The difficulty in translating the book to film is apparent; both Jacobson and Lionsgate say the movie will be made for the book’s 12- to 18-year-old core audience, and as such they want a PG-13 rating. Scholastic Press editorial director David Levithan recalled his hesitation to the premise. “Oooh, that sounds brutal,” he remembered thinking. “I will fully admit that many of us, just based on the summary, thought this was going to be quite a challenge. Not just for us, but for Suzanne.”
“And then the first book came in and we were all blown away.” Collins, who is currently on a 12-city tour to promote the Mockingjay, is still surprised by how popular the series has become. Hundreds of fans attended a midnight release party for the book at New York’s Books of Wonder, and a surprised told the waiting crowd: “I didn’t know there were so many of you until I came out.” Before writing The Hunger Games, she wrote the middle-reader series The Underland Chronicles and worked as a writer in children’s TV programming.
The mother of two from Connecticut says she was flipping between reality shows and news from Iraq three years ago when she came up with The Hunger Games. “On one channel young people were competing for money. On the next channel, young people were fighting for their lives. I was tired, and the ideas merged,” she told USA Today in an interview last September. Coupled with one of the Greek myths about Theseus—similarly about a group of young people sent into a maze to be eaten by a Minotaur—Collins formed the framework for her post-apocalyptic story.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss and 23 other contestants between 12- and 18-years-old are trapped in a massive arena until only one winner is left standing. Throughout the games, she wrestles with the idea of trying to live when it means her competitors must die. And while Katniss succeeds in defying the Capitol in small ways from within the arena, the book does not shy away from the inevitable, nor does it seem to relish depicting deaths by stabbing, insects, or worse. The test for filmmakers will be to walk the same line. “The book’s ethics are clear, and we will find a director who can handle the material in the right way,” Jacobson said. “Suzanne was rightly concerned that it had the potential to be turned into something she hated, glorifying the violence the book is meant to critique.”
“That was really our pitch to Suzanne—You don’t want the movie to become its own version of The Hunger Games,” she continued.
Collins wrote a draft of the screenplay, and Billy Ray, who wrote State of Play and is set to adapt the Fox action drama 24 into a feature, completed a polish. Producers are now searching for a director.
Lionsgate president of production Alli Shearmur collected all of the studio’s top brass to get on the phone when it came time to convince Jacobson they were in sync. “That never happens at a big studio,” Jacobson said. “We were all just really emotionally invested fans.”
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