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‘The Hunger Games’ Books, Ranked Including ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’

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‘The Hunger Games’ Books, Ranked  Including ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’

When the first book in Suzanne CollinsHunger Games series became a worldwide phenomenon upon its release in 2008, it could be argued that it was so successful because it filled the gap in the Young Adult fiction market that was left after the final Harry Potter installment was published the year before. While that may be true, such a conclusion fails to account for the series’ merit and storytelling excellence. The quadrilogy boasts relatable characters (both children and adults), tight writing and pacing, and a fresh concept complete with creative and fully realized world-building. After all, over 100 million copies sold worldwide and four feature film adaptations don’t lie.

The story takes place in a futuristic and war-torn North America called Panem, where 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her young sister’s place in the annual “Hunger Games”, a televised fight to the death between 24 kids instituted by the country’s totalitarian Capitol. Each of Panem’s 12 districts must send one boy and one girl as “tribute,” which the Capitol does to remind Panem of the Capitol’s immense power and discourage the subservient districts from rebelling.

The Hunger Games is a unique book series in that there’s not a bad one in the bunch, just varying degrees of success. So whether you’re bingeing them for the first time or embarking on a re-read in preparation for the upcoming fifth prequel movie, here are all four books in the series, ranked.

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RELATED: 9 ‘Hunger Games’ Prequels We Actually Want to See

4. Mockingjay

Mockingjay picks up after Catching Fire‘s explosive (and cliffhanger) conclusion with Katniss extracted from the arena and District 12 obliterated. Indirectly addressing Katniss’s PTSD from both rounds of the Games, in addition to depression, flashbacks, and nightmares, Mockingjay is the darkest and most “adult” book in the series by far. The tone is incredibly grim (especially given some of the book’s big deaths) which makes it a heavy read, but Collins succeeds in making it ring true to the series’ characters as Katniss, Peeta, and Gale incite a rebellion against the Capitol.

Despite being the only book in the series not to feature the annual Hunger Games, Mockingjay still manages to amp up the action. In fact, it’s one of the book’s high points. The rebellion’s plans, tactics, and combat as they fight their way through the battle zone-like streets of the Capitol is incredibly thrilling and reads like an adrenaline-fueled war movie. It’s also a testament to the story that Collins manages to keep the series’ mythology fresh by introducing the “destroyed” District 13 and the mysteries surrounding it.

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Mockingjay is a grim story but ends up being a satisfying ending for the Games themselves, as well as Katniss and Peeta’s arcs.

3. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Released 10 years after Mockingjay, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is way better than it has any right to be, especially considering it doesn’t continue the story of Katniss and Peeta from the original trilogy. Instead, Collins takes a bold gamble by taking a step backward in time from the events of the first book (64 years to be precise) and featuring a teenaged Coriolanus Snow as the main character. It’s a risky move, trying to make readers care about and become sympathetic towards the future tyrannical ruler of Panem, but it more than pays off. Snow’s character (along with his grandmother and cousin, Tigris) is fully developed and Collins deftly shows that Snow wasn’t merely born evil; rather, a complex set of life circumstances, misfortunes, and betrayals that led to his crossing to the dark side and future murderous tendencies.

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It’s also a welcome surprise that Collins manages to create another fully-realized female character in that of District 12 tribute, Lucy Gray Baird. Her rebellious nature and smarts in putting on a “show” for the Capitol are reminiscent of Katniss, and it’s incredibly enlightening and fascinating that these similarities. Along with Snow’s anger at allowing himself to be vulnerable and care about Lucy as he acts as her Games mentor, it just might be the underlying reason for Snow’s later hatred of Katniss.

The Hunger Games may be a YA series but it has never shied away from violence or the dark side of humanity. Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t either. The brutality of the initial Games is horrifying, and Snow’s status as a main character allows readers a front-row seat to witness the Capitol being just as malevolent as Katniss suspected, complete with hangings for treason, genetically-modified animals, and the villainous Dr. Gaul.

Ballad lags at times (at 517 pages, it’s the series’ longest installment) but its complicated characters, along with the exploration of Panem’s “Dark Days” and how the Games came to fruition, make it a largely successful effort and a hugely compelling read.

2. The Hunger Games

The book that started the worldwide phenomenon is also one of the best. Readers and writers of sci-fi and fantasy fiction might recognize how challenging it is to create a world that feels both foreign and believable with enough rich details that also don’t bog down the story with info-dumps of exposition. Collins more than succeeds in this department. Her deft skill for world-building is on full display through her introduction of Panem, its 12 distinct districts, the tyrannical Capitol, and the nauseating pageantry of the Hunger Games themselves, showing firsthand that a lot can be done with a little. The dystopian world of the story bears enough resemblance to our present in terms of reality television and mistrust in authority figures to make it both relatable and a cautionary tale of the dangers of war, class systems, and an all-powerful government.

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The decision to let main character, Katniss Everdeen, to tell her own story via first-person narrative is a smart one, allowing the reader to become more deeply invested in her thoughts, experiences, and story. Katniss is imbued with enough distinctive characteristics, growth, and depth to make her feel like a real person with wants, desires, and flaws. She’s a relatable entry point into the series, and her relationship with fellow District 12 resident (and Hunger Games competitor) Peeta Mellark feels genuine as it spans complex feelings like love and hate, disappointment and appreciation, and resentment and contentment, instead of the trite and cliched romances often seen in lesser YA series.

The Hunger Games is fast-paced, tightly plotted, and its many cliffhanger chapter endings make it a successful endeavor and a compulsively bingeable read.


1. Catching Fire

Catching Fire takes what The Hunger Games excelled at doing and amps it up half a dozen notches. The characters that we know and love are back and further developed as they’re plunged into deeper interpersonal and political conflicts than before. This is especially true for Katniss and Peeta who find themselves forced back into the arena for the 75th Hunger Games, a Games where the tributes are comprised of past victors. A sequel that repeats a playout of the Games could easily have been a lazy retread of the first book, but instead, it raises the stakes since it’s no longer about Katniss and Peeta merely surviving the arena. Now, the lives of their friends, family, and all the residents of District 12 depend on the pair’s willingness to “play nice” and put on a good show for Snow and the Capitol.

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The new Games arena is visually and conceptually unique, complete with interesting and relatable new characters in Finnick, Johanna, and Mags, and fresh action that assists in making Catching Fire the series’ fastest-paced installment. It’s also advantageous that a large portion of the book takes place before we even get to the Games, which gives readers time to catch up with Katniss and Peeta as they grapple with the events of the previous book and ponder their uncertain futures. The restraint that Collins shows by not rushing into the Games’ action is admirable and allows the story to breathe and the characters to deepen. This, combined with the excitement surrounding the Districts’ Katniss-inspired rebellion and the book’s massive cliffhanger ending — with Katniss extracted from the Games arena and District 12 completely destroyed — tantalizingly sets the stage for the series’ final Katniss-centric installment.


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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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