From the moment I finished reading the Hunger Games novels back in 2011, as the first Hunger Games movie was already starting production, I worried about Mockingjay. It's hard enough to make a PG-13 movie series about kids being thrown into an arena and forced to kill each other, and to expect general audiences to want to watch said series. But to follow the story through to its fairly bitter and sobering end, and expect people to keep sticking with it, was beyond what I could imagine. I was 34 when I read these books, and as I closed Mockingjay after finishing its final page, all I could think of was, I am a fully-functioning adult, and I feel like I need therapy right now. How in the name of all that is holy could a 12 year-old read this and be o.k.??
At that point, all I hoped for from the the movie adaptations was for them to be decent, and to get enough of an audience that they could make all 3 movies (well, 4 - it's basically a given these days that studios will split the last book into 2 films for the extra cash-grab). And then The Hunger Games was released in March 2012. And it became the 11th highest-grossing (domestic) film of all time. And then Catching Fire was released in November 2013, and it made even more money. It was the highest-grossing film of 2013 (domestic), and surpassed the Hunger Games to become the 10th highest-grossing movie of all time. Not only that, but The Hunger Games was a pretty damn good movie, and Catching Fire was flat-out fantastic. All of this was about a billion miles past what I could have ever hoped for from this series.
