Weekend Box-Office: March 30-April 1, 2012

Everyone’s watching the Games!

For the second week, Panem’s telegenic post-apocalyptic survivor Katniss Everdeen is the deathmatch winner as THE HUNGER GAMES tops the chart with another $61.1 million!

That might be an almost 60% drop from its gargantuan $152M opening, but it’s still a lot less painful than a tracker jacker sting — so far the movie has made $251M domestically, plus another $113M from overseas audiences. And since the movie cost around $80M, Lionsgate must be jumping like they lived through a grisly battle royale themselves.

Katniss swiped food from the plates of others, namely Greek gods and Snow White. New release WRATH OF THE TITANS, the 3D (post-converted) sequel to the CLASH OF THE TITANS remake, was earthbound in second place with a $34.2M opening. The mythological beast-battling follow-up cost more than CLASH, but took in just a little over half of its $61M opening (on April 2, 2010).

This is AVATAR star Sam Worthington’s second small start this year, after the heist thriller MAN ON A LEDGE splatted on the sidewalk in January. Then again, most of CLASH OF THE TITANS’ box office came from overseas business ($330M), which is surely why the sequel even got made, so WRATH will also probably do considerable foreign box office — it’s already at a $112M worldwide total.

And then there’s director Tarsem Singh’s vibrant slapstick fairy tale MIRROR MIRROR. Re-imagining the classic Snow White story in a presentation more glossy and goofy than Grimm didn’t seem to hold much mass appeal (and not actually having Snow White’s name in the title probably didn’t help). The $85M-budgeted family film got off to a poisonous $19M start, shattering studio Relativity’s hopes of replicating the billion-dollar fairy tale success of ALICE IN WONDERLAND (as opposed to the tragedy of RED RIDING HOOD). Wish we could say it was nice seeing you again, Julia Roberts.

21 JUMP STREET is still holding strong, and will probably cross the $100M mark by next weekend (and could conceivably even end up with higher figures than star Channing Tatum’s other big 2012 success THE VOW, which topped out at $123M). THE LORAX is also still saving trees and amusing youngsters and Seuss fans, adding another $8M to its total.

Things get into “barely there” territory after that, including Disney’s costly adventure JOHN CARTER, which will reportedly end up causing the studio a loss of well over $200M even after international business is taken into account. Whoops! Maybe Taylor Kitsch will have better box office luck fighting aliens this summer in OCEAN TRANSFORMERS BATTLESHIP. The limited-release Ewan McGregor/Emily Blunt drama SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN wades into the shallow end of the chart at number seven, and JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND somehow still clings to the Top 10 as PROJECT X and SAFE HOUSE slip by it.

Next weekend starts off April by bringing back pastry humper Jason Biggs and his AMERICAN PIE chums for AMERICAN REUNION, and James Cameron gives his big boat a coat of three-dimensional polish for the re-release of TITANIC (in 3D). What April release are you most looking forward to seeing? VOTE HERE!