The Hunger Games is one of the most commercially savvy literary franchises in history. Novelist Suzanne Collins hijacked the bonkers concept of the Japanese novel and film Battle Royale, in which a group of schoolchildren are rounded up and set at each other’s throats in a televised reality game, and yoked it to the story of a strong-willed, hardscrabble heroine whose lifelong experience struggling against poverty gives her an edge against more privileged opponents.

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