To celebrate the lead up to the Holiday season the fine folks at Lionsgate and Funacrtix are offering you a special treat in the Hunger Games Adventures on Facebook, as well as the chance to win one of 5 Hunger Games DVDs and 5 copies of the Catching Fire book!

Free Present

The Gamemakers at Funtactix, have added new winter themed stories to The Hunger Games Adventures! In the spirit of the season, they gave us an exclusive gift to pass along to the fans on HungerGamesMovie.org. Click the link below to enter Panem and open your present! Separate gifts for boys and girls, click the boy link if your character is a boy and girl for girls!

• Free gift for girls
• Free gift for boys

TV Premiere of The Hunger Games

The world television premiere of The Hunger Games will be 12pm ET on New Year’s Day on Epix! You can also see it January 4th with a special surprise guest from the cast hosting!

DVD & Book Giveaway

To enter for a chance to win one of the five copies of each, simply add a comment to this post. I’ll choose 10 commenters at random on January 1st at 12pm ET, the same time as the world TV premiere on Epix!

Respond to Day 7 of Hunger Games 12 Days of Questmas: Win Prizes! –>

Francis Lawrence, the director that replaced Gary Ross to direct Catching Fire, has been confirmed as the director of both Mockingjay parts one and two.

Lawrence previously directed Water for Elephants and I Am Legend as well as videos for Beyonce and Janet Jackson.

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Just so you know how it works:

1. The moms see the clothes in Hollywood paparazzi photos and reality shows.
2. They buy the luxury goods for their kids in Manhattan.
3. They dress up the kids Toddlers & Tiaras style.
4. The kids become moms and reality starlets.

[They're a Walking Billboard of You]

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Now THIS is funny!

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Director Kevin Tancharoen submitted this proposal for his vision of Panem in the leadup to the choice of director Gary Ross. I’m glad they went with Gary Ross, but it’s an interesting look at another way to portray the book on-screen.

Peter: It seems like a lot of upcoming directors are now putting together these video reels for their studio pitches. When did this start, and when did you discover this practice?

Kevin: The idea of a “pitch reel” has been around for awhile and is very common practice for any director. Trying to pitch a vision to a room full of people is always very difficult verbally. In the past two years, the pitch reel has significantly become more demanding since technology allows for people to make mini movies in their own homes. It’s almost expected for a director to show some visual materials, but the need to impress has become elevated. At first, it was just some concept art, some storyboards and possibly a treatment. Then the rip-o-matic (a visual reel using clips from other movies to portray a visual style) became really popular. I even know some directors who do a full animatic at their expense just to take into a meeting.

[Slashfilm]

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The high-end (and pricey) set of Tonner dolls for the main three characters of the Hunger Games are now available for pre-order from Tonner.

Each is a limited edition of 1000 and range in price from $169.99 to $179.99.

The figures include hand-painted details and are made of vinyl and hard plastic. The head sculpts are based off Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson and feature extremely detailed clothes.

Check out the full details for Katniss, Peeta and Gale on the Tonner site.

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After being offered the role of President Snow in The Hunger Games, Donald Sutherland wrote a provocative letter to director Gary Ross to start the collaboration.

It reveals the high order thoughts that went into the character, and the reasoning for adding scenes that were not in the novel which show Snow tending to his rose garden. It’s an amazing read!

Dear Gary Ross: 

Power. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power? 

Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.  

Power corrupts, and, in many cases, absolute power makes you really horny. Clinton, Chirac, Mao, Mitterrand. 

Not so, I think, with Coriolanus Snow. His obsession, his passion, is his rose garden. There’s a rose named Sterling Silver that’s lilac in colour with the most extraordinarily powerful fragrance – incredibly beautiful – I loved it in the seventies when it first appeared. They’ve made a lot of off shoots of it since then.  

I didn’t want to write to you until I’d read the trilogy and now I have so: roses are of great importance. And Coriolanus’s [sic] eyes. And his smile. Those three elements are vibrant and vital in Snow. Everything else is, by and large, perfectly still and ruthlessly contained. What delight she [Katniss] gives him. He knows her so perfectly. Nothing, absolutely nothing, surprises him. He sees and understands everything. he was, quite probably, a brilliant man who’s succumbed to the siren song of power. 

How will you dramatize the interior narrative running in Katniss’s head that describes and consistently updates her relationship with the President who is ubiquitous in her mind? With omniscient calm he knows her perfectly. She knows he does and she knows that he will go to any necessary end to maintain his power because she knows that he believes that she’s a real threat to his fragile hold on his control of that power. She’s more dangerous than Joan of Arc. 

Her interior dialogue/monologue defines Snow. It’s that old theatrical turnip: you can’t ‘play’ a king, you need everybody else on stage saying to each other, and therefore to the audience, stuff like “There goes the King, isn’t he a piece of work, how evil, how lovely, how benevolent, how cruel, how brilliant he is!” The idea of him, the definition of him, the audience’s perception of him, is primarily instilled by the observations of others and once that idea is set, the audience’s view of the character is pretty much unyielding. And in Snow’s case, that definition, of course, comes from Katniss. 

Evil looks like our understanding of the history of the men we’re looking at. It’s not what we see: it’s what we’ve been led to believe. Simple as that. Look at the face of Ted Bundy before you knew what he did and after you knew.  

Snow doesn’t look evil to the people in Panem’s Capitol. Bundy didn’t look evil to those girls. My wife and I were driving through Colorado when he escaped from jail there. The car radio’s warning was constant. ‘Don’t pick up any young men. The escapee looks like the nicest young man imaginable’. Snow’s evil shows up in the form of the complacently confident threat that’s ever present in his eyes. His resolute stillness. Have you seen a film I did years ago? ‘The Eye of the Needle’. That fellow had some of what I’m looking for.

The woman who lived up the street from us in Brentwood came over to ask my wife a question when my wife was dropping the kids off at school. This woman and her husband had seen that movie the night before and what she wanted to know was how my wife could live with anyone who could play such an evil man. It made for an amusing dinner or two but part of my wife’s still wondering.

I’d love to speak with you whenever you have a chance so I can be on the same page with you.

They all end up the same way. Welcome to Florida, have a nice day!

Gary Ross was impressed with Sutherland’s thoughtful letter: “That’s the relationship you want from an actor and director, where it’s a give and take, it’s collaborative, it’s one person offering something to the other who then takes it, extrapolates it, runs with it, give it back to the actor who gives the scene back to me … that’s the way film making works best.”

[Business Insider]

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It’s past midnight and The Hunger Games is now available for download. The iTunes digital release includes extras from the DVD/Blu-Ray along with some amazing iTunes-exclusive content like quizzes and interactive style challenges that offer the chance to make fashion choices just like Cinna.

It’s $14.99 SD / $19.99 HD on the iTunes Store and available NOW!

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Tonight’s the big night! You can get your hands on the Hunger Games DVD and Blu-Ray starting at midnight.

Certain Walmart, FYE and Toys ‘R Us stores will be having release parties to celebrate, so be sure to check where you can meet the stars and our summary of all the different DVD/Blu-Ray editions as well as details on the midnight events in your city!

If you’re sticking at home rather than going out for the midnight release, Amazon is having a special where if you order the DVD or Blu-Ray you’ll be to able to watch a digital copy of the  movie instantly at midnight.

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The Hunger Games trilogy has surpassed the Harry Potter series as the best-selling book series of all time on Amazon!

“Since debuting in 2008, Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games have taken the world by storm, much as Harry Potter did a decade before,” said Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Books and Kindle, Amazon.com. “Interestingly, this series is only three books versus Harry Potter’s seven, and to achieve this result in just four years is a great testament to both the popularity of the work and, we think, the growth in reading digitally during that time. Customers love these books and all three titles are consistently on our Top 10 lists in both print and Kindle formats, and ‘The Hunger Games’ is also the most-borrowed book in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.”

The Hunger Games movie debuts on DVD, Blu-ray and Amazon Instant Video tomorrow, August 18. All customers who pre-order the DVD, Blu-ray or digital version can watch it instantly on Amazon Instant Video starting shortly after midnight. To pre-order now visit www.amazon.com/thehungergames.

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