Hunger Games opens strong - really strong - but reviews are mixed
Hunger Games, the eagerly-anticipated film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' 2008 best-selling novel, has set global box-office records, taking in $155 million in its first weekend as a theatrical release, according to figures published on the web site Collider.com. Directed and co-scripted (with Collins and Billy Ray) by Gary Ross, who co-wrote 1988's Big and had previously helmed Pleasantville and Seabiscuit , The Hunger Games is the first installment in a trilogy of dystopian science fiction stories set in a North America where, after several disastrous events, the existing democratic nation states of the United States, Canada and Mexico have ceased to exist and have been replaced by the totalitarian country known as Panem. As in the best-selling Young Adults novel published by Scholastic - the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series - The Hunger Games presents us with a vision of an America gone seriously wrong. Panem is ruled by the tyrannical ...