Quentin Tarantino has some strong opinions about the billion-dollar-grossing Hunger Games franchise.
During a recent interview on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, the two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker accused The Hunger Games of ripping off the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale. Tarantino has regularly placed the movie, which was based on author Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel of the same name, on his favorite movies list.
“I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every fucking thing she owns,” he said. “They just ripped off the fuckin’ book. Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale so the stupid book critics never called her on it. They talked about how it was the most original fuckin’ thing they’d ever read. As soon as the film critics saw the film, they said, ‘What the fuck? This is just Battle Royale except PG!’”
The similarities between the two stories have long been compared since the first Hunger Games installment, led by Jennifer Lawrence, dropped in 2012.
Battle Royale was set in a dystopian future in Japan and followed a group of junior high students who are forced by a totalitarian government to fight to the death in a competition until only one remains. The Hunger Games is also a dystopian series, which centers on a televised competition in which two teens from each of the twelve districts in the fictional nation of Panem are chosen at random to fight to the death.
Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games books, has previously denied that her series was based on Battle Royale. “I had never heard of that book or that author until my book was turned in,” she told The New York Times in 2011. “At that point, it was mentioned to me, and I asked my editor if I should read it. He said, ‘No, I don’t want that world in your head. Just continue with what you’re doing.’”
After Battle Royale was released in 2000, a sequel followed in 2003 called Battle Royale II: Requiem. As for The Hunger Games, five films have been released in the franchise since the first installment in 2012, with a sixth one, Sunrise on the Reaping, set to his theaters in 2026.
