"The Hunger Games 3" became the biggest opening of 2014 with an estimated 123 million U.S. dollars at the debut weekend.
Playing at 4,151 theaters, the movie named "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -- Part 1," is well above "Transformers: Age of Extinction," whose debut weekend earned 100 million dollars, the previous high for 2014.
However, "The Hunger Games 3" doesn't compare favorably to the previous two in the series. This third film was down 22 percent from "Hunger Games: Catching Fire" (158 million dollars) and was also significantly lower than the original movie's 152 million dollars.
"The Hunger Games 3" of Lionsgate earned a high A-minus rating from audience polling firm CinemaScore and a decent 67 percent "fresh" rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
The film attracted largely young females, who made up of 60 percent of the audience. More than half of moviegoers were younger than 25.
And around the world, "The Hunger Games 3" opened with 275 million dollars in retail business, joining the league of "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" series.
In a distant second place, Disney's "Big Hero 6" got an estimated 20 million dollars at the weekend, 42 percent lower than last weekend.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain, director Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" took the third place with 15 million dollars. This space adventure film has grossed 120.7 million dollars since release.
The rest seven of the top ten best-selling films in the United States and Canada, as estimated by the studios and collated by Rentrak, were "Dumb and Dumber To" (13.8 million dollars), "Gone Girl" (2.8 million), "Beyond the Lights" (2.6 million), "St. Vincent" (2.4 million), "Fury" (1.9 million), "Birdman" (1.9 million) and "Theory of Everything" (1.5 million).