I’ve been seeing at least a handful of my mutuals reblogging stuff from the latest hunger games property and reblogging old gif sets from when the first movie had come out and like, after going back and trying to watch the first movie after rereading the trilogy last year, I HAD to turn it off somewhere around the train-ride-to-the-Capitol scene bc between the careless, sloppy camera work and the refusal to shell out the budget for two younger actors and actresses to play our main characters as being eleven years old when they’re already being played by the comically adult looking Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutchinson like, in any scene at the reaping just looking at the disparity between the actual children they’ve cast to be extras and then there’s Jlaw standing around looking like she’s in her mid twenties…

Basically I saw the first hunger games movie as a blatant cash grab, a sloppily made blatant cash grab at that, the shitty camera work drives the “let’s cash in on this new hot property” message home clear enough. And we all know how completely and utterly the media frenzy around the franchise amplified all the worst most non important bits (think of all the Capitol Couture nail polish & beauty lines and the focus on the love triangle), like I know they got rid of shaky cam in the sequels but I haven’t bothered to rewatch them because, like, if I had to turn off the first movie bc it was Making Me Cringe Dutch, I am not feeling like, overwhelmingly enthusiastic about checking out to see if the other films are just as bad (as I remember them being cough).

So that brings us to the prequel I haven’t read and the prequel movie I haven’t seen. I hope I’m not sounding like a snob when I say this, but surely the idea of an author returning to a franchise they’ve made a fortune off of to create some ~hidden backstory~ that makes the events of the original trilogy just ~soooo much deeper you guise~ is… yknow… backfill to a foregone conclusion. Right? Idk lol