Prepare for a massive understatement, but Quentin Tarantino is a guy with some fairly, let’s say, intense film opinions. And not ones that tend to soften over time, as far as we can tell, as the Kill Bill creator has once again stepped up to a microphone to vent some spleen about the Hunger Games franchise of books and films, and how it “ripped off” one of his favorite movies, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale.
“I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every fucking thing she owns,” Tarantino said in a recent conversation on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, reiterating statements he’s made in the past about similarities between Collins’ Panem and the authoritarian Japan of Koushun Takami’s original novel, vis a vis their tendency to have teenagers murder each other publicly as a sort of social panacea. “They just ripped off the fucking book! Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her out on it. They talked about how it was the most original thing they’d ever fucking read. As soon as the film critics saw the film they said, ‘What the fuck! This is just Battle Royale except PG!’”
Tarantino delivered his diatribe as part of a much longer conversation in which he rolled out the first half of his top 20 films of the 21st century, a typically eclectic set of movies. It’s the rare list where Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (“I don’t think Scorsese has made a film this exciting [this century]”) sits alongside (and, in fact, pretty far behind), to pick just one example, Jackass: The Movie. (“I don’t remember laughing beginning to the end like this since Richard Pryor…”) Battle Royale landed at number 11 on the list, with Tarantino heaping praise on a film that had him saying, on first seeing it in 2000, “I had no idea what the fuck I was about to see.”
Tarantino has touched on the similarities between Battle Royale and Hunger Games before, making similar comments back in 2022. (That was on an episode of Kimmel, so there was less “What the fuck!” energy, although the sentiment was still there.) For what it’s worth, author Collins has denied any familiarity with Battle Royale when she began writing The Hunger Games, first published back in 2008.
[via Variety]
