Film Industry

The Hunger Games 2 - Catching fire

Produced in - United States

Distributions - Lionsgate

 

 

Storyline

Katniss Everdeen has returned home safe after winning the 74th Annual Hunger Games along with fellow tribute Peeta Mellark. Winning means that they must turn around and leave their family and close friends, embarking on a "Victor's Tour" of the districts. Along the way Katniss senses that a rebellion is simmering, but the Capitol is still very much in control as President Snow prepares the 75th Annual Hunger Games (The Quarter Quell) - a competition that could change Panem forever. (Written byBianca Capetillo)





Cast

	Jennifer Lawrence	...	Katniss Everdeen
	Liam Hemsworth	...	Gale Hawthorne
	Josh Hutcherson	...	Peeta Mellark
	Elizabeth Banks	...	Effie Trinket
	Sam Claflin	...	Finnick Odair
	Jena Malone	...	Johanna Mason
	Woody Harrelson	...	Haymitch Abernathy
	Paula Malcomson	...	Katniss' Mother
	Alan Ritchson	...	Gloss
	Stanley Tucci	...	Caesar Flickerman
	Philip Seymour Hoffman	...	Plutarch Heavensbee
	Willow Shields	...	Primrose Everdeen
	Donald Sutherland	...	President Snow
	Jeffrey Wright	...	Beetee

Film plot in more detail - book summary

It has been six months since Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark won the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games, an annual event in which each district in Panem sends one female and one male tribute to fight to the death in a televised competition for food and money. Though only one tribute can win, a change in the rules allowed Peeta and Katniss to both win. Their victory was partly secured because of Peeta's declaration of love for Katniss before the Games. In the Hunger Games, after Peeta and Katniss were the only ones alive, it was announced that the change in rules had been revoked, and there could only be one victor. Instead of killing Peeta, Katniss proposed they eat poisonous berries to kill themselves so that the Capitol would not have any victors. But at the last second, they were both declared winners of the Hunger Games. Throughout the competition, Katniss played along with the love story so she could increase her chances of winning, though secretly she was confused about her true feelings for Peeta and Gale, her best friend who was back home in District 12. Peeta, whose love for Katniss was never an act, was broken-hearted at the realization that Katniss was merely pretending to love him for the sake of the competition. Since the Games, he has been acting very distant and cold toward her, and she feels guilty for the way she treated him. Gale has also been treating her differently since she returned home. Nothing is the same for Katniss since winning the Games. When the novel opens, Katniss is hunting in the woods, thinking about how much she doesn't want to go on the annual Victory Tour. Every victor of the Games must visit each district to celebrate their win at the Games. After hunting, she returns home so she can ensure she is ready in time for the Tour, only to find that President Snow, the leader of Panem, is waiting to speak with her. Snow tells Katniss that she needs to convince both him and Panem while on the Tour that she is in love with Peeta or the Capitol will go after her and Gale's families. According to Snow, Katniss' stunt with the berries was too rebellious. Though some people believe she was proposing suicide because she was so insane with love for Peeta, others think it was an act of defiance. Some of Panem's districts are now on the brink of rebellion. If Katniss can convince everyone she is without a doubt in love with Peeta, Snow will spare her family's lives.

Exhibition -

UPDATE, 6:30AM: Lions gate shares are up around 3.8% in pre-market trading and are about +4.2% on the Paris stock exchange. For exhibition companies, Hunger Games’ $155M domestic opening buttresses the case that box office sales are back in 2012. Thus far, Q1 is +22% over the same period last year and, should end up this week at least +20%. B. Riley analyst Eric Wold notes that two weeks ago he raised his earnings estimates for Regal, Cinemark and Carmike assuming that overall box office sales for the quarter would be about +14%. “It now seems as though we were overly conservative,” he says. He estimates that regale's earnings per share in the quarter could hit 16 cents (vs. the consensus estimate of 8 cents), with Cinemark poised for 33 cents (vs. 26 cents forecasts), and Carmike at 28 cents (vs. 21 cents). The big question now is: How much will Hunger Games sales drop?  Most films fall about 50% in their second weekend, but blockbusters are vulnerable to steeper declines. For example, Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 fell 72% and The Dark Knight was -53%. Hunger Games will lose about 270 domestic Imax screens as they switch on Friday to Warner Bros’ Wrath Of The Titans. These theatres accounted for about $10.6M in ticket sales, or 6.8% of Hunger Games’ domestic total. Still, Cowen and Co analyst Doug Creutz says that the film will power through and ultimately generate $350M at domestic offices — adding “this could well be conservative.” He notes that Hunger Games sales held up from Friday to Saturday, which is “a decent indicator of long-term legs.” Creutz raised his estimate of Lionsgate’s earnings per share for the fiscal year to 41 cents from 17 cents. Lazard Capital Markets’ Barton Crockett predicts $58.7M for Hunger Games’ second weekend, ahead of Titans which he says will come in at $52.1M.

How I live now - Film 4 productions

The director Kevin MacDonald is something of a master of applying the "you are there" approach to scenarios and settings from which most people would very gladly be spared. Whether it's falling off of a mountainside (his 2003 documentary "Touching the Void") or trying to dodge getting oneself killed by ferocious, depraved Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (2006's "The Last King of Scotland," for which Forest Whitaker won a best actor Oscar in the Amin role), MacDonald is at his best putting the viewer exactly where no one in his or her right mind would want to be.
So the fact that his latest film, "How I Live Now," adapted from a novel by Meg Rosoff, is about a band of teens and children in the British countryside trying to stay alive after London gets hit by a nuclear explosion bodes well for the quality of the film. And indeed, for much of its running time the movie is grab-you-by-the-back-of-the-neck immediate; in its last third particularly, the bite-your-lip moments of suspense and tension mount to the extent that you may well draw blood.
The terrific young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan here plays Elizabeth, who insists on being called "Daisy," and whose problem-child status is established even before the opening credits begin: The nagging voices in her head are heard on the soundtrack even as the production company logos are unspooling. Now almost 20, Ronan has gotten tall, and her lovely face is long and lean; she can imbue her disturbed adolescent character with a formidable intensity merely by cocking her head and looking down. She does a lot more of course, and her character's petulance upon being exiled from New York to Britain to stay with cousins she barely knows has a particular quality that made me wonder whether she'd boned up on the role by studying the behavior some of her peers exhibit at press junkets.
In any event, Daisy is at first very reluctant indeed to join her young cousins in their little war games or forays to a gorgeous pond and waterfall near their rambling, cozy house. The lyricism of the Wordsworth-worthy setting is underscored by a nice selection of English folk-rock on the soundtrack; but soon an ominous electronic score by Jon Hopkins replaces the sounds of Fairport Convention and Nick Drake. The only adult in the house happens to be a diplomat; she flies off for an important conference, the kids are disturbed/exhilarated by a V-formation of fighter jets, and soon after that, the news comes that London's been nuked.
The premise of experiencing an apocalyptic disaster from a far remove was famously explored in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1987 "The Sacrifice," itself a masterpiece of dread (and redemption); "How I Live Now" takes an approach that finds its poetry via the meticulous depiction of terrifying conditions complementing the story of a young woman finding herself. (There are also hints, in its depiction of war from a young person's perspective, of Elem Klimov's remarkable masterpiece "Come And See.")
Some cynics may observe that the end of the world as we know it is one hell of a time to find yourself, and object to the movie on some kind of moral ground as a result. For myself, I found the way that the Daisy character softens, and acknowledges her love for oldest cousin Eddie (who's gentle and has know-how and has raised a hawk, even, but also isn't terribly cool-headed at times when it would count), right after the first horrific turn of events, to be kind of on the abrupt side.
But the movie finds a compelling groove once Daisy's new-found family loyalty is established, and a visit from an American diplomat offering Daisy a get-out-of-hell-free card prompts her decision to stay with her own, who also number the vulnerable and adorable (but not cloyingly so) little girl Piper (Harley Bird), who brings out Daisy's most vehement maternal instincts after the females are separated from the boys by an Orwellian martial-law apparatus. Daisy shows almost lunatic determination, after freeing herself and Piper, to get back "home;" and what she needs to do is not just negotiate a seemingly endless maze pitted with bad men with guns and rape intentions, but quell the aforementioned voices in her head.
It's strong stuff, and the actors are fully up to it. MacDonald depicts the horrors of war and dislocation with such commitment that you might find the determinedly YA affirmations that the movie moves toward to be something of a relief when they do arrive.