©Courtesy of Weinstein Company
Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has vehemently expressed his displeasure with The Hunger Games franchise, calling the lucrative series a rip-off of the Japanese cult classic, Battle Royale.
This is not the first time The Hunger Games has been accused of taking inappropriate liberties with Battle Royale. The novel on which The Hunger Games is based was written by Suzanne Collins while the Battle Royale film is an adaptation of a novel by Japanese author Koushun Takami.
Tarantino, the 62-year-old two-time Oscar winner lashed out during his appearance on The Bret Easton Ellis podcast this week.
“I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every fucking thing she owns,” thundered Tarantino. “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.”
Tarantino continued his diatribe by declaring, “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!’”
Takami’s novel follows a group of disaffected teenagers who have been forced by a totalitarian regime in Japan to fight until just one survives. Its plot is mirrored in Collins’s novel, which is set in the fictional nation of Panem, in North America.
Collins told an interviewer for The New York Times in 2011 that she’d never heard of Battle Royale until after she submitted her manuscript to her publisher, only to be directed to “just continue with what you’re doing.”
The Battle Royale movie was released in 2000, followed by a 2003 sequel entitled Battle Royale II: Requiem. Five films have since been released in The Hunger Games franchise, which debuted in 2012. A sixth one, Sunrise on the Reaping, is set to be released on November 20, 2026. The original four-part Hunger Games series grossed more than $3.3 billion worldwide.