It's been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie, and it turns out fans were eager to return for more of Panem's most brutal game show/mechanism of totalitarian control. The latest entry in the series, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakesposted one impressive box office performance to date, earned over $100 million and entered its third week strong. But with so many other big IP films hitting the box office this year, the question becomes: are other franchises releasing too many films?
The most obvious culprit here is Marvel, which had box office news of its own in November: The miraclesthe newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will be the first film in the series not to break $100 million at the domestic box office. This is devastating news for Disney. With 33 films on the market, the MCU is the biggest film franchise of all time, so eventually the company went into firehose mode and released as much content as possible.
Images: Lionsgate
Meanwhile, after the hugely successful run of four films from 2012 to 2015, the Hunger Games essentially disappeared. Sure, it was still popular and had many fans, but there were no new additions to the story until series creator Suzanne Collins released a new prequel novel in 2020. The novel was an instant hit and work on the film began quickly. adaptation, but Lionsgate had the good sense to wait for content worth adapting. And it looks like there won't be a sequel to this movie unless Collins himself decides to return to Panem for another story.
In an interview with Polygon earlier this year, Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson explained the studio's thoughts on sequels for the series. “You could have gone for a fan favorite – Let's do Haymitch's story! Or play Finnick's games! – but that would be doing it for the sake of doing it,” Jacobson said. “If (Collins) had a story in this world with something she wanted to talk about, something to explore, that would be great. But if not, then it's better to leave a franchise as something people feel strongly about than to release a sequel for the sake of a sequel.”
And while Disney will likely never take such a measured approach to its franchises, it certainly doesn't seem happy with the current breakneck pace. Disney CEO Bob Iger has recently made the rounds to limit that damage to the Marvel brand. He's been talking in recent weeks about how Disney is moving toward focusing on Disney quality over quantityand that's one of the biggest problems with The miracles was that executives were too busy to care about the film the kind of supervision that was needed. In addition, Iger has even said that Disney simply makes too much Marvel content between the shows and movies.
Photo: Laura Radford/Marvel Studios
All of this could explain why Marvel is basically killing off 2024. Except Deadpool 3, the MCU has no theatrical offerings planned for next year. It will be Marvel's quietest film year since then Iron Man 2 in 2010. It also only has a few Disney Plus shows, such as Echo And Agatha: Darkhold Journals, both of which are spinoffs and may be part of Marvel's new Spotlight program, which aims to flag shows as unrelated to the larger MCU storyline. All of this should result in the quietest release calendar Marvel has had in over a decade.
And the incredible success of Hunger Games suggests that it might just be the right game. In addition to grossing an impressive $44.6 million in its opening weekend, the film also held its audience and won its second weekend in theaters – beating out Disney's 100th anniversary film, Wish.
Of course, just because Marvel doesn't have any films in theaters doesn't mean it will be absent from the cultural conversation. In addition to the scarce calendar, the studio also has casting for the Fantastic four to announce, some X-Men casting to be determined, and perhaps even a big change for the ongoing multiverse storyline on the horizon. But at least 2024 will give us some room for the most important films, perhaps reviving some of what made the franchise special to begin with.