The Hunger Games book is already a big hit with teenagers. Photo credit: michi003
With 400 fans queuing overnight for tickets at Monday night’s premiere in Los Angeles, the eagerly awaited The Hunger Games is predicted to be as big a teen phenomenon as Twilight proved to be. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic North America. Our heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in one of the 12 districts of Panem, a rural mining area inhabited by drudges subservient to the high-tech overlords of Capitol. She volunteers in her sister’s place to compete in the Hunger Games, an annual fight to the death between 24 contestants (2 from each district) selected by lottery to perform for the entertainment of a mandatory TV audience. Only one survivor will remain.
A new franchise? Just like the Twilight and Harry Potter franchises, The Hunger Games is based on an already-popular series of novels.The Hollywood Reporter has published tracking data suggesting that interest in The Hunger Games is running higher than the original Twilight film, quoting a rival studio executive: “Numbers don’t get much higher than this!” The film is estimated to take $100-120 million on its opening weekend at the US box office. With Catching Fire and Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins’ two sequels also scheduled for filming, we can expect the games to continue …
Fans ate up the books. The film has a near-guaranteed audience, as the books already have a wide fan base. Toby Jones (Dobby the House Elf in Harry Potter), who plays Games’ announcer Claudius Templesmith told Entertainment Weekly that “he “realized it was going to be huge “when he gave his daughter the books and she “ate all three books in four days. She literally just ate them.” Fan Ruzena Zatko, 28, who spent two nights’ camped out in front of the Nokia Theatre to win passes to the premiere in Los Angeles on Monday told Associated Press that the film “stayed true to the book.”
Teen Vogue provides fans with all the juiciest morsels in their Ultimate Hunger Games Guide.
A cross between the X Factor and the Iraq War. The New York Times reported that Collins had the idea for The Hunger Games one evening when she was channel-surfing and flicked from a reality-television competition to footage from the war in Iraq. Collins has also claimed she went back to Greek myths, specifically Theseus and the Minotaur, for her inspiration, reported the Telegraph.
No blood please, we’re British! The BBC reported Tuesday that seven minutes of “blood splashes” and other gory details were cut from the original version in order to gain a teen-friendly 12A rating in the UK. The film was rated PG-13 in the USA for “intense violent thematic material and disturbing images – all involving teens.” This was vital for a film targeting the tween demographic that made up the Twilight and Harry Potter audiences. Brendan O’Neill, who spent his tween years chasing and killing frogs in rural Ireland mocked the British Board of Film Classification “bigwigs” for their rigid rules in a Telegraph blog, arguing that “there is no natural age at which someone becomes good at seeing ‘splashes of blood’” and in fact “the whole point of The Hunger Games is that it is bloody and gory and gross and mental.”
Is this a love story? Although Katniss does have two suitors, and some fans in the crowd outside Monday’s premier waved homemade posters reading “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale,” 22-year-old Twilight fan Stephanie Zatko told Associated Press that The Hunger Games “doesn’t focus on the love triangle” and instead Katniss is “actually doing something [whereas] Bela just sits there.”
Katniss a modern Joan of Arc? In an interview with the Telegraph’s Seven magazine Donald Sutherland, who plays President Snow, the ruler of Panem, drew parallels between the film’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, and Joan of Arc, quoting George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923):“When she was thwarted by men whom she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her impatience with their folly.”
