It was a tale of tired IP at the box-office this weekend, with the odds favouring The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which opened at the lower end of expectations with $44 million, while the already catastrophic performance of The Marvels took another headline making hit with a huge second-weekend drop of 79%.
Audiences did return to Panem for the prequel, just not quite in the same numbers as those who flocked to see Jennifer Lawerence compete in the original Hunger Games trials. Songbirds and Snakes collected $44 million from North American cinemagoers, and a further $54 million from international markets, for a running total of $98 million during its opening weekend.
All four of the $3 billion grossing Hunger Games films opened above the $100 million mark, so The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is off to a slow start in comparison, although the budget for the Francis Lawrence-directed film was considerably lower than its predecessors, with reports pegging it at somewhere in the region of $100 million.
SEE ALSO: Read our review of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes here
It also had a crowded marketplace to contend with; Universal and DreamWorks animated sequel Trolls Band Together ($30.6M), Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving ($10.2M), and Taika Waititi’s oft-delayed soccer comedy Next Goal Wins ($2.7M) were also released to varying degrees of success.
One film that wasn’t going to challenge The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes for the top spot was Disney’s The Marvels, which added to its list of unwanted records by suffering the biggest second-weekend drop in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Nia DaCosta-directed superhero sequel took that title from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (-69.9%), in the process grossing just $10.2 million in its sophomore frame.
The domestic tally for the $220 million blockbuster currently stands at $65 million. The international grosses aren’t in yet, but at this point it isn’t likely to have made more than the original did during its opening domestic weekend ($153 million).
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Source – Variety
