Taylor Shuck explains hype of midnight premieres
Many Baker University students made their way to the theater to fill their appetite on the third highest debut film ever, with the opening weekend of “The Hunger Games.”
The movie topped out its opening weekend at $155 million, with only “Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part 2” and “The Dark Knight” ahead of it.
“It was really interesting … there were all these younger kids there and they were just going crazy, and screaming, and chanting and clapping,” sophomore Teresa Morse, who attended the March 23 midnight premiere, said. “There were a lot of older people there, too. We actually got there at a really good time, because there was a really big line outside; just hundreds of people and they had on their T-shirts and stuff.”
“The Hunger Games” movie is based on author Suzanne Collins’ best-selling trilogy of books.
“My mom and sister actually recommended them to me and over Christmas everybody was talking about them,” junior Reno Marical said. “So I read the first one, and it just kind of drew me in.”
Adapting a book to the silver screen is often questioned by fans, and despite minor changes, most believe the movie stayed true to the books.
“As far as movie adaptions go, it was pretty faithful,” Morse said. “There were definitely things that got changed that I think didn’t necessarily needed to be changed. But for a two and a half hour movie as an adaption of an entire book, that really is jammed packed with action and lots of material in there.”
Despite the female lead in “The Hunger Games,” the movie and books were popular among a balance of both males and females. According to the film’s distributor, Lionsgate, girls and women accounted for just 61 percent of moviegoers.
“Even though the character’s a girl, she still goes through a lot of problems and stuff that a guy could go through, too,” Marical said. “The author kind of pulls you in and kind of draws you emotionally into the state that character is in.”
Although the “The Hunger Games” was published in 2008 and the movie has already been released, the hunger to fill up on the latest trend continues to make its way around the BU campus.
“They just seem like a really interesting series and after watching the movie, I want to start reading the books,” sophomore Xiomara Nunez said.
The violent nature of “The Hunger Games,” where children are forced into an area to fight to their death may be considered mature to some, but the movie is rated PG-13 and has appealed to people of all ages.
“It’s kind of a weird thing to become a phenomenon, when the premise is that the government forces young children to go into an arena and kill each other,” Morse said. “That’s kind of an intense, mature topic to be so popular with so many people, and I think … it’s that people can connect with the main characters and are just rooting for them to kind of overcome the challenges. But it kind of is puzzling that something that is violent and really loaded with mature content has become so popular.”
