Catching Fire's debut ranks behind The Avengers, Iron Man 3 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, all of which had the added benefit of 3D ticket pricing. On Sunday, Lionsgate's estimate for the movie was $161.1 million, which would have set a new 2D-only record. When actuals were tallied, though, Catching Fire fell a bit below The Dark Knight Rises ($160.9 million) and The Dark Knight ($158.4 million). In a situation like this, it seems like a good time for a reminder about how Sunday morning estimates work. On Sunday morning, studios use revenue figures from Friday and Saturday to estimate a Sunday gross. While that's a fairly straightforward calculation, there's no guarantee of accuracy—it's impossible to perfectly predict how many people are going to show up to the movies on any given day. However, movies are overestimated far more often than they are underestimated, which implies that studios tend to report the higher end of projections in order to get better coverage on Sunday mornings. In this case, Catching Fire was overestimated by 1.9 percent—a reasonable margin of error—and as a result wound up below the two Dark Knight movies. Regardless of where it ranks, though, this is a massive success for Lionsgate.
I'd say just under 350M...
