According to Forbes, As of last night, January 21st, 2015, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 1 surpassed the domestic $333.2 million mark, making it the top domestic earner of films released in 2014, just nosing out Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy. This is now the second year in a row to feature a Hunger Games film as a top-earner, not to mention the second year in a row wherein the top-grossing film features a female protagonist.
These numbers are especially impressive when one takes into account that Mockingjay I was not bolstered by the inflated ticket prices of IMAX screen or a 3-D presentations. It is the first #1 domestic film to do that since 2006.
Related: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 Review
Globally, Mockingjay is still behind other high-earning blockbusters like Transformers: Age of Exctinction, which remains the only film this year to have made over a billion dollars, but Mockingjay has not yet opened in China, where it is expected to do well.
What does this all mean? Well, studios tend to try to replicate success based on previous successes, so we’re likely to see an ever sharper rise in dystopian futures, YA novel adaptations, and yet even more carefully planned-out franchises. There is, perhaps, an amusing irony to the fact that millions of people have seen a movie that is, essentially, about media manipulation of the masses.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
