2. Commentary
Put simply, Battle Royale speaks to something larger than itself and The Hunger Games exists mostly on a surface escapist level. While The Hunger Games perhaps has something to say about reality TV, it says nothing that The Truman Show (or say, Battle Royale) didnt say a decade earlier. Behind Battle Royales seemingly mindless violence is an allegory for the competitiveness of Japanese education system and society. The protagonists in both movies have parents who are depressives. In Battle Royale, it is because the father cannot handle the pressures of real-world Japan, in The Hunger Games, it is because she mother cannot handle an imagined dystopia. In setting the story in another time and place, The Hunger Games manages to avoid the subject of school-violence entirely, but it also shoots itself in the foot as it presents a world we cannot ourselves relate to.
To me, I wonder if perhaps the perceived weakness of an American remake of Battle Royale -the school violence- is what could have made the movie a deeply powerful, if controversial, commentary on American society, in the same way Battle Royale was for Japan. For not being afraid to make its audience think, another point goes to Battle Royale.