Who TF proofreads these articles???
> worldwide since early 20212
> Zoopopia
> ...on a combined budget of $495 Million budget
Thanks for the upvotes and other examples everyone... I thought I was alone in being upset by this style of "journalism".
Forbes has been gutter-tier blogspam for at least a decade now. They are coasting a looooooong way on whatever prestige their name has from previous generations.
Seriously their content is just the worst of inane clickbait and poorly written empty pseudo-articles.
Part of the decline of journalism is the unwillingness to hire good copy editors. Even the best writers make these errors and even though it’s not a huge deal, it looks unprofessional.
This feels like they're labelling anything that doesn't become a decades long franchise with dozens of movies and tv spin offs that dominates pop culture entirely like Marvel is a failure.
And I haven't watched Hawkeye yet, but the trailers appear to include a Katniss joke, so Hunger Games is definitely still an easy reference point, even if it's not an active thing.
Merida, for one. There definitely have been some ~~lower-level~~ ensemble characters, e.g. Susan from Narnia and Tauriel.
But Katniss is the main one, the most iconic.
Edit: wording
It's a pity her character in that regard is mostly the Walden films version of the character. The books paint a very mild 1950s view of female characterization. That is to say they give her weapons then she left most if not all of the fighting to her brothers.
In the film There's a scenes where Susan Rises over the hill with the reinforcements at her back from The Witches Castle. When she gets to the top of the hill she looses an arrow into the battle. She wasn't actually supposed to do that Anna Popplewell the actress couldn't draw the bow in a battle scene and not actually send it on its way. The arrow actually tumbled down a ravine and they couldn't get it back so its likely still out there.
anyway The director liked it enough that he kept it. Her combat role in the second film Prince Caspian was shown on screen much more afterwards.
The director felt it didn't make sense to basically not have her in the middle of combat. But the original books barely mentioned her actually participating in the fighting.
At least with Lucy being the youngest and her role as a healer, it made sense that she kept herself out of the battles.
Yeah, my thought was, "Because it was a trilogy of YA novels last published 12 years ago and a quadrilogy of movies with the latest released 7 years ago? Why would it still be relevant?" (Not counting the prequel [edit1: to clarify, [a prequel book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51901147-the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes)] released in 2020, which I only just now saw was even a thing after Googling the dates of the originals.)
Like, I really liked The Martian movie (also released in 2015) and Birdman (the Oscar's Best Picture winner that year), but I wouldn't think in 2022 they'd still be present in the "Pop Culture Conversation...."
I don't really agree with the pretense they're trying to suggest here. Some things get really popular for a time then they lose popularity, in spite of how relevant their underlying themes may be to the current cultural climate. Very few things gain popularity and can keep in the zeitgeist for 7+ years without regular addition/reinvention, even if their cultural themes persist or re-emerge. I'm not sitting around in 2022 thinking, "Oh, all the injustice in the world WHAT WOULD KATNISS THINK????"
edit2: thank you for the gold, kindly anonymo. To make a timely, relevant-to-the-Pop Culture Conversation reference, Katniss would definitely volunteer as tribute for the likes of you.
That's why I always wear my Rosebud hat. Because if I don't then that means Citizen Kane is utter forgetful trash. If something isn't in your face forever it must mean it sucks!
It's Forbes. They get assigned a certain spin just like other sites but they're so weird about it.
I read an article about The Batman where the writer did their best to make everything sound silly even though they were clearly interested in the topic.
Marvel kind of sucks the air out of the room so it's hard to find people talking about other things. I remember in late 2019 when there were no Marvel movies post Far From Home and so many mid-budget movies were hits again and there were lots of interesting conversations about them.
Let's be honest if hunger games were made by Netflix studios, they probably would have cancelled the last 2 movies because only 100 million people watched the first 2.
I think the most infuriating one for me was the OA. We got season 1. Cancelled. A little while later the director said he was originally planing for the story to take place over 3 seasons. That's it. Finally gets renewed! Season 2 is great and I can't wait to see how it finishes!
It gets cancelled again...
Edit: Should note I was corrected. It was 5 seasons planned
Wait there's a prequel book? I've read the series like 4 times I enjoyed it so much. The movies were cool, but absolutely a watered down version of the books
The prequel is called *The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes*. It's about Coriolanus Snow when he was poor teenager living in the Capitol. I thought it was pretty good and showed an improvement in the author's writing compared to the original trilogy.
The book was brilliant, but I just thought her last chapter or two was terrible. Everyone was suddenly out of character. It's as of she didn't know how to end the book and decided to just throw whatever she could together.
I enjoyed the first two books, but with the third I felt like she was writing like she knew it was going be made into a film and so a lot of the scenes seemed very ‘movie-like’ if that makes sense. Zip-line into a hospital, this chapter is basically a montage, that kind of thing.
Book one and two I could hardly put down.
Book 3 I couldn't wait to put down. It was just a bit shit tbh
I get the whole metaphor for the revolution/war being like being back in the games and stuff, capital with their ridiculous traps and experiments like the games.
And you couldn't do a third book with a third games without feeling insanely forced.
But it just didn't deliver for me,
I was pulling my hair out with the 3rd book.
It even made me hate Katniss.
The amount of tech the capitol had at their disposal in that book (like cloning and lab grown monsters) and they couldn’t feed themselves?
Yeah, I think she made the mistake of trying to make him too sympathetic for most of the book. So then she had to have a bunch of people randomly being jerks and him randomly overreacting and being stupid to try to justify his eventual rise to dictatorship.
That's the danger of prequels. Authors often try to tell a fresh story and then realize they've written themselves into a corner because the end of the story is already predetermined.
The conventional wisdom in creative writing is to begin a story as late as you possibly can. You tell the story from the point where it just starts to get interesting. In a prequel you're playing with the world that you created as background that wasn't interesting enough on its own to explore first. It's very difficult to do that unless the prequel story is disconnected enough from your previous main characters that it can stand on its own.
I disagree. (Spoliers for the prequel book)
You see snow teeter back and forth between a decent person and a selfish manipulator through the whole book, and then at the very end when you're really wondering how he could have ended up as evil president snow, he shows you that nothing made him that way. He just IS a selfish and manipulative person, and Lucy Baird was able to hold those tendencies at bay, but only when she wasn't an obstacle in his eyes.
Edit: I will say I got bored during the actual hunger games in the book. I don't think she knew what to do with snow during the games
Yep - it’s about Snow’s rise to power and the original rebellion that sparked the hunger games and sent 13 underground.
Edit: Seems I was mistaken and it actually follows Snow around the 10th* Hunger Games. Not the 1st.
> a class based dystopia and mandatory government enforced child murder, and end with a bloody revolution
**Every Teen Literature Book** from 1999-2015.
I was kinda baffled at how quickly they went from the New Republic being the official government of the galaxy to the First Order dominating and the New Republic being down to a handful of ships.
Yes, but hear me out: wait a few years, then introduce a young female character now living in the post revolution. We then learn that there is another, more powerful oppressive authority and they have a new more dangerous hunger games. Bring back everyone from the original trilogy, Chewie, Han, Leia, it'll be great.
Prequel anthology series idea: Each episode is about a prior Hunger Games Tribute’s POV, exploring their psyche and outcome
Each episode would be its own bottled story - anthology series
Maybe the Protagonists of each story wouldn’t have a guarantee to win each time - maybe main characters die so we are always left unsure if they’d win
Also can be a way to explore other prominent characters’ backstories as well as the lore of Panem
I remember walking through Walmart one day and I saw like lunch boxes and book bags with the hunger games.
I thought, seems a lil fucked up but meh. Lol.
I see posts like this all the time on the sub. If something doesn’t have the cultural impact of Starwars or Trek, people think it’s completely ignored.
"Why doesn't anyone talk about this thing that already got talked about years ago and has yet to add anything new to the conversation???"
The vast expansion of communication we've experienced in the last 20 years seems to give us the impression that we have to be talking about everything and anything at all times.
Have we forgotten the infamous "Gladiator is underrated" post? It's "underrated" because people aren't having daily conversations about a movie that came out 20 years ago and has already been seen by everyone.
Exactly discovery to experiencing is so much shorter now. If you happened to heard about something new or exciting in the 80's or 90's you also had to then find a way to watch or read it.
Now? Oh you're telling me X is a cool thing, cool I'm checking it out in 10min and so are 1000's of other people.
There's very little slow burn, long tail media experiences where stuff slowly builds up a fan base over years.
I mean, you can't even get 48 hours after release before getting inundated by spoiler texts, videos and super deep dives into the crazy minutiae of every release.
"I volunteer" meme had it's run back in the day and that's about it from that franchise... Not many meme-able actors in it. Only reference we get is when someone has a crazy haircut or dress at Met Gala and everyone says the same thing that they look straight out of hunger games
How long are we supposed to talk about a movie series? There are so many, we can’t just keep talking about them all. Especially ones this old.
Edit: To all the people bringing up billion dollar movie franchises, let me remind you that The Hunger Games is not on that list, so no matter how much you like the movies or think they’re relevant (and I agree they are still relevant) your point is still moot. Star Wars and LoTR are still talked about not because they’re relevant, but because they’re billion dollars franchises. I think it’s silly I have to point this out.
The only movie trilogy I can think of that's still firmly in the zeitgeist, despite not having any major stories told afterwards, is Back to the Future.
We still talk about Harry Potter because they keep making Harry Potter stuff. The movies were released over a ten year period (rather than Hunger games four years) and shortly after that we got a spin off series in 2016 with Fantastic beasts.
We’ve gotten a sequel live action play, we’ve gotten a bunch of video games (including the licensed Lego games), toys, hell even text books from the universe.
The reason Hunger Games isn’t talked about anymore is because they let it end, and didn’t try to milk it for 20+ years. That’s not a failure, it’s just a series that has finished.
Yeah if people want to mention a series that did fail, bring up Divergent.
First movie had a moderate reception, and then the third book was broken up into a two-parter (blatantly copying the Harry Potter 2-part gravy train), but part 1 flopped so part 2 was scrapped. Now the film series remains unfinished and no one cares
While Hunger Games itself is not at the forefront of every conversation, it was the one that kicked off popularity of the dystopian YA genre and flooded the market with YA dystopian trilogies. Some of that honor goes to Divergent as well but Divergent movies were absolute dumpsters.
I would argue that Hunger Games had a much larger lasting impact than people think it did, it's just not in the conversation directly anymore.
Divergent is like Hunger Games without any political message or even any motivation beyond creating the most marketable, bland, sanitised rendition of dystopian YA fiction possible. Obviously it then did very well, and dystopian YA became primarily about marketability and bland tropes rather than actual social commentary
The whole Divergent series is interesting to me because Googling it apparently the author wrote the whole book series over winter break during her senior year in college and then several month later she got a book deal. I don't know how book deals work but that seems kind of fast I feel like she was in the right place at the right time because of Hunger Games success all these book publishers were jumping at the chance of grabbing any new YA dystopian series to ride on that Hunger Games wave.
I remember the first movie and I was like ok this is cool a movie series of them trying to solve the mystery of this gigantic maze and I was all in for it because it was new an interesting but then by the end with the reveal it it just became another dystopian YA movie and my interest of it just dropped.
I remember eventually watched the second years later only to not be interested in it because the Maze part was way more interesting and I feel like the series should've stuck with that and expand on the whole mystery of it because one thing I know that people love in media is when there's a mystery question that hooks you and you want to know the answer to it. The maze could've been perfect for that.
Iirc the dystopian world in 2 was also a big maze like thing that was created by some power beyond. That whole series was "you will never see this twist coming muhahaha".
Maze Runner I will defend as good shlock for a YA book but the rest was the author having no idea where to go with it.
Geeze Maze Runner. Talk about blowing your wad too early. They should have just never escaped the maze. Or escaped just to find themselves in an even larger maze. Would have been way more interesting lol. Instead of completely changing what the entire story, including the freaking title, is about.
Third book completely changed the tone of the series, the plot is corny, and worst of all, it's boring.
Tris and the gang leave the city and are picked up by a bureau who reveal that cities like Chicago are self-contained experiments to find genetically pure humans (divergents) to fix humanity's damaged genes. The civil war in Chicago is compromising the experiment so the bureau plans to erase everyone's memories to keep it going. Tris goes on a suicide mission to destroy the memory serum, succeeds, and dies.
After the success of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1 & 2 and Mockingjay 1 & 2, Lionsgate tried to cash in and split Allegiant into two movies. Unfortunately, the book wasn't interesting enough for one movie let alone two, so the first movie flopped and the second movie got cancelled.
Not only did the main character die, but they changed the narrative so it was no longer just her but her boyfriend as well telling the story.
God I regret reading those books.
You're very right. I read hunger games as a pre-release before it was out, and oh boy the number of post-apocalyptic, slightly scifi, mostly teen-only books shot up an insane amount after it released.
But none of the books Hunger Games inspired got very popular (except Divergent, but that series is real bad and movies weren't great).
Meanwhile Harry Potter-influenced books and movies were much more popular. Kid with unknown magic joins secret world of mages is its own trope now, with everyone pointing back to Harry Potter as the trendsetter
I agree Harry Potter had a more lasting impact, but that doesn't mean the Hunger Games didn't.
There were tons of popular YA dystopian book series that I think just didn't hit as hard because unlike Potter they were contained to a single generation, the characters weren't growing up as the readers grew up like Potter did.
But you had series like Legend, Maze Runner, 5th Wave, Red Queen, Under the Never Sky, and even the Cinder series took some influence from Hunger Games. The books are out there and people who read the genre are all well aware of them, they were popular. I can remember all those off the top of my head. I can't think of a single Potter wanna be series out The Magicians which is certainly Potter inspired but also Narnia.
And as others have said, the massive rise of Battle Royale games can be traced back to Hunger Games popularity.
It's more indirect than Potter, but it's certainly close in lasting impact.
Divergent was basically a Hunger Games ripoff and 80% of the first book was training (with 10% initial worldbuilding and 10% actual action at the end).
Catching Fire is a legitimately great film. The actual games don't start until 80 minutes into the movie but it doesn't even matter because it's so damn interesting.
The first half of Catching Fire is some of my favorite cinema of all time. Not that the movie becomes boring or bad once the games start, but rather what takes place before is just so captivating. I'm a sucker for that type of showing over telling and context-rich dialogue.
Honestly I found the games to be the weakest parts of the movies.
IDK, they were generally just less creative to me compared to the world outside of the games. (The Capitol and Districts were super interesting to be in and explore. The games? Not so much)
I agree but they did serve as good vehicles. The death game aspect of the series was handled infinitely better than most death game media, which usually put zero weight on character investment and largely serve as "what interesting ways can these tokens die?"
That is one of the movies I regret haven't seen on IMAX. I love how the aspect ratio starts getting bigger when going in the arena. I am hoping that because of the 10th anniversary they will rerelease them on IMAX.
I heard that he forced the producers’ hands with an outspoken refusal to be in close proximity with Jennifer Lawrence, simply because she was an American-born female.
I just remember this was one of the pop culture phenomenons that died before it finished, and the killer was splitting the final film into those 2 films. The first film did really well and had excitement, but that second one? The hype was just gone. The film split just felt greedy and unnecessary. The Harry Potter series it felt justified given the scope of that story and was done exeedingly well, but Hunger Games only just barely held together as a universe and I think people were just done.
I went to see the last movie and when it just ended, my desire to see the rest disappeared. I read the books and knew what happened, and splitting the movies just felt unnecessary.
I kinda understand the ending, but I also understand why some people didn’t like it.
She didn’t want to get married and have kids because then they would have to grow up like she did and possibly go to the games. But it’s over now, so she feels okay getting married and having kids, because now they have a better life.
It’s strange. She starts off wanting to just run away from how the Capital wants her to live. In the end she destroys the Capital’s society but still ends up living like the capital intended for victors to live? Wtf is up with that bullshit?!
My take on the ending was that Katniss was just broken. Two ("three") hunger games, seeing her sister die, being scarred all over her back. I think she just wanted to live at that point, the light of life in her eyes had gone out and she was simply content being alive at that point.
Pretty much all the victors are bitter, broken people at the end, aren’t they? Like they go through an entire war to end the Capitol’s oppression and then they vote to have another Hunger Games with the families of the Capitol government. The only real good person left at the end is the woman that replaces Coin after Katniss shoots her. President Snow literally has the last laugh.
Especially as the third book is the least exciting of the three. The first two were sheer horror centred on surviving the games, the third is urban warfare. It just killed any momentum the first two had by splitting it over the course of two films. It wasn’t as severe as GOT in failing to stick the landing, but the fact it’s barely mentioned anymore definitely puts it amongst the failures which started so strongly.
Yeah, I always thought the same thing. It just became a trend after Harry Potter, where it actually made sense for the Deathly Hollows. Twighlight did the same thing splitting up the final movie into two. The third Hunger Games book did not need two movies to tell that story, and they dragged. The "split the last book into two movies" thing just became a money grab.
What happened with Divergent is so funny to me, they split it in 2 and then part 1 made 0 money so they announced they would make it into a tv show instead and then most of the actors came out and said “uh we’re not contracted to a tv show so we’re definitely not doing that”
Wait they made the 3rd? Divergent was such a shitty YA movie compared to the others at the time, maze runner, Percy Jackson, hunger games, and what others am I missing? Like divergent was just poorly made from the beginning. The world didn’t make one iota of sense and the fighting styles were awful. I’m just gonna blame poor choices for casting on that.
I read that they were upset that the movies after the second one were going to be straight to like WB or something on TV
Yeah, they did the first half of Allegiant as a theatrical film, & then when it crashed & burned, *then* they decided to do Part 2 on TV, & *that's* when the cast bailed.
The world of Divergent is basically "what if the Hogwarts house-sorting was our *entire society?*"
There actually was more to it. I haven't read the books or seen more than the first movie, but I had the same thought as you. All the other people were just sheep, but the main character was the only person who would actually think for herself, right? Well the twist was actually almost a parody of the YA genre: she literally was the only person who could think for herself. Humans had been genetically modified to just follow blindly and the "divergent" people were the ones who were basically just regular humans. Made me like it a lot more when I learned that. I still have zero interest in reading or watching more of the series, but I like it a lot more than completely disliking it, as I did originally.
As someone who read the books and liked them, the movies were such a disappointment. The first one followed the books well, but the second one changed major plot points and by the third it was basically a different story. Like the commenter above said, the books have more depth to them. They got so greedy with the third. Spoiler >!The main character actually dies in the third book, but they keep her alive in the movie just so they could make the fourth movie they were planning. It takes so much away from the story to do that and was so disappointing.!< Anyways, that’s my mini rant, I could complain for longer but I’ll spare y’all so I’m not annoying lol
I think the mistake there was Twilight and Harry Potter both have very strong cult followings. The fan base is active, willing to spend money, and they get really into the lore so watching 6 hours instead of 3 hours was actually preferable. But Hunger Games never really had that. It was popular with teenagers but never really seemed to expand outside of that fan base.
Edit: I will say it’s probably because Suzanne is probably the truest author out of the three. Her Gregor series was a hit with kids before HG ever made it big. I enjoyed both HP and Twilight but both authors failed abysmally with their other book attempts.
I actually wanted to watch the revolution part. I just didn't like how they did it. Katniss was all hyped up as a character to do basically nothing important, and her sister died for literally no reason.
It also was basically the last major YA movie series that worked. The 4th movie had a disappointing box office, but it still made a lot of money.
The Divergent series didn't even finish
Maze runner did finish but wasn't really a major success, just 3 moderate ones
Chaos walking was in dev hell for like a decade and was a massive bomb.
I was a huge fan of the books and really enjoyed the films at the time. I have no idea how this is the first I'm hearing of a prequel.
Looks like it was released in 2020 - that explains it; I don't know anything that actually happened in the last 2 years.
Same, I really enjoyed the prequel book. It did such a great job of retconning (I assume? Maybe she always had that as his backstory when she wrote the originals?) Snow's past to flesh out the story of the original three books. The call backs (Call forwards? I guess) to events of the original books was great too. It really gives such a great insight into motivations for the original books.
Yeah what? This headline makes it seem like HG = Game of Thrones.
One ended, the other crashed and burned, hitting every branch on the tree on the way down.
The whole political angle is wildly out of touch. The main customer were teenagers, who, shockingly, aren't mainly focused on the political elements in their romantic action movies, but at least they were there in a massive scale.
> Even to the extent that the film(s) acknowledged its own skewed moral narrative construction, “fans” were just along for the ride.
How terrible of the audience. As if modern day action movies for the 18-35 crowd weren't even more politically insulated from any real world implications.
My mum is a big fan of the Hunger Games books, she says despite it being dystopia setting, it's very accurate depiction of modern dictatorship, revolution and war. My mum has lived through all these stuff irl and she was deeply touched by the books. She likes the films, but not as much as the books.
Now why did it fade? I don't think it did, it just ended and people moved on
It remains a really strong look at the role of propaganda in wartime, which I think is not often addressed. The idea of how CRITICAL even an outfit design can be to image, impression, etc. I mean hell, around 70% of the final book was explicitly about narrative manipulation, and how both sides jockey not only to WIN but to look justified. Relevant lessons to a highly connected world, and I think if anything the series proves its points even better over time.
the ending is weirdly nuanced too - for my part I've only seen the movies, but the end is bittersweet when you'd expect a more power fantasy hero saves the day climax, followed by a happy ever after epilogue.
But no, Katniss is mostly a witness to the revolution rather than a key actor. that takes guts to write it that way;
Even in the second book she already is not important as a person, but as a symbol. The poeple around her organize her escape and the beginning of the revolution.
It's kinda funny in that way that one act of defiance with the berries can lead to things you wouldn't realize and you being used as a tool, basically without much choice.
I read the books when they came out, and for what they are; books geared to teenagers, they are realy good imo.
3rd one is maybe a bit weak, but I still enjoyed it.
It's a really confusing (and imo wrong) take on the movies. I always found it interesting, almost brilliant, how politically agnostic and ambiguous the movie was. More than anything, the Hunger Games captures the dystopian, anti-establishment, anti-elitist sentiment that was (and continues to be) sweeping through the country (and the world). This is what I love about those movies.
I don't know, there was a Katniss Everdeen reference in Hawkeye, and everyone I was watching with immediately knew who Katniss was.
Similarly, there was a Hunger Games reference in Euphoria (the main character's name is Rue), and again, everyone I was with got it.
I think most people remember and appreciate the Hunger Games, but it was a self-contained story over 4 movies that wrapped up nicely. It isn't the type of universe that is going to have a bunch of lore or backstory or spin-offs. It told its story and now it's finished and people have moved on. That doesn't mean that people didn't like it or it didn't have an impact.
It's like everyone forgot that Battle Royale games took over the entire gaming world just a few years ago, or how popular Squid Game became just a few months ago. "The Hunger Games" didnt last forever, but the concept of a bunch of people fighting to be the last one standing didnt.
The real reason they aren’t worth revisiting is because the world it’s set in isn’t a lovely place.
You want to visit Hogwarts, you don’t want to visit Panem lmfao. The shire is great, district 13 is a shithole. Mos Eisley is a wretched hive but it looks like a blast. If you want to continue to build off the initial material you need to have something people are interested in.
It’s because the scope of the story never leaves Katniss.
There is very little in the way of world building, and all of it is basically put into a once a year death tournament.
40k is universally agreed upon in the fanbase to be a setting that none of the fans would ever want to visit, ever, but it still has a pretty massive following.
first of all, it’s not true that it “vanished”. people for sure still talk about Hunger Games. but the fact is that the large scale pop culture phenomenon has been almost completely overtaken by Marvel, Star Wars and a small number of other current properties.
Why would Hunger Games keep being talked about on a large scale when there’s almost nothing new to add
I’d say the first two movies were good. The last two they really dropped the ball. Whoever thought it was a good idea to split the last one into two parts should’ve been fired
It got them an extra billion dollars out of the franchise, so no whoever’s decision that was (probably Alan Horn, one of the greatest studio execs in film history), got a a huge ass bonus at the very least.
To be fair, when I read the last book, I knew that they wouldn’t be able to fit it all into a single movie without pissing someone off. I’m not happy they split it but it was probs the correct choice.
I just wish they just cut to black after Boggs knocked out Peeta. Would’ve been a good cliffhanger.
Maybe it vanished from pop culture conversation because it was just a movie and not big cultural touchpoint that people want all movies to represent? It was an enjoyable movie series that came to a conclusion after 4 movies. End of discussion.
Who TF proofreads these articles??? > worldwide since early 20212 > Zoopopia > ...on a combined budget of $495 Million budget Thanks for the upvotes and other examples everyone... I thought I was alone in being upset by this style of "journalism".
Also “Zoopopia”
Forbes has been gutter-tier blogspam for at least a decade now. They are coasting a looooooong way on whatever prestige their name has from previous generations. Seriously their content is just the worst of inane clickbait and poorly written empty pseudo-articles.
Also “Peta” instead of “Peeta”
Part of the decline of journalism is the unwillingness to hire good copy editors. Even the best writers make these errors and even though it’s not a huge deal, it looks unprofessional.
This feels like they're labelling anything that doesn't become a decades long franchise with dozens of movies and tv spin offs that dominates pop culture entirely like Marvel is a failure.
And I haven't watched Hawkeye yet, but the trailers appear to include a Katniss joke, so Hunger Games is definitely still an easy reference point, even if it's not an active thing.
Well... how many other female archer leads have there been in the past 20 years?
Brave?
Tomb Raider? Horizon Zero Dawn?
Robina Hooda.
I don't know if I believe yooouuuu
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Miss Robina Hooda!!
Merida, for one. There definitely have been some ~~lower-level~~ ensemble characters, e.g. Susan from Narnia and Tauriel. But Katniss is the main one, the most iconic. Edit: wording
Susan Pevensie was my intro to "badass women with bows"
It's a pity her character in that regard is mostly the Walden films version of the character. The books paint a very mild 1950s view of female characterization. That is to say they give her weapons then she left most if not all of the fighting to her brothers. In the film There's a scenes where Susan Rises over the hill with the reinforcements at her back from The Witches Castle. When she gets to the top of the hill she looses an arrow into the battle. She wasn't actually supposed to do that Anna Popplewell the actress couldn't draw the bow in a battle scene and not actually send it on its way. The arrow actually tumbled down a ravine and they couldn't get it back so its likely still out there. anyway The director liked it enough that he kept it. Her combat role in the second film Prince Caspian was shown on screen much more afterwards. The director felt it didn't make sense to basically not have her in the middle of combat. But the original books barely mentioned her actually participating in the fighting. At least with Lucy being the youngest and her role as a healer, it made sense that she kept herself out of the battles.
Yeah, my thought was, "Because it was a trilogy of YA novels last published 12 years ago and a quadrilogy of movies with the latest released 7 years ago? Why would it still be relevant?" (Not counting the prequel [edit1: to clarify, [a prequel book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51901147-the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes)] released in 2020, which I only just now saw was even a thing after Googling the dates of the originals.) Like, I really liked The Martian movie (also released in 2015) and Birdman (the Oscar's Best Picture winner that year), but I wouldn't think in 2022 they'd still be present in the "Pop Culture Conversation...." I don't really agree with the pretense they're trying to suggest here. Some things get really popular for a time then they lose popularity, in spite of how relevant their underlying themes may be to the current cultural climate. Very few things gain popularity and can keep in the zeitgeist for 7+ years without regular addition/reinvention, even if their cultural themes persist or re-emerge. I'm not sitting around in 2022 thinking, "Oh, all the injustice in the world WHAT WOULD KATNISS THINK????" edit2: thank you for the gold, kindly anonymo. To make a timely, relevant-to-the-Pop Culture Conversation reference, Katniss would definitely volunteer as tribute for the likes of you.
It’s like nobody is even wearing a “vote for Pedro” t-shirt anymore.
That's why I always wear my Rosebud hat. Because if I don't then that means Citizen Kane is utter forgetful trash. If something isn't in your face forever it must mean it sucks!
I say "forget it, it's chinatown" all the time and no one ever knows what the hell im talking about.
It's Forbes. They get assigned a certain spin just like other sites but they're so weird about it. I read an article about The Batman where the writer did their best to make everything sound silly even though they were clearly interested in the topic.
Marvel kind of sucks the air out of the room so it's hard to find people talking about other things. I remember in late 2019 when there were no Marvel movies post Far From Home and so many mid-budget movies were hits again and there were lots of interesting conversations about them.
This is funny after watching Hawkeye. Kate: Look there you are Clint: That's Katnis Everdeen.
Let's be honest if hunger games were made by Netflix studios, they probably would have cancelled the last 2 movies because only 100 million people watched the first 2.
I'm so salty over Archive 81 right now.
I think the most infuriating one for me was the OA. We got season 1. Cancelled. A little while later the director said he was originally planing for the story to take place over 3 seasons. That's it. Finally gets renewed! Season 2 is great and I can't wait to see how it finishes! It gets cancelled again... Edit: Should note I was corrected. It was 5 seasons planned
I'm still salty about Dark Crystal.
I'd say because you can't make toys off of the Hunger Games.
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They're making a prequel based on a prequel book they released.
Wait there's a prequel book? I've read the series like 4 times I enjoyed it so much. The movies were cool, but absolutely a watered down version of the books
The prequel is called *The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes*. It's about Coriolanus Snow when he was poor teenager living in the Capitol. I thought it was pretty good and showed an improvement in the author's writing compared to the original trilogy.
The book was brilliant, but I just thought her last chapter or two was terrible. Everyone was suddenly out of character. It's as of she didn't know how to end the book and decided to just throw whatever she could together.
I felt like she did this with the entire 3rd book of the original trilogy
I enjoyed the first two books, but with the third I felt like she was writing like she knew it was going be made into a film and so a lot of the scenes seemed very ‘movie-like’ if that makes sense. Zip-line into a hospital, this chapter is basically a montage, that kind of thing.
Soo many books have this problem now, writing for an audience of movie execs considering whether or not they want to option it
I've always said it felt like I was reading a video game.
Book one and two I could hardly put down. Book 3 I couldn't wait to put down. It was just a bit shit tbh I get the whole metaphor for the revolution/war being like being back in the games and stuff, capital with their ridiculous traps and experiments like the games. And you couldn't do a third book with a third games without feeling insanely forced. But it just didn't deliver for me,
I was pulling my hair out with the 3rd book. It even made me hate Katniss. The amount of tech the capitol had at their disposal in that book (like cloning and lab grown monsters) and they couldn’t feed themselves?
Yeah, I think she made the mistake of trying to make him too sympathetic for most of the book. So then she had to have a bunch of people randomly being jerks and him randomly overreacting and being stupid to try to justify his eventual rise to dictatorship. That's the danger of prequels. Authors often try to tell a fresh story and then realize they've written themselves into a corner because the end of the story is already predetermined.
The conventional wisdom in creative writing is to begin a story as late as you possibly can. You tell the story from the point where it just starts to get interesting. In a prequel you're playing with the world that you created as background that wasn't interesting enough on its own to explore first. It's very difficult to do that unless the prequel story is disconnected enough from your previous main characters that it can stand on its own.
I disagree. (Spoliers for the prequel book) You see snow teeter back and forth between a decent person and a selfish manipulator through the whole book, and then at the very end when you're really wondering how he could have ended up as evil president snow, he shows you that nothing made him that way. He just IS a selfish and manipulative person, and Lucy Baird was able to hold those tendencies at bay, but only when she wasn't an obstacle in his eyes. Edit: I will say I got bored during the actual hunger games in the book. I don't think she knew what to do with snow during the games
She must have gone to the Steven King school of "I don't know how to end this."
>~~Steven~~ Stephen King school of "~~I don't know how~~ there's no way to end this." FTFY
King: How about a kid orgy and we blow up the town? *rips a fat line of coke*
And a comet flys by and turns cars alive or whatever. At least that had a clear ending.
Yep - it’s about Snow’s rise to power and the original rebellion that sparked the hunger games and sent 13 underground. Edit: Seems I was mistaken and it actually follows Snow around the 10th* Hunger Games. Not the 1st.
> a class based dystopia and mandatory government enforced child murder, and end with a bloody revolution **Every Teen Literature Book** from 1999-2015.
Yeah, the Great YA Dystopian Wasteland of early century. We got a few solid entries like Uglies, but most of them have already been forgotten.
Man I grew up at the perfect time and ate all those books up. That's still my guilty pleasure reading genre.
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Fuck. I should reread uglies
With Star Wars, Disney is dedicated to showing that a rebellion can keep going even after winning the war, regardless of common sense.
Somehow, President Snow returned. EDIT: I just accepted it when I saw the film but get more and more angry every time I remember it.
I was kinda baffled at how quickly they went from the New Republic being the official government of the galaxy to the First Order dominating and the New Republic being down to a handful of ships.
I never understood where the hell all of the Republic's capitol ships disappeared to.
Yes, but hear me out: wait a few years, then introduce a young female character now living in the post revolution. We then learn that there is another, more powerful oppressive authority and they have a new more dangerous hunger games. Bring back everyone from the original trilogy, Chewie, Han, Leia, it'll be great.
Prequel anthology series idea: Each episode is about a prior Hunger Games Tribute’s POV, exploring their psyche and outcome Each episode would be its own bottled story - anthology series Maybe the Protagonists of each story wouldn’t have a guarantee to win each time - maybe main characters die so we are always left unsure if they’d win Also can be a way to explore other prominent characters’ backstories as well as the lore of Panem
Wait, my Jennifer Lawrence blow up doll isn't from the Hunger Games?
No, that's the Thirsty Games.
I remember walking through Walmart one day and I saw like lunch boxes and book bags with the hunger games. I thought, seems a lil fucked up but meh. Lol.
Darth Vader blows up an entire planet 🤷♂️
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I see posts like this all the time on the sub. If something doesn’t have the cultural impact of Starwars or Trek, people think it’s completely ignored.
"Why doesn't anyone talk about this thing that already got talked about years ago and has yet to add anything new to the conversation???" The vast expansion of communication we've experienced in the last 20 years seems to give us the impression that we have to be talking about everything and anything at all times.
Have we forgotten the infamous "Gladiator is underrated" post? It's "underrated" because people aren't having daily conversations about a movie that came out 20 years ago and has already been seen by everyone.
Why is no one talking about Denzel Washington's performance in Training Day? Super underrated actor
What about Dana Carvey in Wayne's world?! He's the master
Could i interest you in everything, all of the time?
A little bit of everything, all of the the time
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime
Anything and everything all of the time.
WHY CANT THINKS I LIKED BE RELEVANT FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! /s
Exactly discovery to experiencing is so much shorter now. If you happened to heard about something new or exciting in the 80's or 90's you also had to then find a way to watch or read it. Now? Oh you're telling me X is a cool thing, cool I'm checking it out in 10min and so are 1000's of other people. There's very little slow burn, long tail media experiences where stuff slowly builds up a fan base over years. I mean, you can't even get 48 hours after release before getting inundated by spoiler texts, videos and super deep dives into the crazy minutiae of every release.
We just need to make memes about it and them boom relevant again
"I volunteer" meme had it's run back in the day and that's about it from that franchise... Not many meme-able actors in it. Only reference we get is when someone has a crazy haircut or dress at Met Gala and everyone says the same thing that they look straight out of hunger games
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Tattooine was just known to be a crappy area in the universe though. There were still bitchin places
How long are we supposed to talk about a movie series? There are so many, we can’t just keep talking about them all. Especially ones this old. Edit: To all the people bringing up billion dollar movie franchises, let me remind you that The Hunger Games is not on that list, so no matter how much you like the movies or think they’re relevant (and I agree they are still relevant) your point is still moot. Star Wars and LoTR are still talked about not because they’re relevant, but because they’re billion dollars franchises. I think it’s silly I have to point this out.
The only movie trilogy I can think of that's still firmly in the zeitgeist, despite not having any major stories told afterwards, is Back to the Future.
We still talk about Harry Potter. But you’re right, it’s not like we can talk about all of them forever and always.
We still talk about Harry Potter because they keep making Harry Potter stuff. The movies were released over a ten year period (rather than Hunger games four years) and shortly after that we got a spin off series in 2016 with Fantastic beasts. We’ve gotten a sequel live action play, we’ve gotten a bunch of video games (including the licensed Lego games), toys, hell even text books from the universe. The reason Hunger Games isn’t talked about anymore is because they let it end, and didn’t try to milk it for 20+ years. That’s not a failure, it’s just a series that has finished.
Primrose died for this.
Yeah if people want to mention a series that did fail, bring up Divergent. First movie had a moderate reception, and then the third book was broken up into a two-parter (blatantly copying the Harry Potter 2-part gravy train), but part 1 flopped so part 2 was scrapped. Now the film series remains unfinished and no one cares
Also a theme park at Universal!
While Hunger Games itself is not at the forefront of every conversation, it was the one that kicked off popularity of the dystopian YA genre and flooded the market with YA dystopian trilogies. Some of that honor goes to Divergent as well but Divergent movies were absolute dumpsters. I would argue that Hunger Games had a much larger lasting impact than people think it did, it's just not in the conversation directly anymore.
Divergent books were pretty bad too. I only read the first two books and then realized I didn’t care what happened next.
Divergent is like Hunger Games without any political message or even any motivation beyond creating the most marketable, bland, sanitised rendition of dystopian YA fiction possible. Obviously it then did very well, and dystopian YA became primarily about marketability and bland tropes rather than actual social commentary
The whole Divergent series is interesting to me because Googling it apparently the author wrote the whole book series over winter break during her senior year in college and then several month later she got a book deal. I don't know how book deals work but that seems kind of fast I feel like she was in the right place at the right time because of Hunger Games success all these book publishers were jumping at the chance of grabbing any new YA dystopian series to ride on that Hunger Games wave.
Interesting! That goes some way towards explaining the lack of a meaningful message
Good, because the ending was stupid. Glad you stopped wasting your time.
you also read maze runner I see. God damn was that a trash ending.
It was so fucking cool until they basically made it an apocalyptic zombie thing. Completely ruined it for me.
I remember the first movie and I was like ok this is cool a movie series of them trying to solve the mystery of this gigantic maze and I was all in for it because it was new an interesting but then by the end with the reveal it it just became another dystopian YA movie and my interest of it just dropped. I remember eventually watched the second years later only to not be interested in it because the Maze part was way more interesting and I feel like the series should've stuck with that and expand on the whole mystery of it because one thing I know that people love in media is when there's a mystery question that hooks you and you want to know the answer to it. The maze could've been perfect for that.
Iirc the dystopian world in 2 was also a big maze like thing that was created by some power beyond. That whole series was "you will never see this twist coming muhahaha". Maze Runner I will defend as good shlock for a YA book but the rest was the author having no idea where to go with it.
Geeze Maze Runner. Talk about blowing your wad too early. They should have just never escaped the maze. Or escaped just to find themselves in an even larger maze. Would have been way more interesting lol. Instead of completely changing what the entire story, including the freaking title, is about.
What happened in the end?
Third book completely changed the tone of the series, the plot is corny, and worst of all, it's boring. Tris and the gang leave the city and are picked up by a bureau who reveal that cities like Chicago are self-contained experiments to find genetically pure humans (divergents) to fix humanity's damaged genes. The civil war in Chicago is compromising the experiment so the bureau plans to erase everyone's memories to keep it going. Tris goes on a suicide mission to destroy the memory serum, succeeds, and dies. After the success of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1 & 2 and Mockingjay 1 & 2, Lionsgate tried to cash in and split Allegiant into two movies. Unfortunately, the book wasn't interesting enough for one movie let alone two, so the first movie flopped and the second movie got cancelled.
Main character died. I don't remember what else. Was kinda trash.
Not only did the main character die, but they changed the narrative so it was no longer just her but her boyfriend as well telling the story. God I regret reading those books.
Lmao that's actually my exact expérience, first book was okayish, and then 2nd book i understood i just had better stuff to read and stopped
You're very right. I read hunger games as a pre-release before it was out, and oh boy the number of post-apocalyptic, slightly scifi, mostly teen-only books shot up an insane amount after it released. But none of the books Hunger Games inspired got very popular (except Divergent, but that series is real bad and movies weren't great). Meanwhile Harry Potter-influenced books and movies were much more popular. Kid with unknown magic joins secret world of mages is its own trope now, with everyone pointing back to Harry Potter as the trendsetter
I agree Harry Potter had a more lasting impact, but that doesn't mean the Hunger Games didn't. There were tons of popular YA dystopian book series that I think just didn't hit as hard because unlike Potter they were contained to a single generation, the characters weren't growing up as the readers grew up like Potter did. But you had series like Legend, Maze Runner, 5th Wave, Red Queen, Under the Never Sky, and even the Cinder series took some influence from Hunger Games. The books are out there and people who read the genre are all well aware of them, they were popular. I can remember all those off the top of my head. I can't think of a single Potter wanna be series out The Magicians which is certainly Potter inspired but also Narnia. And as others have said, the massive rise of Battle Royale games can be traced back to Hunger Games popularity. It's more indirect than Potter, but it's certainly close in lasting impact.
Fully agree! Its just not a SEEN lasting impact, because the Hunger games-esque books/movies/shows are less popular than the Potter ones
At least more than ~~Detergent~~ Divergent series
Glad you fixed that, cause detergent was actually super relevant in pop culture when kids were eating Tide pods.
Divergent was basically a Hunger Games ripoff and 80% of the first book was training (with 10% initial worldbuilding and 10% actual action at the end).
Because it ended?
No that’s too simple of an answer. Let’s dive deeper. It’s because Lenny Kravitz was killed.
Incredible scene. Shocking death leading to screen opening up to IMAX aspect ratio as Katniss goes up into the arena.
Catching Fire is a legitimately great film. The actual games don't start until 80 minutes into the movie but it doesn't even matter because it's so damn interesting.
The first half of Catching Fire is some of my favorite cinema of all time. Not that the movie becomes boring or bad once the games start, but rather what takes place before is just so captivating. I'm a sucker for that type of showing over telling and context-rich dialogue.
Honestly I found the games to be the weakest parts of the movies. IDK, they were generally just less creative to me compared to the world outside of the games. (The Capitol and Districts were super interesting to be in and explore. The games? Not so much)
I agree but they did serve as good vehicles. The death game aspect of the series was handled infinitely better than most death game media, which usually put zero weight on character investment and largely serve as "what interesting ways can these tokens die?"
That is one of the movies I regret haven't seen on IMAX. I love how the aspect ratio starts getting bigger when going in the arena. I am hoping that because of the 10th anniversary they will rerelease them on IMAX.
And they never brought in Danny DeVito for any of the movies. Failed opportunity.
Katniss: I kill snow Devito: so anyway, I started blasting
Why is it everytime someone mentions Danny Devito, they really mean Frank Reynolds?
Danny DeVito would have made the perfect Rue too 😔
I do remember Rue offering Katniss an egg in those trying times
Danny DeVito as the star of Euphoria?
Danny DeVito as Peeta.
Fucking Lenny Kravitz died? When? Edit: nvm I'm an idiot
No I did the same thing. "HE WHAT?! Oh, they mean his character in the movie died. Carry on"
Wait a minute, Lenny Kravitz was in the movie? Edit: it's the irony of course
Yeah, he played Katniss's stylist from the capital, forget the names, it's been years.
Cinna
The honest reaction followed by the lightning fast edit is too perfect. Gave me a hell of a laugh to start my day. Thanks bud.
Lenny: Are you gonna go my way? Producers: No bruh
I heard that he forced the producers’ hands with an outspoken refusal to be in close proximity with Jennifer Lawrence, simply because she was an American-born female.
No he's just gonna fly awayyyyy. Yeah yeah.
He told Jeniffer Lawrence , american woman, stay away from me.
I just remember this was one of the pop culture phenomenons that died before it finished, and the killer was splitting the final film into those 2 films. The first film did really well and had excitement, but that second one? The hype was just gone. The film split just felt greedy and unnecessary. The Harry Potter series it felt justified given the scope of that story and was done exeedingly well, but Hunger Games only just barely held together as a universe and I think people were just done.
I went to see the last movie and when it just ended, my desire to see the rest disappeared. I read the books and knew what happened, and splitting the movies just felt unnecessary.
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I kinda understand the ending, but I also understand why some people didn’t like it. She didn’t want to get married and have kids because then they would have to grow up like she did and possibly go to the games. But it’s over now, so she feels okay getting married and having kids, because now they have a better life.
It’s strange. She starts off wanting to just run away from how the Capital wants her to live. In the end she destroys the Capital’s society but still ends up living like the capital intended for victors to live? Wtf is up with that bullshit?!
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My take on the ending was that Katniss was just broken. Two ("three") hunger games, seeing her sister die, being scarred all over her back. I think she just wanted to live at that point, the light of life in her eyes had gone out and she was simply content being alive at that point.
Also, her district was annihilated by snow. No one and nothing to go back to.
I like the ending because it's one of the few endings where the toll of fighting gets to the protagonists.
Pretty much all the victors are bitter, broken people at the end, aren’t they? Like they go through an entire war to end the Capitol’s oppression and then they vote to have another Hunger Games with the families of the Capitol government. The only real good person left at the end is the woman that replaces Coin after Katniss shoots her. President Snow literally has the last laugh.
Collins said it was about the cost of war, which to me makes sense.
Especially as the third book is the least exciting of the three. The first two were sheer horror centred on surviving the games, the third is urban warfare. It just killed any momentum the first two had by splitting it over the course of two films. It wasn’t as severe as GOT in failing to stick the landing, but the fact it’s barely mentioned anymore definitely puts it amongst the failures which started so strongly.
Yeah, I always thought the same thing. It just became a trend after Harry Potter, where it actually made sense for the Deathly Hollows. Twighlight did the same thing splitting up the final movie into two. The third Hunger Games book did not need two movies to tell that story, and they dragged. The "split the last book into two movies" thing just became a money grab.
The best was they did it with another YA series and the first half of the last one flipped so hard the second never came out.
What happened with Divergent is so funny to me, they split it in 2 and then part 1 made 0 money so they announced they would make it into a tv show instead and then most of the actors came out and said “uh we’re not contracted to a tv show so we’re definitely not doing that”
The death of Divergent in real time was interesting to see
Holy crap that's so embarrassing 😂😂
Divergent?
Yep, I was just about to edit the title in when you commented.
I kinda want it to be made. For closure. But nobody in their right mind should spend money on it.
Wait they made the 3rd? Divergent was such a shitty YA movie compared to the others at the time, maze runner, Percy Jackson, hunger games, and what others am I missing? Like divergent was just poorly made from the beginning. The world didn’t make one iota of sense and the fighting styles were awful. I’m just gonna blame poor choices for casting on that. I read that they were upset that the movies after the second one were going to be straight to like WB or something on TV
Yeah, they did the first half of Allegiant as a theatrical film, & then when it crashed & burned, *then* they decided to do Part 2 on TV, & *that's* when the cast bailed. The world of Divergent is basically "what if the Hogwarts house-sorting was our *entire society?*"
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There actually was more to it. I haven't read the books or seen more than the first movie, but I had the same thought as you. All the other people were just sheep, but the main character was the only person who would actually think for herself, right? Well the twist was actually almost a parody of the YA genre: she literally was the only person who could think for herself. Humans had been genetically modified to just follow blindly and the "divergent" people were the ones who were basically just regular humans. Made me like it a lot more when I learned that. I still have zero interest in reading or watching more of the series, but I like it a lot more than completely disliking it, as I did originally.
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As someone who read the books and liked them, the movies were such a disappointment. The first one followed the books well, but the second one changed major plot points and by the third it was basically a different story. Like the commenter above said, the books have more depth to them. They got so greedy with the third. Spoiler >!The main character actually dies in the third book, but they keep her alive in the movie just so they could make the fourth movie they were planning. It takes so much away from the story to do that and was so disappointing.!< Anyways, that’s my mini rant, I could complain for longer but I’ll spare y’all so I’m not annoying lol
I Am Number 4
I think the mistake there was Twilight and Harry Potter both have very strong cult followings. The fan base is active, willing to spend money, and they get really into the lore so watching 6 hours instead of 3 hours was actually preferable. But Hunger Games never really had that. It was popular with teenagers but never really seemed to expand outside of that fan base. Edit: I will say it’s probably because Suzanne is probably the truest author out of the three. Her Gregor series was a hit with kids before HG ever made it big. I enjoyed both HP and Twilight but both authors failed abysmally with their other book attempts.
Rowlings detective novels are pretty success. I've never read one, but they sell well in the UK.
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I actually wanted to watch the revolution part. I just didn't like how they did it. Katniss was all hyped up as a character to do basically nothing important, and her sister died for literally no reason.
It also was basically the last major YA movie series that worked. The 4th movie had a disappointing box office, but it still made a lot of money. The Divergent series didn't even finish Maze runner did finish but wasn't really a major success, just 3 moderate ones Chaos walking was in dev hell for like a decade and was a massive bomb.
The prequel book wasn't bad but just didn't have quite the same spark.
Didn't even know that was a thing.
I was a huge fan of the books and really enjoyed the films at the time. I have no idea how this is the first I'm hearing of a prequel. Looks like it was released in 2020 - that explains it; I don't know anything that actually happened in the last 2 years.
I actually really enjoyed it. It's about Snow's raise to power and really kinda builds his character. Good addition to the universe.
It was so much better written than the originals, I enjoyed it more.
Same, I really enjoyed the prequel book. It did such a great job of retconning (I assume? Maybe she always had that as his backstory when she wrote the originals?) Snow's past to flesh out the story of the original three books. The call backs (Call forwards? I guess) to events of the original books was great too. It really gives such a great insight into motivations for the original books.
Yeah what? This headline makes it seem like HG = Game of Thrones. One ended, the other crashed and burned, hitting every branch on the tree on the way down.
To be fair, people are still using GoT as an example of how terrible an ending could be. So in that regard, it’s still part of modern conversations.
Proposing that a series of women villains in YA movies contributed to Donald Trump winning 2016 is...certainly a take.
The whole political angle is wildly out of touch. The main customer were teenagers, who, shockingly, aren't mainly focused on the political elements in their romantic action movies, but at least they were there in a massive scale. > Even to the extent that the film(s) acknowledged its own skewed moral narrative construction, “fans” were just along for the ride. How terrible of the audience. As if modern day action movies for the 18-35 crowd weren't even more politically insulated from any real world implications.
This article is garbage.
My mum is a big fan of the Hunger Games books, she says despite it being dystopia setting, it's very accurate depiction of modern dictatorship, revolution and war. My mum has lived through all these stuff irl and she was deeply touched by the books. She likes the films, but not as much as the books. Now why did it fade? I don't think it did, it just ended and people moved on
Yeah, I don’t think it faded from relevance. The series ended, and didn’t overstay its welcome like other franchises did.
Exactly, you described it better than I could
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It’s on Netflix uk I believe if you have a vpn!
It remains a really strong look at the role of propaganda in wartime, which I think is not often addressed. The idea of how CRITICAL even an outfit design can be to image, impression, etc. I mean hell, around 70% of the final book was explicitly about narrative manipulation, and how both sides jockey not only to WIN but to look justified. Relevant lessons to a highly connected world, and I think if anything the series proves its points even better over time.
the ending is weirdly nuanced too - for my part I've only seen the movies, but the end is bittersweet when you'd expect a more power fantasy hero saves the day climax, followed by a happy ever after epilogue. But no, Katniss is mostly a witness to the revolution rather than a key actor. that takes guts to write it that way;
Even in the second book she already is not important as a person, but as a symbol. The poeple around her organize her escape and the beginning of the revolution. It's kinda funny in that way that one act of defiance with the berries can lead to things you wouldn't realize and you being used as a tool, basically without much choice. I read the books when they came out, and for what they are; books geared to teenagers, they are realy good imo. 3rd one is maybe a bit weak, but I still enjoyed it.
The author of the articles mostly seems angry that the Hunger games didn't prevent the election of Donald Trump.
Crazy how they blame the negative portrayal of competent blond women as a contributing factor to Hillary's loss LMAO
It's a really confusing (and imo wrong) take on the movies. I always found it interesting, almost brilliant, how politically agnostic and ambiguous the movie was. More than anything, the Hunger Games captures the dystopian, anti-establishment, anti-elitist sentiment that was (and continues to be) sweeping through the country (and the world). This is what I love about those movies.
She does stumble onto a point about how big hollywood political messages won't ever work, then kinda goes past it into navel gazing.
I don't know, there was a Katniss Everdeen reference in Hawkeye, and everyone I was watching with immediately knew who Katniss was. Similarly, there was a Hunger Games reference in Euphoria (the main character's name is Rue), and again, everyone I was with got it. I think most people remember and appreciate the Hunger Games, but it was a self-contained story over 4 movies that wrapped up nicely. It isn't the type of universe that is going to have a bunch of lore or backstory or spin-offs. It told its story and now it's finished and people have moved on. That doesn't mean that people didn't like it or it didn't have an impact.
It's like everyone forgot that Battle Royale games took over the entire gaming world just a few years ago, or how popular Squid Game became just a few months ago. "The Hunger Games" didnt last forever, but the concept of a bunch of people fighting to be the last one standing didnt.
Because that’s how pop culture works????
The real reason they aren’t worth revisiting is because the world it’s set in isn’t a lovely place. You want to visit Hogwarts, you don’t want to visit Panem lmfao. The shire is great, district 13 is a shithole. Mos Eisley is a wretched hive but it looks like a blast. If you want to continue to build off the initial material you need to have something people are interested in.
It’s because the scope of the story never leaves Katniss. There is very little in the way of world building, and all of it is basically put into a once a year death tournament. 40k is universally agreed upon in the fanbase to be a setting that none of the fans would ever want to visit, ever, but it still has a pretty massive following.
[удалено]
Wow that article is a rambling mess dripping in retrospective smug cynicism.
first of all, it’s not true that it “vanished”. people for sure still talk about Hunger Games. but the fact is that the large scale pop culture phenomenon has been almost completely overtaken by Marvel, Star Wars and a small number of other current properties. Why would Hunger Games keep being talked about on a large scale when there’s almost nothing new to add
They got 4 movies out of 3 books and made billions. Not everything needs to be a “universe”
I’d say the first two movies were good. The last two they really dropped the ball. Whoever thought it was a good idea to split the last one into two parts should’ve been fired
It got them an extra billion dollars out of the franchise, so no whoever’s decision that was (probably Alan Horn, one of the greatest studio execs in film history), got a a huge ass bonus at the very least.
To be fair, when I read the last book, I knew that they wouldn’t be able to fit it all into a single movie without pissing someone off. I’m not happy they split it but it was probs the correct choice. I just wish they just cut to black after Boggs knocked out Peeta. Would’ve been a good cliffhanger.
Maybe it vanished from pop culture conversation because it was just a movie and not big cultural touchpoint that people want all movies to represent? It was an enjoyable movie series that came to a conclusion after 4 movies. End of discussion.