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Richmond ranks as city with ‘Hunger Games’ obsession

Posted at 6:24 PM, Mar 19, 2012
and last updated 2012-03-19 18:32:23-04

Blockbuster season at the movies starts much earlier than summer this year.  The much anticipated "The Hunger Games" comes out this Friday.

Last week Amazon announced the Top 20 cities in the U.S. that have purchased the most copies of Suzanne Collins’ popular Hunger Games trilogy.

Ticket sales for the movie, which opens on Friday, are expected to surpass the popular ‘Twilight’ movies. According to the ticket-selling website Fandango, "The Hunger Games" already broke the record for ticket pre-sales last month.

Amazon, in the press release, also revealed that Collins is the best-selling Kindle author of all time.

The company compiled sales data of all three Hunger Games books, in both print and Kindle formats, on a per capita basis in cities with over 100,000 residents.

The final list of Top 20 cities with Hunger Games hysteria are:

1. Sunnyvale, CA
2. Salt Lake City, UT
3. Tallahassee, FL
4. Seattle, WA
5. Orlando, FL
6. Pittsburgh, PA
7. St. Louis, MO
8. Provo, UT
9. San Francisco, CA
10. Naperville, IL
11. Washington, DC
12. Richmond, VA
13. Scottsdale, AZ
14. Wilmington, NC
15. Murfreesboro, TN
17. Portland, OR
18. Tampa, FL
19. Overland Park, KS
20. Norman, OK

Part of the marketing campaign for the movie has included letting fans convince fans of the movie's value, versus the using the traditional Hollywood pipeline to funnel info and stage releases.

One such example is the video above. Recently some lucky fans got to speak to the movie's stars via CNN iReport.

Click on the video above to see how the actors answered the iReporters' questions.