May the Ratings Be Ever in Your Favor

As Lionsgate ramps up filming the newest “Hunger Games” prequel adaptation, Jazmine Agregado revisits the franchise’s popular indictment of our attraction to violent on-screen spectacle.

By Jazmine AgregadoJune 1, 2025

I WAS 10 when I first read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008), probably too young for the morbid and gory material. In the past few years, Collins published two prequels, which have now been adapted into films (casting for the 2026 adaption is currently being announced—and eagerly shared—on social media). This seems like the perfect time to revisit Ned Vizzini’s LARB essay “A Grosser Power: A Contrarian Look at The Hunger Games,” which argues that the titular arena death-match concept only “works as art” if it forces the audience to examine their own role in the spectacle—their participation and pleasure in brutality.

Collins has long expressed her concern about the public’s relationship to violence: “We are so bombarded with imagery,” she told an interviewer over a decade ago, adding:

I worry that we’re all getting a little desensitized to it. There’s just too much of our lives that we’re putting on television and I think it’s fine if you get desensitized to a sitcom or something like that but when you’re watching real footage, actual tragedy unfolding before you, that’s different.

Vizzini observes the resemblance between the movie theater audiences and the Capitol’s citizens in the books, both captivated by their screens. It doesn’t help that our desensitization only seems to be getting worse—recently, a Florida State University student allegedly filmed themself casually walking past a bleeding schoolmate. Like the citizens in the Hunger Games’ Capitol, we are also actively participating in our media: indeed, Lionsgate is presently hosting an open casting-call sweepstakes for fans to be extras in the upcoming film. Why join the movie’s universe when our own world is already descending further into the Collins dystopia? See: US wealth disparity, Project 2025’s censorship plans for any “anti-American” pro-Palestinian activism, rollbacks on DEI, and most brazenly, the semiserious suggestion that immigrants go through a series of challenges to win American citizenship on a television show. Vizzini’s essay asks us to pay attention, lest we become no better than citizens of the Capitol cheering for our gory bread and circuses.