But you're like the "perfect audience" in some way - you're part of the niche audience who find space opera fun and don't mind its tropes. As we saw with the reception of the SW PT with the more mature viewers, the space opera genre tropes are something a wide audience tolerate at best. Had it not be SW, word of mouth might have killed the career of TPM rather fast.

Jones jested, but I don't think the studios are confused at all JC is a return to an out-fashioned genre with now limited appeal, and directorial/production/writing choices made it miss the young audience the genre still works with. Only George Lucas truly managed to sell classic space opera to a wide audience after the 50-60s, and part of its success is explained by the "depressing" American cinema of the late 60s-early 70s, that offered only anti-heroes. People were starved for simple heroes like Luke/Han/Leia, they didn't come for space opera. In his footsteps, studios launched space opera TV shows and movies - none of them really worked), and if you analyze most of the gripes of some people with SW (especially the PT), you'll see a great many of those are classic tropes of the genre Lucas naturally used. ESB got so popular with fans because it moved away from space opera to borrow more from SF, and this was originally a big misunderstanding. Kershner didn't understand Lucas's vision for SW and started moving away from space opera acting/art direction and tone that personally he didn't care for. Kershner taught the space opera tropes silly and taught Lucas meant to modernize the genre, that in the first episode he didn't succeed as much as he wanted, but Kershner started working on what he saw as "problems" with ANH. Lucas was caught up with the problems with the SFX and exhausted. When he finally started seeing rushes and had time to visit the sets, Lucas was appalled... at many of the things that made ESB the most popular (in time) with the older fans but originally less popular than ANH with the larger audience.

The new BSG was this big success because they took key elements and characters and move it all outside the space opera setting, into something inspired by hard SF/military SF and made it a good drama with characters who felt very realistic. It also dealt with themes that appealed/concerned the modern audience. But the space-opera-ish elements caught up to them for the finale, which a lot of the audience didn't like at all.

The great classics of American SF were written in part in reaction to John Carter, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and all. Asimov, Herbert and company considered this utter trash that had destroyed the reputation of SF as a literary genre. They wanted to return to the roots of SF/spec fic (Wells, Verne and co) and make it popular and respected again as a literary vehicle through intelligent, challenging works. The most enduringly succesful seris, Star Trek, was a popular derivative of these "Golden Age" SF themes, not of the space opera sagas that had completely fallen out of favour with the mass public (it retains fans, but there's fans for everything... it's a matter of how many there are...) and that merely transposed in a space setting the tropes of 19th century popular feuilleton literature, departing from the motivations and tone behind early SF works. It's a genre that's never truly produced a "great work". There's no Tolkien, no Dickens, no Dumas, no Frank Herbert in space opera history.

Aside from the SW saga, most of the succesful "space setting" movies since the 1970s have rather been inspired by science-fiction, drew their worldbuilding, tone, themes etc. from it, or from the more literary works with connections to SF, like BNW, 1984, Farhenheit 451 etc.. Adaptations of the golden age stuff have not been very succesful ("real" SF, the spec fic type, was never popular with mass audiences, except in Russia. Boule's Planet of the Apes is one of the exceptions. Kubrick's ventures always had more critical than popular acclaim, and the Russian SF masterpieces like Solaris were art house successes in the West at best), but "popular" SF has changed a great deal after WWII. It no longer explored the "pulp" space opera veins of the early century, it rather mixed Golden Age SF with other genres... horror, thriller, war movies, UFO, fairy tales even (E.T) etc.. Later attempts to resurrect Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers flopped. When studios turned to classics of pulp SF, they made sure to dust them up massively first - Scott mixed the hallucinating dystopian elements of William S. Burroughs for the setting and art direction with the core of the plot of "Do Androids dreams..." to make Blade Runner.

John Carter was a very untimely gamble. The original books have lost most of their relevance (the little they had, it's not like ERB is remembered as a key figure of American literature so much as the inventor of a character who became a popular icon in other medium) and retains only some entertainment value to a niche audience that isn't even the SF audience(s), a fair percentage of which are allergic to space opera, both among the more "popular" side of the SF fans and in the more "serious" SF audience.

Hunger Games OTOH belongs to an extremely popular spec fic sub-genre, that only grew in popularity in the last 20 years. The book series is also hugely popular with its YA target group, and the movie adaptation made sure to respect this - but well done dystopias are popular in adult literature at the moment as well, and apparently the director/writer have managed to make a movie adaptation that would appeal to both groups. Many reviewers are saluting the inventive and expert directorial work, the good casting choices, the avoidance of a few blockbuster "traps" that would have dumbed the whole thing down, and the art direction for the dystopian setting is apparently fabulous.

It's not magic. HG appears to be a project that started with a good choice of work to adapt as "the new YA franchose to follow HP"/the "anti-Twilight" (they market it to the audience both ways, not matter the limits of such comparisons), with themes and ideas with relevance and appeal to today's audiences, and that was driven masterfully to "safe harbor", while JC was a very bad choice of outdated novel series to adapt at this time that after the initial enthusiasm Disney appeared to have been at a loss to find any good direction to steer it into to avoid a wreck, before they reached a point where they realized nothing could be done and they had to finish it and watch it sink (a great deal of reviewers speak of a script and movie that constantly seems unsure what it really wanted to accomplish and in the end tried to be a bit of everything and became a mess).