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In terms of where the franchise goes from here, I think that The Hunger Games has a very good chance of reaching $300 million - though that all depends on how well it holds up next week - and that Catching Fire may very well take the title for biggest opening weekend, assuming that The Dark Knight Rises or Breaking Dawn Part 2 don't do so in the meantime and set the bar ridiculously high. Seriously, if this is what happens with the first film, imagine what could happen now that even more people are are aware of the franchise.

Jim Van Nest - I was positive we'd see a $100 million opening. I also had a feeling that if it was close to Alice in Wonderland, somehow, it would find away to clock in at $117 million, to give it the "highest March opening of all time." As high as I was on the movie, I never thought $150 million plus was possible. That's just crazy. What this has me wondering is what the sequels will do. Catching Fire should be just as huge, if not more so. But what of Mockingjay? As it's widely considered to be the worst of the three books, I wonder if this could be the odd series where the final film(s) actually drop, instead of increase. But that's quite a ways down the road. We still have Catching Fire's $180 million plus opening weekend to predict and talk about.

Bruce Hall: I'm not surprised. Not surprised one bit. I'm not trying to say I called this, but the word I think I used last week to describe the potential of this franchise was "massive." And that's only because I wanted to avoid using the word "Twilight"...oh, crap. But seeing as how the Hunger Games series of books is superior to...that other one...in every way imaginable, I see the box office potentially peaking with the final installment. There will be no Hunger Games fatigue. I'm not saying that the opening weekend for each sequel will necessarily top this result, just that I would not be surprised if each cume ultimately outstrips the last one.

Max Braden: I find the number astounding, because on all fronts it seems like this movie should have been an underdog compared to book-to-screen projects like Harry Potter or Twilight. I would love to know the demographic breakdown of audiences that went to see it. I think it's fair to say that teens were the primary drivers behind this weekend. What interests me about that is that it seems to be a significant shift from the box office from when I was a kid. Recently I was thinking that prior to 1980 (and I'm biased here because I don't have much movie memory earlier than that), there were very few movies about teenagers. You either had Funicello's party movies or Disney fare. Big earning movies were aided by teenage money but often starred adult actors. But once you got into the 1980s, suddenly you started seeing teenagers as stars, in stories about teenagers: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, all the John Hughes movies and "The Brat Pack," even The Goonies and countless raunchy comedies. That seemed to open up a market where teens really became the box office target demo. Look at Titanic, reportedly benefiting from multiple ticket sales to teenage girls. In the early 1980s or before, it would have been unthinkable to produce a movie like The Hunger Games with kids - you would have cast it with adults, as they did in The Running Man. But here in the last decade we have Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games all doing huge business by starring kids and teens and marketing to them. That's a significant shift in the last three decades that I think has really only become apparent in the last ten years, and doesn't show any sign of reversing in the next ten.

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