Making a hit movie on a budget is as hard as Hollywood makes it look. "We're in a business where the solution is almost always to write a check," said Joe Drake, the departing co-chief operating officer of Lionsgate, the studio behind "The Hunger Games."

"The Hunger Games" opens Friday, tracking toward an opening weekend ticket take of perhaps more than $100 million. The movie, about a future dystopia that pits teens in televised fights to the death, cost around $80 million to make. That amount probably wouldn't cover the loin-cloth budget alone of the recent $250 million flop "John Carter."

So how did "The Hunger Games" fool the movie gods of profligacy? The Huffington Post chatted with Drake last week to recount the beans and shed light on a little-known fact -- that movies the masses want to see can be made for less than the GNP of a small nation.

"The absolute last resort is solving something with money," Drake said. "Very often, that turns out to be the best creative solution. It requires you to deal with it in the storytelling."

It should be pointed out that Lionsgate, home to the "Saw" horror franchise, has seen rough times lately. It weathered a takeover bid by Carl Icahn and its stock price dropped 45 percent in a four-year period, according to Bloomberg. But it recently gained muscle when it bought Summit, the studio mother of the "Twilight" movies. Those films, based, like "The Hunger Games, on a popular trilogy of books, earned $2.3 billion, a figure "Games" hopes to match or even surpass.

Financial burdens never stopped a studio from ripping open its wallet, but Lionsgate resisted.

Here are the steps that paved the film's road to profit.

The Source Material: Lionsgate secured the rights to Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" in 2009 before it became a household name. At that point, Drake said the studio determined it would work in part to increase book sales, thereby raising the visibility of the movie.

"The Hunger Games," the first of a trilogy, had sold about 250,000 copies when Lionsgate acquired it, Drake said. By the time the film went into production last May, the three novels had sold a combined 8 million. When production wrapped in September, the total had climbed to 12 million. The New York Times reported Sunday that there are now 24 million copies in print. "The velocity of sales is exponential," Drake said.

The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Collins received hundreds of thousands of dollars for the option on her three books, but will make millions if the movie and at least one planned sequel strike gold. For comparison's sake, Warner Bros. paid "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling $1 million in 1999 for the first four of her novels, and the first film, released in 2001, cost $125 million to make.