When it comes to adapting a book to a movie, people are bound to be upset. There are always the fans who except their favorite scenes to be portrayed a certain way and are saddened when it’s not the way their mind conjured it up to be.
Hey, that’s just what happens.
Some book to film adaptations are a hit and others are a miss and according to several enraged fans, The Hunger Games was a miss, but not for the reason you might believe.
On March 23, the film was released worldwide and many angry fans immediately went to twitter to express their disappointment about one specific aspect: race.
“I was pumped about the Hunger Games. Until I learned a black girl was playing Rue.”
“Why does rue have to be black, not gonna lie kind ruined the movie.”
“Totally not expecting Thresh to be some big black guy.”
“Why did the producer make all the good characters black.”
Director Gary Ross and the casting team were definitely not expecting the concept of race to be an issue when it came to the film and quite frankly, neither was I.
Frankly, the responses by the fans received through both Twitter and Tumblr can be said to prove one solid fact: the readers of the book were lacked in reading comprehension.
Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games doesn’t go into great depth when it came to describing Rue (Amandla Sternberg), Thresh (Dayo Okeniyi) and Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), the African-American characters fans have had a problem with, but simple reading can reveal that the characters are indeed black.
Rue was described as “a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes…” and Thresh was described as having the same brown skin and golden brown eyes as Rue.
When it comes to Cinna, however, his race wasn’t clearly identified, but he was said to have cropped brown hair, which Lenny Kravitz definitely has in the movie.
Although the young, adult novel whose distributing rights were acquired by Lions Gate Entertainment, has stirred up its share of drama due to its upset fans, it’s still going strong.
After 38 days, has a gross income of $372,019,021 and shows no signs of slowing down yet.
With the sequel, Catching Fire, set to be released November 23, 2013, Collins and Lions Gate will see what outcome this recent outburst will bring, but most likely, the book’s enormous fan base won’t be deterred and the sequel will bring in another record setting dollar amount.
