Dystopia Now: Why ‘The Hunger Games’ Still Speaks Volumes About Teens, War, Propaganda, and More

The first quarter of the twenty-first century seems to have been an especially confusing time to be a teenager, which is quite the achievement. But look at the century’s most successful teen franchise, the Hunger Games novels and movies, a relentlessly grim series that expanded this spring to add a second prequel novel to Suzanne Collins’ original set of three books. That trilogy was turned into four movies between 2012 and 2015, followed in 2023 by an adaptation of the first prequel. All in all, that’s a lot of dead kids on screen. Twentieth-century teens enjoyed bloody entertainments like the Scream and Friday the 13th movies, but the body counts in those franchises are to Hunger Games slaughter as the crimes of Watergate are to any recent afternoon in the current White House.

You can measure Collins’ achievement in the obvious ways. The new sequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, moved 1.2 million copies in the US on its first week off the block in March. All told, the books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The five movie adaptations are rated the 16th highest-grossing film franchise in North America by Box Office Mojo (though I would argue with the way website has sliced and diced various franchises and would rank The Hunger Games #12). A Sunrise on the Reaping movie is already scheduled to arrive in theaters for Thanksgiving 2026.

A less obvious way to measure the Hunger Games’ success is by how open to interpretation the books and films have proven—almost as elastic as the Greek myths Collins drew on. (Reread Theseus and the Minotaur.) “I don’t write about adolescents. I write about war for adolescents,” Collins has said. I think this is both true and not. Yes, the series is about war, as well as politics, propaganda, media manipulation, and power in most of its manifestations. But when you create a futuristic dystopia organized around a televised blood sport in which teenage gladiators are forced to fight to the death, you have either wittingly or unwittingly created a pretty nifty metaphor for high school—the social battlefields of The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls made literal.

There is intergenerational warfare, too. Coriolanus Snow, the evil president of Panem, the stories’ dystopia, justifies the Games as “a pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” meant to reinforce the bond between the ruling Capitol and its outlying, formerly rebellious districts. “This is how we remember our past,” he says. “This is how we safeguard our future.” The logic doesn’t track, even in context, but adolescent readers and moviegoers likely hear a variant of the old parental boilerplate: Someday you’ll thank me for this.

As for grander themes, perusing the extensive academic literature devoted to the series, I have learned that The Hunger Games is also a parable about the dangers of big government and thus an inspiration to young Republican activists, but that it is also a parable about the dangers of income inequality, pitched to the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Or the tale might be an allegory of the American Revolution . . . or of Christian love and sacrifice . . . or of the twenty-first century’s cutthroat college admissions derbies and ruthless job markets. It might be free-market propaganda. It might be a veiled criticism of the Global War on Terror (entering its second decade when the first Hunger Games film hit theaters in 2012). The heroine Katniss Everdeen is an American frontier archetype, descended from James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo and the loners played in movie westerns by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood—unless, what with her lethal prowess and indifference to male suitors, she gives a proud feminist middle finger to “heteronormative expectations.”

The Hunger Games could be about some or many or all these things at once: pop art that lands big isn’t always easy to parse—or necessarily coherent at all. People can see what they want to see in The Hunger Games, even the commentator on the Stormfront, a neo-Nazi website, who hailed Katniss as a “Hitler figure, a veteran, a reluctant hero, an idealist.”

On second thought, him we’ll ignore.

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But most people don’t go to the movies to absorb allegories and parables. I am partial to the conflicted enthusiasm of The National Review’s John Podhoretz regarding the first Hunger Games picture: “The thing is gripping as hell . . . I don’t know that these books or the movie that springs from them are morally defensible, really—they glory in the violence that they view with horror— but my oh my they do get under your skin and into your head.”

Simply put, the movies are well-made, well-acted entertainments, suspenseful, and satisfying. But “simply put” is not my job here. So what does it say about recent times that they produced this bizarre, convoluted, and brutal saga that has resonated so profoundly and lucratively with young audiences—and older ones, too—but in another era might have made a few ripples as a provocation when dropped into the pond but otherwise sunk quickly to cult exploitation movie status? (See: Death Race 2000.)

Simply put: what’s wrong with us?

There are some obvious e-ticket answers anyone could recite without too much thought: 9/11, America’s blundering Global War on Terror, the Great Recession, the degradations of online culture, climate change, the rise of right-wing populism and nationalism around the globe, and Trumpism here at home, the stain we can’t get out. The MAGA phenomenon postdates The Hunger Games, but both were incubating during the same period (and share cosmopolitan elites as their chief villains).

Collins has said the initial inspiration struck one night in the mid-2000s when she was channel surfing back and forth between a reality show and the news, which might also be how certain voters got the idea that the star of The Apprentice would make a fine president. Collins’s epiphany was even more fanciful. “I was very tired,” she told one interviewer, “and I was flipping through images on reality TV where these young people were competing for millions of dollars or whatever, then I was seeing footage from the Iraq War, and those two things began to fuse together in a very unsettling way, and that is the moment where I got the idea for Katniss’s story.”

As mentioned above, teenagers getting slaughtered on screen is not a new form of entertainment, not just in slasher films but the countless war films that have featured youthful cannon fodder quaking in trenches, foxholes, jungles, and deserts, dating back at least as far as the original All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). In that context, The Hunger Games is merely a refinement, a conceptual tweak. Collins herself once said, when asked whether her books were too brutal and frightening for young people, “There are child soldiers all around the world right now who are nine, ten, carrying arms, forced to be at war. Can our children not even read a fictional story about it? I think they can.”

Another terrible fact of twenty-first-century life unfortunately relevant to this discussion: school shootings. They didn’t begin with the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School—the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security maintains a school shooting database going back to 1970—but the scale of that assault (thirteen dead, not including the two shooters, and twenty-one wounded) marked a divide in American life, a before and after akin to Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and 9/11. The number of shootings have fluctuated in the years since, trending upward a bit in the second half of the 2010s, though it’s not clear if that’s a meaningful rise or a statistical blip, since the annual totals are relatively small, even if the impacts are huge.

But the death tolls from specific attacks have continued to set horrifying records: the Columbine body count was surpassed by the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, only to be surpassed again in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and once more in 2022 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas—a sickening, unspeakable tally, the terror magnified for children by years of increasingly realistic barricade-the-classroom drills, with fake shooters roaming the halls firing blanks. Why wouldn’t Panem’s fictional mayhem strike a chord with kids accustomed to literal trigger warnings?

That said, I think The Hunger Games’ appeal is far more escapist than therapeutic; I mean, the movies aren’t after-school specials. Teens (and adults) have long looked to Hollywood for vicarious, transgressive thrills, and twenty-first-century adolescent lives are circumscribed in multiple ways that might magnify such appeal. It’s not just that, according to study after study, kids are having less sex than their Boomer and Gen X forebears even as they marinate in a hypersexualized culture. They also drink less and don’t smoke or vape as much, and, marijuana aside, their use of recreational drugs has dwindled (trends that all began in the 1990s). Moreover, their interest in the adult-ish pursuits legally allowed them, traditional stepping-stones toward independence such as part-time jobs, has also waned.

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According to Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who has written extensively about contemporary teenage life:“Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in popular culture from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all boomer high school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school . . . In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.“

Well, yes, unthinkable at least to my sixteen-year-old self, back in 1974, intoxicated by the freedom granted by a car key. Society should, of course, celebrate the fact that less drinking, drug-taking, and driving means fewer kids crashing cars and killing or injuring themselves and otherwise ruining their lives. But even overanxious parents might feel pity for adolescent homebodies who, in Twenge’s words, are “more comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party.” To hear her tell it, aside from trudging to and from school, teens barely even leave the house anymore. “The shift,” she asserts, “is stunning: twelfth graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth graders did as recently as 2009.” (Her emphasis.) And even when teenagers do roam about, parents can reach and keep tabs on them in real time thanks to their cell phones–cum–tracking devices—not so different, a young person might feel, from the relentless scrutiny the teen gladiators are subjected to in the Hunger Games arena.

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Unsurprisingly, study after study asserts that teenagers are more depressed than ever before. One example: the Centers for Disease Control’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey for 2021 found that 42 percent of all high school students reported “feeling so sad or hopeless that they could not engage in their regular activities for at least two weeks during the previous year,” up from 28 percent a decade earlier. Over roughly the same period, the number of girls admitted to emergency rooms for “self-harm” tripled, and the suicide rate for people between the ages of ten and twenty-four (that’s how the CDC breaks down the data) has increased steadily over the last two decades (as have the suicide rates for middle- aged and older adults).

Do we blame helicopter parenting for that? Crushing loads of homework? Not bothering to learn to drive? Social injustice? American carnage? Agoraphobia?

Covid and Zoom schooling surely didn’t help. But the true culprits are literally at hand, according to popular alarmists like Twenge and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestselling 2024 book The Anxious Generation, but also Vivek H. Murthy, the US surgeon general under Joe Biden. All three have pointed the finger squarely at social media and smartphones, linked technologies that both reached critical masses of usership in the early 2010s, coinciding almost too perfectly with the abrupt decline in teen mental health; online porn and video games, each addictive and all-consuming in its own special way, also come in for blame. Haidt calls it “The Great Rewiring of Childhood”:

“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and . . . unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand.”

In two or three decades, will Haidt’s warnings seem as hyperbolic as twentieth-century fears about violent comic books or smutty rock and rap lyrics? Maybe . . . ? There are researchers who feel the phone/social media/depression link is overstated. But if I had to bet, I’d bet not. In October 2023, following a damning surgeon general’s report, thirty-three states filed a suit in federal court against Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, accusing it of ignoring “the sweeping damage” its platforms “have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth.” Eight other states and the District of Columbia filed separate but aligned suits against Meta—which means that social media’s allegedly deleterious effect on teens is the rare, maybe even sole, issue upon which more than four-fifths of state governments, both red and blue, can agree.

Surgeon General Murthy called for warning labels to be put on social media platforms spelling out the dangers for adolescents. My first thought: That’ll work, followed by an eye roll emoji. But the impulse feels right. As Murthy wrote in a 2024 New York Times op-ed essay, “The moral test for any society is how well it protects its children.”

On that score, I’d like to think we’re at least doing better than the adults in Panem. But how do kids feel? Maybe for them—depressed, shadowed by horrific violence, living in fishbowls—The Hunger Games feels less like a metaphor than the day after tomorrow? “I think one reason this franchise was so successful is that this generation feels they are fighting for their survival all the time, and that survival is far from certain,” Gary Ross, who directed the first film, observed in 2022, marking its tenth anniversary. “From climate change to authoritarianism, their generation feels a real sense of dread and jeopardy . . . I think, sadly, the themes in this movie are only more resonant now than when we made it.”

And the last three years have only increased that resonance… ten-fold? Even more? Collins’ first novel was published in 2008, so in 2028 The Hunger Games franchise will enter its third decade of bleak relevance. Will we celebrate?

From HOLLYWOOD HIGH: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies by Bruce Handy. Copyright © 2025 by Bruce Handy. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.