Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino has said The Hunger Games “ripped off” Battle Royale, and expressed surprise that the Japanese writer of the cult classic original didn’t sue The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins.
Speaking on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, the Oscar-winning director of the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Django Unchained, said that book critics failed to call out The Hunger Games, whereas film critics did.
Battle Royale, released in 2000, was directed by Kinji Fukasaku from a screenplay by Kenta Fukasaku. It was based on the 1999 book of the same name, by Koushun Takami, and stars Beat Takeshi as a school teacher who ends up putting his unruly students through a fight to the death.
The Hunger Games is a series of novels written by American author Suzanne Collins that kicked off in 2008. It follows teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, who similarly battles with other children in a fight to the death. The Hunger Games movie, starring Jennifer Lawrence, came out in 2012 and was a global hit.
Speaking on the podcast, Tarantino hit out at The Hunger Games novels. “I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every f***ing thing she owns,” Tarantino said. “They just ripped off the f***ing book! Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her out on it. They talked about how it was the most original thing they’d ever fucking read. As soon as the film critics saw the film they said, ‘What the f**k! This is just Battle Royale except PG!'”
Tarantino’s criticism of The Hunger Games is a long-standing one, and his comments here have sparked a debate among fans about where inspiration for creative works like novels truly comes from. Collins has talked about the creation of The Hunger Games in interviews before. In a 2008 interview with School Library Journal, Collins said The Hunger Games was based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which she read when she was eight years old.
“I was a huge fan of Greek and Roman mythology,” she said, when asked how she came up with the idea. “As punishment for displeasing Crete, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete, where they were thrown into the labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur, which is a monster that’s half man and half bull. Even when I was a little kid, the story took my breath away, because it was so cruel, and Crete was so ruthless.
“The message is, mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you—we’ll kill your children. And the parents sat by apparently powerless to stop it. The cycle doesn’t end until Theseus volunteers to go, and he kills the Minotaur. In her own way, Katniss [the heroine of The Hunger Games] is a futuristic Theseus. But I didn’t want to do a labyrinth story. So I decided to write basically an updated version of the Roman gladiator games.”
Collins went on to say she was inspired to write The Hunger Games while channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage.
“On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war,” she said. “I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way. That’s the moment when Katniss’s story came to me.”
Of course, Battle Royale also inspired a new genre of video game, which ended up spawning the likes of PUBG, Fortnite, and Warzone. Tarantino's comments are especially ironic as he is now partnering with Fortnite itself.
If you're hunting for the best offers this week, we're actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.
Photo by Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/quentin-tarantino-cant-understand-why-the-writer-of-battle-royale-didnt-sue-the-hunger-games-author-suzanne-collins-for-every-fing-thing-she-owns