Its sequel, Catching Fire, was released today, and promises to break box-office records. That success has carried over to the box office, where the 2012 film version of the 2008 Hunger Games novel grossed almost $700m worldwide and made Jennifer Lawrence a megastar. Collins thought of her heroine as “a futuristic Theseus”, sent to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, but instead emerging from the Labyrinth alive. Its protagonist was Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers to take her younger sister’s place in the titular Hunger Games, and proves more than a match for her male rivals, who tend to suffer violent deaths at her hand or others’. The story was set in a dystopian North America ruled by a despotic regime, which once a year plucks several teenagers from their impoverished provincial towns, corrals them in a hostile arena with a selection of weapons, and then forces them to fight each other to the death on live television. “I was tired,” Collins recalled later, “and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story.”
She found herself flicking back and forth between a reality TV contest and footage of the war in Iraq, musing on that uncomfortable juxtaposition, and on the desensitising effect of the modern media. The idea for The Hunger Games famously came to Suzanne Collins as she was channel-hopping at home in Connecticut, late one evening in the mid-2000s.
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