Advance tickets for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping are reportedly the best Lionsgate has seen post-Covid for any title, running ahead of Universal's Wicked, per Deadline. The prequel opens Friday, Nov. 20, and the studio's opening forecast now has an $80M floor, up from $60M-$70M last weekend.
Presales are the industry's favorite oracle. A handful of early tickets get read like prophecy, the prophecy gets quoted in a trade, and by the time the movie opens the number is part of the marketing. The Sunrise floor jumped from $60M to $80M in one weekend of reporting, which is not a forecast revision. That is the forecast doing its own press tour.
The oracle now has a bookmaker. A prediction market prices a $100M+ opening at 75 percent, and other distribution sources agree, per the same report. The pipeline is now: presales leak, the market prices the leak, the trade prints the price, the theater chain books the price. Nobody has seen the movie. The movie has already been distributed.
The franchise math does the reassuring. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the low one, the strike-hurt one, the B+ CinemaScore one, still opened to $44.6M and finished at $166.3M on a 3.7x multiple. A Hunger Games number does not go down, it only goes up. The IP has a floor the way a stadium has a floor: something concrete, something you stand on, something the accounting department names after a load-bearing wall.
A prequel is a marketing department with a plot. It sells the past to people who already own it, and this one is selling the past to the prediction markets too.
YOUR TURN: With an $80M floor and a 75 percent odds column, what number does the movie actually have to hit to count?
Comments (1)