Kids Battle to the Death in The Hunger Games

Franchise-ready young adult book series are all the rage nowadays, with your “Twilight” and your “Harry Potters” and a sea of others. The latest kid-friendly series to get the big-screen treatment (and if all goes well, a movie franchise) is “The Hunger Games”, a novel by author Suzanne Collins set in a dystopian future where kids are forced to battle to the death. Sounds like fun times to me!

THR has more on the novels:

The Scholastic novel, which is the first in a planned trilogy, imagines a dystopian future (is there any other kind?) where North America has been divided into 12 oppressed districts, each of which is forced to send tribute in the form of a boy and a girl to compete in a televised battle to the death once a year. Released last year, the book had gained modest popularity until Stephen King and “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer publicly gave it kudos, propelling it onto best-seller lists.

Lionsgate apparently had to go a couple of rounds themselves to land worldwide rights to the property, but land it they have. Collins will be adapting the novel herself for the movie version.

“The Hunger Games” is being described as a cross between the Japanese “Battle Royale” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger (and Stephen King) story “The Running Man”. Okay, it was barely a Stephen King story, seeing as how the movie diverged completely from his story, but he got paid for it, so it’s a King story. In any case, “Battle Royale” was an incredibly violent movie, and definitely not for “young readers”, so it’s an odd comparison.

The second novel in the series, titled “Catching Fire”, is due out later this year.