IMAX. And not just the punch and potential of the brand's own 3-D, either, but good old conventional 2-D as well.
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Screenwriter David H. Steinberg's credits include two American Pie sequels, National Lampoon's Barely Legal, the 2002 Devon Sawa vehicle Slackers, and, yes, Puss in Boots... which makes him an expert on adapting for the screen, of course! "...Ultimately I was underwhelmed. The movie simply failed to capture the emotion of the book... (No one in the movie ever looks hungry!)" [Yahoo]
The industry seers pretty much nailed it: "The Hunger Games opened with $68.25M grosses for Friday’s North American box office, including $19.75M in record-setting midnights. That should make for a first weekend of $140M with upside. This is the highest non-sequel opening weekend ever, and the highest debut single day for a non-sequel ever, and the highest March opening ever, and the 5th highest opening day ever." Read Nikki Finke's full report at our sister site Deadline.
Because Jennifer Lawrence's StarMeter is sky-high during this glorious Hunger Games weekend, why not take a look at her next venture, the indie horror pic House at the End of the Street? Katniss Everdeen this ain't; JLawr (JenLaw? JLa? Did we ever figure this one out?) stars as a teenager who befriends a new neighbor (Max Thieriot) whose family was murdered years ago. In the first image from the pic, a tank topped Lawrence discovers something mysterious and, from the look on her face, probably horrifying. Where's that bow and arrow when you really need it...?
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You knew The Hunger Games would open big, but this big? Meet your new bona fide box office powerhouse franchise: Taking in $19.75 million at midnight showings around the country, Lionsgate's PG-13 action-romance earned the #1 all-time non-sequel midnight debut, outperforming even The Dark Knight's 2008 $18 million midnight. We've got another true blue four-quadrant blockbuster on our hands, people! If you're sitting bleary-eyed at your desk right now with a happy smile on your face from last night's late night debut, share your reactions after the jump.
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Oh, God, here we go again: "'Katniss's act of self-sacrifice [volunteering to take her sister’s place in the games] is a trigger for an entire revolution. She draws an ethical line that she won’t cross over and it serves as such a beautiful example for people,' [director Gary] Ross said. 'That assertion of her own individual ethics ultimately triggers a revolution just as it was one Tunisian flower vendor that led to the revolt that rifled through the Middle East last year. Or Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus. It usually comes down to an act of individual ethics that can trigger something like that.'" [LAT]
Suzanne Collins can start her victory lap now. The film version of her first Hunger Games novel is on the brink of blowing up box-office records – and critics and fans like it, too. Other young-adult fantasy authors haven’t been quite so successful in dealing with Hollywood. Some of Collins’s success was luck and good timing: her first Hunger Games book was released a month after Stephenie Meyer’s final Twilight novel appeared, sending publishers and studios alike scrambling for the next young-adult franchise. But Collins also skillfully played the game with and for the filmmakers, making deliberate choices about how she wrote the novels and how she helped market them to the books’ fierce fans. Forget teenage love triangles or wizards vs. werewolves; here's a far more practical list of dos and don'ts for when your popular young-adult fantasy book is being adapted by Hollywood. (Spoilers for lesser movies ahead.)
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Heads up, romantic drama die-hards: Movie theaters will be awash with tears in the next couple of weeks. Three epic — well, two epics and one epic-lite — love stories are being re-released for various questionable reasons, and in these challenging economic times it might not make sense to rush out and see all three. Here, then, are some points to consider before buying a ticket and travel-size tissues for Casablanca, The Bodyguard or Titanic.
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Forget comparisons to Twilight -- will Lionsgate's The Hunger Games hit Dark Knight-level opening weekend success? So sayeth some experts who peg the PG-13 action pic's tracking in the $85 million - $115 million range on par with Iron Man, Spider-Man, and franchise sequels usually featuring wizards or robots. What's more, The Hollywood Reporter cites "insiders" who think those figures are conservative and say the Suzanne Collins YA adaptation could even bank as much as $140 million thanks to its four-quadrant appeal, which would propel it not only ahead of all but one Twilight sequel in the record books, but into the Top 5 weekend openings of all time. [THR]
Movie events have become deadly little things, highly mechanized gadgets thrown by studio marketing departments into an audience’s midst in advance; then we just stand around and wait for them to explode. The Hunger Games, adapted from the first of Suzanne Collins’ hugely successful trio of young adult novels, was decreed an event long before it became anything close to a movie: More than a year ago its studio, Lionsgate, launched a not-so-stealthy advertising campaign that made extensive use of social media to coax potential fans into convincing one another that they had to see this movie. The marketing was so nervily persuasive that you had to wonder: How could any movie – especially one that, as it turns out, is largely and surprisingly naturalistic, as opposed to the usual toppling tower of special effects – possibly hope to measure up?
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