How The Hunger Games Popularized Dystopian Media
The Hunger Games book series has been around since 2008, with Catching Fire coming out shortly after The Hunger Games in 2009, and then Mockingjay being released in 2010. It wasn’t until 10 years later in 2020 that Suzanne Collins would release The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel to The Hunger Games dating all the way back to the tenth games.
After The Hunger Games book was released, there seemed to be an outpouring of dystopian books that followed. There was The Maze Runner book that came out in 2009, Divergent in 2011, Reboot in 2013, and many more. The Hunger Games wasn’t the first dystopian novel and it won’t be the last, but it’s definitely made its mark in an impactful way.
Some of the most iconic dystopian novels of all time came before The Hunger Games, though. The list includes books you’ve probably read in school, including Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Giver (1993), 1984 (1949), Ender’s Game (1985), and A Clockwork Orange (1962).
I think a big reason that The Hunger Games is such a staple when we think of dystopian media is because it kicked off the dystopian book-to-movie adaptation era at the time. An article from Collider says it best, “When the first Hunger Games movie came out in 2012, the world of cinema had just recently discovered the power of young adult literature as a source of inspiration. The Harry Potter saga had hit the screens for the first time a little more than a decade prior in 2001, kickstarting a wave of fantasy movies based on books aimed at tweens and teens, from The Chronicles of Narnia to the ill-fated His Dark Materials film franchise. A few years later in 2008, Twilight gave rise to the teen paranormal romance craze.” It was time for modern dystopian media to branch out more into movies.
Yes, dystopian books have been adapted into movies, one of the biggest examples of this being A Clockwork Orange (1971) based on the novel from 1962. However, The Hunger Games has now modernized dystopian media. At the time when A Clockwork Orange and 1984 were written, the idea of technology taking over our lives and being as advanced as it was seemed like a faraway mystery, and now today it seems like it’s advancing too fast for us to even comprehend. The Hunger Games, despite being fictional, feels like it could almost become reality one day if we keep becoming more divided in class and war and not being able to keep up with modern-day technology.
I think at its core, what makes a good dystopian novel is the world-building. You have to make the reader/viewer feel the eeriness and hopelessness of that world, and I think The Hunger Games does a fantastic job at this. There’s a very real “bleakness ingrained in its universe and its materialist system of oppression.” Being divided by class is not something that’s a new concept to anyone in the real world. The way the factions are split up in Divergent is based on personality, while The Hunger Games splits Panem up into districts with one driving economic factor for each of them. The people in the Capitol are the richest of them all, just like the people in The White House today. They push The Hunger Games so that they can retain their privilege, power, and wealth. It’s similar to the concept today of how the rich seem to keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. It seems to be an impossible uphill battle, and in the world of The Hunger Games, they make sure that it’s not only an uphill battle for the districts, but almost impossible to rebel as well.
Now I’m not saying we’ll ever have The Hunger Games, or be split up into factions, or have to run in a maze to find a cure for a deathly virus. However, a lot of elements of these dystopian novels are rooted in reality, and I think the classist and oppressive aspects of The Hunger Games hit a little closer to home than most.
Now that I’ve kind of discussed how The Hunger Games modernized dystopian media, I want to talk about its sales in general. The Hunger Games has sold over 100 million copies as of October 2022 and has probably only gone up in sales since the prequel came out. Divergent on the other hand, although popular amongst young adults and lovers of The Hunger Games/dystopian media, sold about 35 million copies worldwide. Taking this back to older dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984, that’s sold about 30 million copies worldwide as of July 2023. The Hunger Games will not be everybody’s cup of tea I’m sure, but the numbers don’t lie with how successful the franchise has become. Take The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes as another example; The Hunger Games hasn’t come out with a movie since 2015 and yet TBOSAS surpassed $100 million in the box office and $200 million worldwide. Dystopian media, thanks to The Hunger Games series, is undeniably still very much alive.
