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Kim Hollis: I had definitely heard of The Hunger Games six months ago, as I was championing it to friends more than a year ago. Oddly, I grabbed it on the Kindle as something good to read while visiting my parents for the holidays, and it just happened that my sister (a professor of literature, including classes on Harry Potter) had given my *other* sister the books as a gift. Since then, I've seen the buzz spread through a message board that I frequent as well as becoming a popular book of choice amongst any number of friends. Here's the thing about it: even people who haven't read the books are suddenly excited for this film. It's an event picture. And it trumps Twilight because it appeals to everyone rather than just females. With every passing week, I've been raising my estimate of what the film could do - and I was thinking $70 million several months ago. Now, I think we could potentially double that number. I don't know that I've ever seen a film with this kind of wide awareness. I'm not kidding when I say the movie and/or books come up in conversation several times a day.

Reagen Sulewski: Thanks to all your incessant yammering, I know way more about this book series than I really care to. This has been a slam dunk production since it was announced (and since they've kept the budget absolutely minuscule, it's a license to print money). Now that Harry Potter has ended and Twilight is entering the home stretch, audiences are looking for the next big thing to obsess over. What's going to turn this film from a "success" to a "great big honking success" is going to come down to a matter of timing. Once you get over $100 million, the numbers are really kind of arbitrary and subject to so many other factors that it's not really worth quibbling about what kind of hit that makes it, so it's money baths for everyone!

Max Braden: I read the first book in the series a year ago on the recommendation of friends. (Captivating writing plot, hateful characters). In the summer, I made the prediction that the movie would open to less than $50 million. Of course that seems crazy now, but I had my reasons: this is a brutal action movie with a female star opening in March with a smaller base than Harry Potter or Twilight. Twilight also had a romance plot that Hunger Games lacks, so I see the material splitting the gender demographics. And I was remembering the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which only earned $46 million in its first five days. As a result, I was expecting a cautious opening followed by huge legs and tremendous opening weekend from the sequel. Obviously at this point it would be a major shocker to open that low. I'm still bearish on it, though, so I think the execs are full of their own hype and I won't be surprised at all if this opens below $100 million. That's still a big number, and I still expect huge legs and a recordbreaking sequel.

Edwin Davies: I was actually reading the series six months ago since, after learning about that Jennifer Lawrence had been cast and being a huge fan of her work in Winter's Bone (which everyone should check out), I felt that I needed to check the books out. I enjoyed them a great deal and thought that the world of the story was compelling and interesting, but since reading them I've pretty much cut myself off from anything relating to the movie up until the last week, when I tentatively started reading reviews to see if they had done justice to the books.

Like Max, I didn't think that the film would open to huge numbers when I was reading the books since I felt that it was too violent to be a crossover hit, and also because I wasn't really aware of just how huge a phenomenon the series had become. Now, I have a better understanding that, yes, they are a pretty huge deal, and my expectations have adjusted accordingly. I think that something around about the level of Alice In Wonderland's opening ($114.8 million) is highly possible, but part of me wants to say that it'll be even higher than that, considering how many screenings have already sold out across the country. We seem to be looking at a record-breaker here, and I'm really excited to see how high it flies next weekend. Not as excited as I am to check out the film, but still pretty excited.

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