Fans of The Hunger Games should have the franchise on the big screen for at least two more years.
Hopefully the comparisons between Twilight and Games will also disappear as well, because other than appealing to young adults as well as a mainstream audience, I really don’t see any similarities between the two.
It also seems that Games is a much better written series, although I’ve always felt that it’s basically Battle Royale light, and that Jennifer Lawrence is dealing with her fame much better than Kirsten Stewart, even after she was voted “most desirable woman” by Vanity Fair. Even if Hunger Games becomes the next hater favorite now that we don’t have Twilight to kick around anymore, at least the whole film cycle will be complete next year.
Recently, I spotted a report about a potential Hunger Games reality series, and no, it won’t have teens fighting each other to the death. As Entertainment Weekly confirms, the CW network has made a thirteen-episode order for The Hunt, where twenty four people are dumped in the wild without food, water or shelter.
Like the Hunger Games kids, you have to survive on your wits, strength, and survival instincts, except instead of killing each other, you have to “capture” your opponents. Contestants play The Hunt for a month, and you play for money, although there’s no cash prize amount disclosed yet. There’s also currently no premiere date or anything like that set up, but this is sure to get a lot more press attention in the upcoming year.
A reality TV show idea like this is totally a no-brainer, but we’ve been seeing this kind of stuff since Survivor, it’s just now redone in a new package. Many have felt that eventually reality shows would go the way of the Hunger Games, where audiences are going to have to see somebody killed on TV to finally be satisfied, but we may have thankfully reached a reality TV saturation point with the end of Jersey Shore, and American Idol’s ratings in the toilet.
Of course, the spirit of The Hunger Games is all over TV these days, as the L.A. Times recently pointed out in an article on survival themes being the hot thing right now. The big one last year was Revolution, not to mention The Walking Dead and other zombie tales fit in with this theme as well. Why is this popular these days? Well, with the collapse of the economy, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine everything else falling apart along with it.
As Mary McNamara writes, “Where we once feared corruption, we now fear collapse, a technological, social or political cataclysm that will change everything. Many of these after the fall fables question our modern level of simple competence…Now, the ever-morphing digital tablet comes with a dark-mirror image of Square One.”
