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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins began writing for children’s TV shows in the early 1990s. After meeting with children’s author James Proimos, she figured that writing children’s novels wouldn’t be that difficult, so she banged out a few of them of her own. Her first books were inspired by Alice In Wonderland. Then she wrote The Hunger Games, a dystopian science fiction story with a strong female protagonist, set in a United States that looks very similar to our own. The Hunger Games Trilogy became hugely successful. The first two Hunger Games books were bestsellers. It didn’t take long for Collins to start talking with Hollywood. Already a seasoned scriptwriter, she has adapted the book into the script for a big-budget motion picture that has, in its first week of release, already shown a staggering profit over its $78 million production budget. But how does the hugely successful film compare with the novel it was based on?

The Book

As the book opens, we are introduced to the protagonist and her family. Her mother and her sister are there. As it turns out, she’s a hunter. She goes out to poach game to help feed her family. She lives in a country called Panem, which evidently is the US after some kind of massive apocalyptic event. A number of districts answer to a totalitarian authority. It’s not a big, happy fascist dictatorship, though. Evidently one of the original 13 districts rose up against the government and was subsequently squelched. Now the remaining districts are reminded of the power of the rule of the Panem government by way of annual televised games involving a group of children fighting each other to death.

Okay. Fine. Stop it right there. This is all interesting and everything, but it IS kind of derivative. (There’s a lot of precedence here, most recently the 1999 novel Battle Royale, but also the old video game SMASH TV, the older film The Running Man…Beyond Thunderdome, Death Race 2000 and a seemingly endless parade of dystopian death-duel sci-fi stories that stretch back arguably to the dawn of the sci-fi genre.) But where did the idea come from this time? As legend has it, Suzanne Collins was flipping through channels when she found herself spotting the rather dramatic juxtaposition between a reality show and the invasion of Iraq. This gave her the idea for The Hunger Games. Okay, fine, but that doesn’t make the idea terribly original. This sort of thing has been done before - which is perfectly fine so long as Collins can do something with it that is fresh and new. Certainly if that were the case, it would go a long way towards explaining the novel’s commercial success.

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