“The Hunger Games” continues to dispatch all comers, holding the top spot at the box-office for the fourth straight week with an entirely respectable $21.5 million.

In fairness, this week’s challengers split up the potential audence, which pretty much guaranteed none of them would prove a big enough draw to unseat the queen. The Farrelly brothers’ decidedly unironical “The Three Stooges” and Joss Whedon’s inside-baseball horror movie “The Cabin in the Woods” earned $17.1 million and $14.9 million, by playing to their own bases, and the 3D re-release of “Titanic” made $11.6 million by being a 3D re-release of “Titanic”.

Curiously, the Luc Besson space-prison actioner “Lockout” somehow failed to connect with much of anybody despite having what I’d thought was the broadest appeal of all: Its $6.3 million gross landed it in ninth place. Here’s hoping it finds its audience on disc, once it’s retitled “Awesome Luc Besson Space Prison Movie”. (The lobbying begins now, people.)

Still, “The Hunger Games” deserves the lion’s share of the credit for its staying power. The movie’s grossed $337.1 million in under a month, making it a bona fide phenomenon … and giving a slight sense of urgency to the conversation about who’ll be directing the sequel now that Gary Ross has announced he won’t be returning. “Catching Fire” has an August start date.

The Los Angeles Times has some more on that conversation here, including the frankly preposterous suggestion that Alfonso Cuaron, David Cronenberg or Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will take the helm. They may be on the short list, but there’s no way any of them would actually go for it.

Well, Inarritu might. But only if he gets to shoot the story out of sequence, replace Jennifer Lawrence with Rinko Kikuchi and make it not be fun. He’s an artist, you know.