Ikr?! And this was way better than hunger games plus it's totally obvious which influenced which.To me at least hunger games seems like a bad imitation of BR.And i totally agree about the america cinema etc comment with most obvious example "the ring" and im so glad im not the only one thinks that way!
The live action version did have Kiriyama....
Σ( ￣□￣||) I'm really bad at remembering names while watching movies (and I watched the movie first, so I remember the names after reading the manga) so I didn't realize Kiriyama WAS in the movie! #－.－)
but still, my main points of how different his character/role in the manga v.s. the movie is still valid and how the story in BR is so psychologically intriguing that other countries' (esp. hollywood) media/films/books have a lack of.
Thanks for correcting me, I just felt after reading the manga that Kiriyama's Badass-ness was not translated to film and had to comment.
I acctually liked the movie, because usually I don't like live action adaptations, but it didn't have Kiriyama! If it did it would have been awesome, but still for a movie adaptation it was pretty good. While I understand why people want to compare the hunger games to this, it's an easy way to get the similar government forces kids to kill each other plot across to new audiences, but this has the awesome Japanese horror touch and psychological aspects the hunger games can't touch. Sadly American writers and directors don't really include this kind of psychological horror unless in a few slasher/horror flicks, so there isn't any gory psychological films/books like Battle Royale in America, even if the hunger games has a similar plot.