There is a much stronger connection between Battle Royale and Hunger Games, than Squid Game. Very similar government depiction, the announcement of deaths etc. Moreover, we should appreciate Battle Royale even more - because it was done waaay before any prior art existed.
I saw Battle Royale as a subbed bootleg around 20 years ago. Fantastic B-movie, and I understand some of the young actors got some notable roles as they got older (Takeshi Kitano was there because he was Takeshi Kitano), but it’s still a B-movie. Good time though, even today.
As an aside on Takeshi, for those who want to go down a rabbit hole, dig into “Takeshi’s Challenge” on the Nintendo Famicom. That game is a trip.
In 2003 I was first unknowingly introduced to Takeshi Kitano on MXC on Spike. That fall in a Japanese film class I saw him in Sonatine which remains one of my favorite movies. Then in the spring of 2004 Zatoichi was released and I saw it in theaters. I had a year in my life where Takeshi Kitano was *everywhere*.
It was "the third highest-grossing Japanese film of 2001". "At the 2001 Japanese Academy Awards, Battle Royale was nominated for nine awards, including Picture of the Year, and won three of them".
Hardly a b-movie, except in the sense "not a Hollywood blockbuster crapfest"
Probably not, since aside from "kids in an island" there's no relation between the two, anymore than there is between and Gulligan's Island and the Castaway, or Alien and Passangers ("people on a spaceship").
Yeah, if it's not an American movie, it's some cheap shit! /s
My brother, it was nominated for nine Japanese Academy Awards, it was helmed by one of Japan's top directors, is an adaptation of a best-selling novel, is regarded by critics as one of the best films of the era, has high production values, stars arguably the most famous actor in Japan, was scored by a famous and prolific composer (you might have heard his music in another movie called Django Unchained), etc.
That's not even getting into the economics of film in Japan. A successful film in Japan nowadays earns around $10M on a budget of half a million. BR, produced nearly twenty years ago, had a budget nearly ten times that much and grossed triple.
Suffice it to say, Battle Royale is a high production cost movie, which forecloses the possibility of it being a B movie.
I’ll stick my neck out and assert that “cheap” films are better, anyway: movie budgets’ sizes are inversely proportional to the producers’ risk tolerance; therefore, big money films are devoid of originality and any message they carry is nought but masturbatory self-aggrandisement.
The best films I’ve ever watched, that which had the biggest effect on me, were TV-plays and self-funded documentary-films.
That may be true for some but at the really high end, writers have the resources to so some fun things. Even many high-end marvel-style movies have hidden jokes and themes that 99% of viewer don't ever pick up on.
"The Running man" by Stephen King was published in 1982, the movie starring Schwarzenegger was released in 1987 (another adaptation will be released this year in 2025)
The story is similar to a Robert Sheckley's short story from 1952,"The Prize of Peril" adapted into a movie in Germany in 1970 "Das Millionenspiel" and in France in 1982 "Le prix du danger" (same year as King's Running Man novel)
I would say "The Prize of Peril" is the grandfather of these books, movies and series, as far as I know. Battle Royale is the start of another branch, though : it's not one vs many anymore, it's many vs many.
He also has his protagonists hail from the fictional town of Shiroiwa-cho 白岩町, which is a direct translation of King's frequently-seen "Castle Rock". I wonder how many Japanese readers of the original spotted that.
I vividly remember watching Battle Royale with my college roommate, and when it was over, we looked at each other and said "this would be an incredible premise for a video game". This would have been like 2004. We even tried to mod it into the original FarCry engine (the island setting was perfect), but it was too difficult for us. Too bad we didn't actually have the chops to do it, could have gotten the jump on Fortnite/PUBG by over a decade lol. Really wish we had stayed motivated, looking back on it.
edit: But yes, Battle Royale is a great movie, and Hunger Games totally rode its coattails.
I had the same idea after watching Hunger Games. Played around with the concept for a few weeks and then eventually tossed it. My first interaction with Fortnite was when I saw them selling t-shirts in a brick and mortar shop.
But I don't feel hard done by, I'm sure many people had similar ideas around that time, and I never executed. I also have no idea how I would get a large multiplayer game off the ground without funding. The idea of making even a two-player game scares me.
Before Fortnite released its Battle Royale game, it was a PVE survival/crafting shooter. It did the Battle Royale game mode copying the absolute sensation that was PUBG in 2017
But PUBG began as a series of mods for Arma 3, before moving to its own game with its own monetization (and running like absolute crap on release too).
I think there have been versions of PUBG mods for Arma for much longer than when I discovered it.
Stephen King's "The Long Walk" was published in 1979
"Every year, on the first day of May, one hundred
teenage boys meet for an event known through-
out the country as "The Long Walk." Among this
year's chosen crop is sixteen-year-old Ray Gar-
raty. He knows the rules: that wamings are issued
if you fall under speed, stumble, sit down. That
after three wamings... you get your ticket. And
what happens then serves as a chilling reminder
that there can be only one winner in the Walk—
the one that survives"
Definitely relevant and maybe inspirational, though I find "fight to death game show" format quite distinctive, so much so that it created its game genre 15 years later even with the same name as the movie.
> The whole video game genre exists and is named such because of that movie.
If so, then it is ultimately named for the pro wrestling free-for-all format. The author says in the foreword that's how he chose the name for the book.
So they renamed the game from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (thus why everybody called it PUBG) to PUBG: Battlegrounds. So what does the BG in PUBG stand for? The game is a real example of a PIN number!
