Hunger No. 1, but not up to par

Jennifer Lawrence, Mahershala Ali and Liam Hemsworth star in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2. It came in first at last weekend’s box office and made about $103 million.
Jennifer Lawrence, Mahershala Ali and Liam Hemsworth star in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2. It came in first at last weekend’s box office and made about $103 million.

LOS ANGELES — Katniss Everdeen may have come out on top of last weekend’s box office with about $103 million in domestic ticket sales, but the new The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 fell short of industry expectations and, unlike the Twilight and Harry Potter young-adult juggernauts, her Hunger Games finale fell far short of other films in the franchise.

Starring Jennifer Lawrence and directed by Francis Lawrence, Mockingjay — Part 2 saw ticket sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters fall below industry expectations of about $120 million. By comparison, The Hunger Games, the first adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novels, opened to $152.5 million domestically in 2012. Its sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, opened even higher in 2013, at $158.1 million. The studio Lionsgate split the third book in the Collins trilogy, Mockingjay, into two movies, and Part 1 opened last year to $121.9 million.

About 70 percent of critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a positive rating. Audiences approved more overwhelmingly, giving the film an A-minus grade, according to polling firm CinemaScore. Crowds skewed female (56 percent) and under 25 (50 percent).

The movie, which cost an estimated $160 million to make, still is the fifth-highest opening film of the year so far, behind Universal’s Jurassic World ($208.8 million), Disney’s Avengers: Age of Ultron ($191.3 million), Universal’s Furious 7 ($147.2 million) and Universal’s Minions ($115.7 million).

Columbia’s new buddy Christmas comedy The Night Before with Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie was no match for Katniss — or James Bond or Charlie Brown. While the Bond film Spectre finished in second place and added $15 million, and The Peanuts Movie finished third and pulled in $13 million, the R-rated The Night Before opened with about $10 million in ticket sales, good for fourth.

The Jonathan Levine-directed film received an A-minus from CinemaScore and 64 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Rounding out the top five was STX Entertainment’s Secret in Their Eyes, starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film, loosely based on a 2009 Argentine thriller that won the foreign-language Oscar, garnered about $6.7 million. Critics were generally cool to the movie, and audiences gave it a B-minus Cinema-Score.

The Weinstein Co.’s Carol, the period love story starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in acclaimed lead performances, debuted strongly on only four screens in New York and Los Angeles for a per-screen average topping $62,000 — the highest of the week.

Still performing well is Spotlight, director Tom McCarthy’s drama about the Boston Globe’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It was the only holdover in the top 10 to post a week-to-week increase — of 166 percent — partly due to its addition of more than 500 screens and building buzz about its awards-season prospects.

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