Welcome to the intense reality of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who must try to survive – by sheer wits and will alone – a future world that is at once high-tech and apocalyptic, glitzy and primal, unsettlingly dangerous and a telltale mirror to our own.

Unfolding entirely through Katniss’ intimately personal POV, ‘The Hunger Games’ reveals how this miner’s daughter from a dark future transforms from a mere pawn in a lethal televised contest to a soulful, sacrificing heroine who comes to realize that she has even more to protect and fight for than her own family.

Few who have encountered Katniss have been able to resist the visceral excitement of watching her find her strength, resolve and heart while under the most extreme pressure a teenager could imagine. This was certainly true for the production executives at Lionsgate Entertainment. For them, Katniss’ journey jumped off the pages of Suzanne Collins’ literary sensation ‘The Hunger Games’ with such beauty and force, they felt instantly it deserved to be captured on screen.

When producer Nina Jacobson had bought the rights to the novel in 2009, ‘The Hunger Games’ was just beginning to find a devoted audience. Jacobson brought it to Lionsgate’s film executives Joe Drake and Alli Shearmur, among other studio executives, and they instantly became obsessed with Katniss and her journey.

It was only as development began that the popularity of the books swelled in tandem with anticipation of the movie. Millions began to wonder how a filmmaker might bring to life Collins’ fresh twist on a sinister future and – most of all – bring to life the complicated but gutsy heroine who made the book’s adventure feel so harrowingly true.

Ultimately, Lionsgate and Jacobson put together a team, headed by visually bold director Gary Ross, that was equally compelled by Katniss’ arc and how her evolution as a human being touched millions of readers. The idea behind the screen adaptation was to visually get inside Katniss’ head, and ultimately her heart, the same way that Collins had done in words.

In that way, the film would not only capture Katniss’ battles with her fellow Tributes in the Games, but would also mine the rich themes Collins had explored through Katniss’ life-changing experience: personal sacrifice, star-crossed love and the question of where our current society might be headed.

Katniss’ world was initially inspired, Collins says, by her fascination with the ancient Greek myth of Theseus – who every nine years sent a phalanx of young boys and girls into a deadly labyrinth to fight the monstrous Minotaur. It was equally influenced by her experiences channel-surfing through an unsettling blur of reality TV and war coverage, wondering what this mix of entertainment and true-life terror boded for the future of society.

Together, these two ideas added up to the birth of Katniss Everdeen – who enters a violent and mythic future from a perspective unlike any other. Her adventure in the Capitol of Panem, once she takes her sister’s place in the Games, might have the breathless pace of a sci-fi thriller, but it is at heart about a girl coming to grips with the moral dilemmas of power, injustice and self-preservation at the same time in life as she is also discovering love, independence and her own identity.

A former children’s TV writer and a mother of two, Collins found a way to make Katniss’ world feel so deeply personal that readers couldn’t help but imagine how they would feel in her place – as she is first driven to save her sister, her family and herself, but then begins to see the glimmer of a chance to make a difference for others across the shadowy landscape of Panem.

Collins was not afraid to take Katniss into risky terrain, because she knew teens were already grappling with these questions in the world around them.  In her book proposal for the series, Collins wrote: “Although set in the future, ‘The Hunger Games’ explores disturbing issues of modern warfare such as who fights our wars, how they are orchestrated, and the ever-increasing opportunities to observe them being played out.”

Yet she also balanced that with Katniss’ growth and evolution into someone as courageous and principled as she is stubbornly tenacious.  She noted that Katniss, though initially “distrustful,” takes from this adventure “a deep capacity to love and sacrifice for those few people she cares for.”

The success of ‘The Hunger Games’ hinged on readers identifying with Katniss — and that is exactly what happened. The book was soon being passed from hand-to-hand, reader-to-reader, developing a devoted following that flowed into the culture at large.

Author Stephen King dubbed Katniss a “bow-and-arrow Annie Oakley,” The Atlantic Monthly called her “the most important female character in recent pop cultural history” and The New York Times praised Collins’ “convincingly detailed world-building and her memorably complex and fascinating heroine.”

Stephanie Myer, author of the ‘Twilight’ series, blogged:  “The story kept me up for several nights in a row, because even after I was finished, I just lay in bed wide awake thinking about it.”

Once word began to get out about the books and the impending movie, their popularity began to spread like wildfire. When the film went into production, there were about 8 million copies of the novels in circulation; by the time production wrapped there were 12 million and now the number has exploded to over 26 million.

The first novel has since spent more than 180 consecutive weeks and more than three consecutive years to date on The New York Times bestseller list. Collins went on to write two more best-selling books in the series, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, which established Panem as a realm that has taken up permanent residence in the popular imagination.

Image Courtesy of   https://www.facebook.com/TheHungerGamesUK

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Lionsgate have announced ‘The Big Wedding’, a Nu Image / Millennium Films production that Lionsgate will be distributing in the U.S. and the U.K. The announcement was made jointly by Joe Drake, President of Lionsgate’s Motion Picture Group, Jason Constantine, Lionsgate’s President of Acquisitions and Co-Productions, and Avi Lerner, Founder and Co-Chairman of Nu Image, who is handling international sales of the film.

The film, which boasts an all star cast including Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried, Robin Williams, Ben Barnes and Topher Grace, is currently shooting in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Written and directed by Justin Zackham (‘The Bucket List’), the film centers around Don (De Niro) and Ellie (Keaton), a long divorced couple being forced to pretend that they are still happily married at their son’s wedding. Among all of their family and friends, the hoax snowballs into a poignant and raucously funny story about the ties that bind.

Nu Image’s Avi Lerner, Danny Dimbort and Trevor Short are executive producing, with Justin Zackham, Clay Pecorin, Richard Salvatore and Harry Ufland producing.

“The Big Wedding is a charming, rollicking movie that promises to be an instant intergenerational family comedy classic,” explains Drake of the film’s appeal to the studio.  “We are thrilled to be in business once again with Avi and Nu Image,” adds Constantine.  “After our success together with action genre films like ‘The Expendables’ and the upcoming ‘Conan The Barbarian’, this film presented a wonderful opportunity to expand our collaborative horizons into the realm of broad comedy.”

“Our relationship with Lionsgate has always been mutually beneficial and one of great respect. A film like The Big Wedding only reinforces that idea and takes our relationship to the next level,” says Lerner. “We know that Lionsgate’s faith in us to deliver on all of the potential of this comedy is well placed.”

Negotiations on behalf of Lionsgate were overseen by Constantine along with Lionsgate’s SVP of Acquisitions Eda Kowan and EVP of Business & Legal Affairs Wendy Jaffe.

About Lionsgate 

Lionsgate is a leading global entertainment company with a strong and diversified presence in motion picture production and distribution, television programming and syndication, home entertainment, family entertainment, digital distribution and new channel platforms.

The Company has built a strong television presence in production of prime time cable and broadcast network series, distribution and syndication of programming through Debmar-Mercury and an array of channel assets.

Lionsgate currently has 15 shows on more than 10 networks spanning its prime time production, distribution and syndication businesses, including such critically-acclaimed hits as “Mad Men”, “Weeds” and “Nurse Jackie” along with  the comedy “Blue Mountain State, ” the upcoming drama “Boss” and the syndication successes “Tyler Perry’s House Of Payne”, its spinoff “Meet The Browns”,  the upcoming “For Better or Worse,” ”The Wendy Williams Show” and “Are We There Yet?”.

Image Courtesy of   cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com

The article ‘The Big Wedding’ Starring Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon Announced appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.