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There are no wizards or vampires in The Hunger Games, but the phenomenon surrounding the series is poised to reach mass hysteria.
Set in a future dystopian North America, Suzanne Collins’ dark book trilogy is being hailed by critics as the next big franchise since Harry Potter or Twilight, fuelled by the hype surrounding the March 23 release of the first film adaption.
The series finds its overwhelming success in the post-Occupy climate of discontent, with young characters on a journey of self-empowerment as they’re forced to battle to the death in a televised game under an oppressive regime. Sixteen-year-old protagonist Katniss Everdeen, from impoverished District 12, is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect her family. In doing so, she’s characterized as both brave and painfully human: exposing the reluctant rebel in all of us.
It’s on the back of Katniss’s heroism that the first book went from a print run of 200,000 (originally bumped up from 50,000) in 2008, to more than 23.5 million printed copies of the trilogy in the U.S. The sequels Catching Fire and Mockingjay were released in 2009 and 2010 with great success.
In Canada, where a 5,000-copy print run is considered a bestseller, there are two million copies in print, according to Scholastic Canada.
For a series that’s been at the top of The New York Times children’s series bestsellers list for 80 weeks in a row, the upcoming movie, directed by Gary Ross, is riding a wave of success, with first-day ticket presales blowing past previous record holder The Twilight Saga: Eclipse on U.S. movie-ticket site Fandango.com.
If that success is any indicator, it bodes well for The Hunger Games films to keep pace with the five-part Twilight series that has seen openings upwards of $140 million (U.S.) and has collectively grossed more than $1 billion already.
And like blockbusters before it, when the movie deal was announced fans were snapping up merchandise — dolls, T-shirts, books and video games — while demanding to know when the next contest for movie tickets would be.“Our biggest hurdle is trying to break away from it being compared to Twilight.... It’s so much bigger than that,” said Joanna Miles, vice-president of marketing for Alliance Films, the Canadian partner for the movie release.
As articulated by the series’ biggest fans that have read and reread the trilogy, the books are more mature than recently released teen literature, featuring a better command of language and characters who are role models for any age.“I really enjoyed the complexity of the characters,” said 19-year-old Toronto resident Lauren Morrison, a student at the University of Guelph.
Since she discovered the series in December, she’s read through it twice and flips back to her favourite parts, which she’s been posting to Facebook in a countdown to the movie release.
She’s also a fan of Twilight and Harry Potter, but Morrison said The Hunger Games tops her list, with its social commentary on violence, propaganda and freedom of speech.
“One of the things that’s struck me the most, talking to both teen and adult readers, is that the meaning of the books isn’t lost on them,” said Collins’ editor David Levithan, publisher and editorial director at Scholastic Press. “It’s a fantastic vehicle to open up conversations about where we’re going as a society and a culture.”And unlike Twilight, Collins’ series uses a love triangle between main characters Katniss, Peeta and Gale not as a story arch, but as a way to make the books’ central themes all the more vivid.
The novels logically draw comparisons to Lord of the Flies and Battle Royale thanks to the forced kid-on-kid combat violence. But that’s where the comparisons end.
Collins told Scholastic her inspiration for the series came after flipping through TV channels, seeing flashes of reality shows and footage from the war in Iraq that fused together in a “very unsettling way.”“You’re not dealing with vampires, you’re not dealing with wizards,” Morrison said. “There’s a very raw aspect to it. It’s a very raw book.”
While the books were released on teen fiction shelves, they appeal to adults, too.
“I was a reluctant reader and I couldn’t wait to get to the end of the series,” said Bahram Olfati, vice-president of trade books for Indigo Books & Music. “I’ve handed it out to my own friends.”
Olfati attributes that success to Collins’ “masterful writing.”
“There’s always a handful of books, every month — they come across our desk with a very small publishing run and really no hype behind it — and all of a sudden you feel the ripple across the readers,” he said.
Cheryl Cowdy, an assistant professor in York University’s Children’s Studies Program, agrees the writing is pivotal to the trilogy’s success.
“There’s an awful lot of mediocre writing for young people that wants to be teaching them a lesson,” Cowdy said. “It answers that hunger that young people can have, to have books that are not talking down to them.”
It’s through that writing that readers find respect for Katniss, a new breed of female heroine, and one who is extremely relatable in her fears and misgivings.
“Katniss is a symbol of freedom, trapped under the thumb of the Capitol,” Olfati said. “She stands up for it, so it’s easy to cheer for her because she is a symbol of that.”
And it’s not just Katniss.
“Everyone could see themselves or could relate in some ways to one of these characters,” said Vancouver-born actor Alexander Ludwig, who plays the cutthroat Cato in the upcoming movie.
“There are no superpowers, there’s nothing like that. It’s just regular kids kind of thrown into this madness and this fight for survival.”
Ludwig himself was launched into madness when he was signed onto The Hunger Games, having previously appeared in smaller projects such as Race to Witch Mountain and The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.
“When I got to Vancouver and the Vancouver airport after Thanksgiving, and there (were) fans and people taking pictures there and paparazzi there, that’s kind of when it really hit me,” he said.With a fan base that grew up on Facebook, it’s hard to say whether the books have heightened the younger generation’s worldliness or if a heightened political awareness is what created such devotion in the first place. But together they’re beginning to represent a larger generational movement that’s learning they’re a long way from Hogwarts, one that tweets and posts about the injustices they see around them.
And unlike series before it, the elements that make it so popular also contribute to its shelf life, said Melissa Bourdon-King, general manager of Mabel’s Fables Bookstore in Toronto.
“We’ve been selling The Hunger Games consistently for four years,” Bourdon-King said. “The Hunger Games feels like a world that could very well happen tomorrow.”
Rosemary Stimola, Collins’ literary agent, says there’s no magic formula when it comes to writing a bestseller for teens.Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games have each touched us in different way: the boy who finds out he’s a wizard; the girl who stubbornly falls for the vampire; and Katniss, the girl on fire.
“The reluctant hero who literally changes the world,” Stimola wrote in an email. “What better hero for our times, our young readers, for all of us.”MORE HUNGER GAMES STORIES
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