This is the way Panem ends, not with a bang but a whimper—well, a $101 million whimper. As expected, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 roundly conquered the box office this weekend, with a $101 million domestic haul and a $274.9 million worldwide tally that should be (and is) the envy of any cash-loving studio exec. And yet if the pop-culture panegyrics and odes to Katniss Everdeen’s overdue assault on Hollywood’s patriarchy feel muted this morning, maybe it’s because that opening represents the least spectacular of all the series’ spectacular openings—a full $57 million less than Catching Fire’s record-breaking $158 million.

Who knew that making $275 million in one weekend could be anything but a massive success?

To be clear, as far as bottom lines go, Katniss hit her mark. Mockingjay 2 will turn a healthy profit in no small part thanks to Lionsgate’s comparably thrifty budgeting. (Mockingjay’s two parts were filmed simultaneously at an estimated cost of $300 million, so we can effectively treat Mockingjay Part 2 as a $150 million film, fairly modest by world-conquering blockbuster-finale standards.) And ultimately, The Hunger Games as a franchise has already earned $2.5 billion, with Mockingjay Part 2 probably adding another $800 million to that already Scrooge McDuck–worthy pile of money. So, what’s the problem?

Well, in this particular case, $101 million counts as a genuine, if not exactly relatable, financial low ebb. Although it got higher marks on the Tomatometer than its much-shrugged-about predecessor, the series finale opened down a significant 17 percent from Part 1’s $121.9 million. And Mockingjay Part 2 missed the mark of even the most conservative projections, Lionsgate’s own $110 million estimate. That’s significant because studios always underestimate so they don’t get caught in exactly this bind. Between Mockingjay and fellow underseen new releases The Night Before and Secret in Their Eyes, the entire box office was off 11 percent from a year ago, when Part 1 debuted. Even Part 2’s worldwide haul was down $27.8 million from the previous film—and Part 1 didn’t have the benefit of opening concurrently in the world’s most red-hot film market, China.

Given the formidable weight on Katniss Everdeen’s shoulders to right Hollywood’s notorious gender imbalances, this B+ performance from Hollywood’s top-of-the-class student has folks doing some seriously existential hand-wringing. Scott Mendelson at Forbes wonders if audiences in general just can’t appreciate the series’ grim finale and what it says about war and conflict. And yes, given all its thought-provoking complexity, The Hunger Games’ ending is far from a bunch of happy Ewoks dancing around a fire. Maybe after the Paris attacks, the last thing anyone wanted at the box office was another disheartening reminder of the multiple bloody Gordian knots of conflict that surround us in the 21st century?

Now, there may be something to that. Any Hollywood producer will tell you a morally gray “downer” ending never beats a triumphalist, if naïve, finale. But look at it this way: when’s the last time any film with such a profoundly difficult moral outlook and unsparing commentary on human savagery opened to $100 million? And when has an author’s unsettling vision ever been left as intact by the sanitizing forces of Hollywood as Suzanne Collins’s has? The dark ending may have kept away book readers who preferred to sit out the finale for a second go-round, but if audiences were turned off from darkness, they never would have tuned in to The Hunger Games to begin with.