NEW YORK – Mockingjay, Part 1 didn’t catch fire like the previous installments of The Hunger Games, but it still had the biggest opening of the year with $123 million at the weekend box office, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Mockingjay opened well below the $158 million debut of last year’s Hunger Games: Catching Fire and the $153 million opening of the 2012 original. But even with a $30-million-plus slide in the franchise, Mockingjay far surpassed the previous top weekend of the year: the $100 million debut of Transformers: Age of Extinction.
Mockingjay did even better overseas, where it made $152 million over the weekend, accounting altogether for a $275 million global opening.
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about Mockingjay – Part 1
Dividing the book pushed much of the big drama of Mockingjay to the second film, scheduled for release in November 2015. On the same November weekend in 2010, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 — which similarly split the series’ last book into two — opened almost identically with $125 million. A year later, the second Deathly Hallows film debuted bigger than all previous Harry Potter films with $169 million.
In its third week of release, the animated adventure Big Hero 6 moved into second place with $20.1 million. Christopher Nolan’s made-in-Alberta space epic Interstellar came in third with $15.1 million, also in its third week.
Last week’s top film, the long-in-coming sequel Dumb and Dumber To, starring Canada’s Jim Carrey, slid considerably. The comedy dropped to fourth place with $13.8 million.
Gone Girl finished the weekend in fifth place.
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