Quentin Tarantino Slams ‘Hunger Games’ for Ripping Off ‘Battle Royale’

Quentin Tarantino has some strong opinions about the billion-dollar-grossing Hunger Games franchise.

via: EW

The Inglourious Basterds filmmaker accused the book's author, Suzanne Collins, of copying the premise of Battle Royale — a similar story about a dystopian competition between murderous teens, which was first published as a novel by Koushun Takami in 1999 and subsequently adapted into a film by Kinji Fukasaku in 2000.

"Battle Royale is based on a novel. I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue Suzanne Collins for every f---ing thing she owns," Tarantino said in a recent episode of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. "They just ripped off the f---ing book!"

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Collins for comment.

In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Collins said she had no awareness of Battle Royale until she was completely finished writing The Hunger Games.

"I had never heard of that book or that author until my book was turned in," she said at the time. "At that point, it was mentioned to me, and I asked my editor if I should read it. He said: 'No, I don’t want that world in your head. Just continue with what you’re doing.'"

Tarantino claimed that literary critics failed to acknowledge the multitude of similarities between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games when Collins' novel first hit shelves in 2008.

"Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her on it," he said. "They talked about how it was the most original thing they’d ever f---ing read."

Tarantino said that the conversation changed once The Hunger Games became a movie in 2012.

"As soon as the film critics saw Hunger Games, [they said,] ‘What the f---! This is just Battle Royale except PG!'" he recalled (though The Hunger Games actually received a PG-13 rating, not PG).

Indeed, EW's Chris Nashawaty compared the two films on THG's opening weekend and criticized the Gary Ross–directed movie for its sanitized violence.

"In the meantime, allow me to recommend another film with a strikingly similar story that was made with such giddy, gory gusto that there’s no way in hell it would ever earn a PG-13," the critic wrote at the time.

Elsewhere on the podcast, Tarantino also remembered that the relationship between the two films spawned an online joke paraphrasing an iconic conversation from his movie Pulp Fiction.

"The weekend that Hunger Games opened, there was a meme of Sam Jackson and John Travolta driving down the street," he explained. "[It said,] 'Hey, you know what they call The Hunger Games in France? Battle Royale with cheese."

Battle Royale generated considerable controversy upon its initial release in Japan, where it was condemned by conservative politicians and received the rare R15+ rating due to its graphic depiction of violence between teens. The movie quickly garnered a cult following in the United States, where it was not officially released for over a decade but earned a handful of vocal fans from various film festival screenings. The film ultimately came out in the U.S. via a Blu-ray release on March 20, 2012 — just three days before The Hunger Games hit theaters.