Quentin Tarantino Calls The Hunger Games a Battle Royale Rip-Off — Fans Fire Back
A filmmaker set social media ablaze this week, igniting a fierce debate and dividing audiences across platforms.
Quentin Tarantino is still keeping everyone guessing about what his next (and supposedly final) movie will be. In the meantime, he lit a match on a different conversation: he says The Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale.
What he said, and where he said it
On a recent episode of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Tarantino compared Suzanne Collins' blockbuster series to Koushun Takami's blood-soaked cult classic and did not tiptoe around it.
"I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn't sue Suzanne Collins for every fucking thing she owns."
He went on to argue that book critics called Collins' story wildly original because they were unlikely to seek out a Japanese film called Battle Royale. He said once film critics actually saw Battle Royale, they basically clocked The Hunger Games as the same thing but sanded down for a PG crowd.
The internet had thoughts (a lot of them)
Fans pushed back fast. The overall vibe: yes, the two share a premise — teenagers forced into a state-sanctioned kill-or-be-killed spectacle — but beyond that, readers say they diverge in meaningful ways. People pointed to differences in how the games work, how the characters relate to each other, and how each world is built, arguing those details make them fundamentally different stories.
Another thread: the whole 'kids in deadly contests under authoritarian rule' idea did not start with Takami. Users reminded everyone that Takami himself has acknowledged influences from Stephen King's The Long Walk and The Running Man, and others traced the lineage further back to Shirley Jackson's 1948 short story The Lottery.
Some also zeroed in on Tarantino's wording. In the podcast, he called Takami "the Japanese writer" instead of naming him, which a lot of commenters took as a sign he might not know the material as well as he thinks. Several people framed it like this: if you believe one outright stole from the other, you probably have not read both books.
And, predictably, the conversation swung back at Tarantino himself. Plenty of replies noted that borrowing, remixing, and riffing on older work is baked into pop culture — from Star Wars on down — and, yes, into Tarantino's movies too. A common refrain: if anyone knows about stitching together influences from other films, it is him.
The bigger picture
Strip it down and you get a messy truth: both stories absolutely play in the same sandbox, with televised youth-on-youth violence enforced by a brutal government. But they use that setup for different ends, with different rules, characters, and tones. And that sandbox existed long before either book hit shelves.
Meanwhile, about that final Tarantino movie...
Still a mystery. No title, no official rollout. Just this fresh controversy to keep the discourse warm.
If you are looking ahead, we have you covered: check out our guide to the best upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond — including The Hunger Games' new prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping.