The Hunger Games Franchise: What went so right (THG, CF) and then so wrong (MJ1, MJ2)

[Plain Old Tele]

I hardly think people are drawing a direct comparison between MOCKINGJAY and Ferguson or anything else -- especially given such a generic slogan as "if we burn you burn with us". And it's a big leap to swing from that connection to "I'm not going to see this movie" from that.

 

Rebellions and overthrowing dystopian dictatorships have been a staple of SF/fantasy blockbusters for decades -- there's nothing in the THG series that's very different in that regard.

 

For better or worse, CF was part of the exciting blockbuster zeitgeist in 2013 and MJ1 wasn't in 2014. Maybe all those whities went to INTERSTELLAR instead and we can blame Nolan.

[DeeCee]

Time to take a step back.  

[JohnnyGossamer]

8 minutes ago, water said:

 

because "if we burn you burn with us" was graffitid and chanted in ferguson, for example, and more than 30% of white people did not support those protests. that's just an EXAMPLE of the kind of parallels between MJ1 and things a portion of white people are against. and do you not realize i wouldn't be claiming this if ONLY white people didn't come back for MJ1? like why else would ONLY white people not come back for mj1, while 100% (or 99% if we must) of non-white people came back. please provide a reason that MJ1 did not appeal to white people, but did appeal to non-white people, and this discussion is over. otherwise i'm the only person who has put forward a theory.

No. Everyone I know that abandoned the series did so because they liked the games and the last few films didn't feature the games. They're all just casaul moviegoers... Nothing more, nothing less.

Edited November 23, 2015 by JohnnyGossamer

[BadAtGender]

8 minutes ago, JohnnyGossamer said:

No. Everyone I know that abandoned the series did so because they liked the games and the last few films didn't feature the games. They're all just casaul moviegoers... Nothing more, nothing less.

 

That's amusing, because one of the criticisms of the MJ book is that Collins tried to force the game concept in there when it wasn't really necessary.

[water]

provide a reason that MJ1 did not appeal to white people but did appeal to non-white people.

 

none of you have done that. you're still talking about it as if it dropped uniformly across all demographics. it didn't. it lost <1% of non-white tickets, while losing 30% of white tickets.

 

if we were discussing why it dropped more among males than females, you would all give gender-based reasons. the % of guys who saw CF vs MJ1 it dropped 3%, so the answers would be "traditionally guys are into action and mj1 had less action. less action, 3% less guys" or "mj1 focused more on katniss who is a girl so 3% less guys were interested" or whatever. all reasons actually based on gender, for a drop in a certain gender's attendance.

 

so now that we're discussing a factual, numerically-backed race statistic, you have to provide a racial reason. what is it about white people that made mj1 less appealing to 30% of them, but didn't bother 99% of non-white people?

[Plain Old Tele]

I gave a reason. A tongue-in-cheek reason, but one nonetheless. And one which has just as much credibility as yours.

 

I find the idea to be silly in the extreme: that white consumers, en masse, would suddenly choose not to see this specific movie (based on a novel by a white person, starring a white superstar actress, with white co-stars, a white director, white producers, white screenwriters, etc) for racial reasons. It's a hammer looking for a nail.

 

edit: I should point out that even if I agreed with your point (I don't), a white audience choosing not to see a white movie (because they don't agree with some political interpretation they assume it has) doesn't make them racist.

[grim22]

2 minutes ago, water said:

provide a reason that MJ1 did not appeal to white people but did appeal to non-white people.

 

none of you have done that. you're still talking about it as if it dropped uniformly across all demographics. it didn't. it lost <1% of non-white tickets, while losing 30% of white tickets.

 

if we were discussing why it dropped more among males than females, you would all give gender-based reasons. the % of guys who saw CF vs MJ1 it dropped 3%, so the answers would be "traditionally guys are into action and mj1 had less action. less action, 3% less guys" or "mj1 focused more on katniss who is a girl so 3% less guys were interested" or whatever. all reasons actually based on gender, for a drop in a certain gender's attendance.

 

so now that we're discussing a factual, numerically-backed race statistic, you have to provide a racial reason. what is it about white people that made mj1 less appealing to 30% of them, but didn't bother 99% of non-white people?

 

A race based statistic does not need a racial reason. That is close minded thinking from you. It all comes down to whether a movie looks good enough to put down your money. 

 

Not to make this more about race, but look back at the chart you posted. The only demographic that MJ1 increased in was HISPANICS, it fell not just in white people, but also in African-Americans, Asians and other demos. 

 

That alone should remove the racism card from the reasons for it falling. Hispanics alone fuelled the "others", else African-Americans fell 4M and Asians/Others fell 8M. This has nothing to do with race, it just has everything to do with the increasing Hispanic audience in the US

http://www.thewrap.com/how-hispanics-became-hollywoods-most-important-audience/

 

Hispanics single handedly made up the 7M deficit among "other races". the issue isn't the white audience, neither is it Ferguson (which would have meant the Afr-Am audience would have increased or stayed the same. It is you looking at "Non-white audiences" and jumping to the conclusion that they are one unified blob instead of diving further into the same facts you are using. 

[moviesRus]

Oh boy this thread has become a trainwreck. 

[water]

use ticket sales, not dollar amounts. drops in dollar amounts are due to loss of imax, while if you look at ticket sales they remained effectively constant

 

from 6m 6m 7m -> 6m 7m 6m

 

anyway i'm done with this conversation. it's absolutely juvenile to think that race and gender play no role in facets of society like moviegoing

[75Live]

1 minute ago, moviesRus said:

Oh boy this thread has become a trainwreck. 

 

It's what happens when meltdowns occur  

[Jack Nevada]

*writes down* "Not seeing MJ2 means you hate black people", got that

[Plain Old Tele]

5 minutes ago, water said:

use ticket sales, not dollar amounts. drops in dollar amounts are due to loss of imax, while if you look at ticket sales they remained effectively constant

The problem is that ticket sales are a vague approximation at best.

[Plain Old Tele]

6 minutes ago, water said:

it's absolutely juvenile to think that race and gender play no role in facets of society like moviegoing

 

And yet it's equally juvenile to think that race plays the key role for a general audience that already embraced two of the same movies in the franchise.

[water]

1 minute ago, Telemachos said:

 

And yet it's equally juvenile to think that race plays the key role for a general audience that already embraced two of the same movies in the franchise.

 

so you think it's a sheer coincidence that white dropped 30% while non-white dropped 0%?

[grim22]

6 minutes ago, Telemachos said:

The problem is that ticket sales are a vague approximation at best.

 

And that there is literally no way the same number of tickets sold causes a 4M difference, especially since all of those tickets were definitely not IMAX (even if they were, IMAX surcharges are pretty much 3$ everywhere which is 1.8M), so even if we say 50% were IMAX tickets, that means we are looking at a reduction of almost 750000 tickets (so the Afr-Am tickets got rounded down from, say 6.2M and rounded up from 5.6M in the 2 years - just approximating here). 

 

That is just a fancy way of saying, the White audience reduced 30%, the Afr-Am audience reduced 12.5% and the Asian audience reduced 16%. Hispanics increased 17% or more.

 

Why do Black audiences and Asians hate the Hunger Games franchise????

[water]

2 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

And that there is literally no way the same number of tickets sold causes a 4M difference, especially since all of those tickets were definitely not IMAX (even if they were, IMAX surcharges are pretty much 3$ everywhere which is 1.8M), so even if we say 50% were IMAX tickets, that means we are looking at a reduction of almost 750000 tickets (so the Afr-Am tickets got rounded down from, say 6.2M and rounded up from 5.6M in the 2 years - just approximating here). 

 

That is just a fancy way of saying, the White audience reduced 30%, the Afr-Am audience reduced 12.5% and the Asian audience reduced 16%. Hispanics increased 17%.

 

thanks for that math! big help for my argument

 

NEW QUESTION (in addition to what made white audience drop 30% while non-white audience dropped 0%?): what made white attendance drop TWICE MORE than black and asian attendance?

[grim22]

7 minutes ago, water said:

 

thanks for that math! big help for my argument

 

NEW QUESTION (in addition to what made white audience drop 30% while non-white audience dropped 0%?): what made white attendance drop TWICE MORE than black and asian attendance?

 

Because white people stayed away from all movies last year. Or are you forgetting that last year was the worst attended in a decade? People just did not want to go to movies. With the economy also being rough, movies become a much lower priority for everyone. You are treating this like it was an issue just for MJ1 for some reason.

[water]

Just now, grim22 said:

 

Because white people stayed away from all movies last year. Or are you forgetting that last year was the worst attended in a decade? People just did not want to go to movies. With the economy also being rough, movies become a much lower priority for everyone.

 

incorrect. 2013 report, 2014 report. average white attendance went down only 3%. yet cf->mj1 it went down 7%. over twice as much.

[AndyLL]

3 minutes ago, water said:

 

NEW QUESTION (in addition to what made white audience drop 30% while non-white audience dropped 0%?): what made white attendance drop TWICE MORE than black and asian attendance?

 

White people are more excited about Star Wars and it had nothing to do with MJ2?

 

Really... it's pointless to speculate about it... especially since we don't know how they came up with those numbers.

 

20 minutes ago, moviesRus said:

Oh boy this thread has become a trainwreck. 

 

Yeah... this is one reason we try to avoid WWW threads.  It doesn't take long before they degenerate.

 

Let's try to keep the discussion reasonable.  

 

And don't forget the spoiler policy is still in effect for MJ2

[water]

we're talking about CF->MJ1, not MJ1->MJ2

Edited November 24, 2015 by water