Review: The Hunger Games Complete 4-Film Collection Out on Blu-ray Today
Today is a happy day for fans of The Hunger Games everywhere, because the final installment of the popular series of films, Mockingjay, Part 2, is finally available for purchase today in Digital HD and on Blu-ray. What this means, too, is that today is also the release date for The Hunger Games Complete 4-Film Collection. If you’ve been holding off buying the films individually, because you knew that eventually you’d get a collection like this, you were right!
Having enjoyed some of the over 14 hours of bonus features of this awesome set, I can tell you that making the investment in this collection will totally be worth it to any fan. Not only are the bonus features actually interesting (which isn’t always the case in collections like this), but they’re easily navigated, which is so important when dealing with so much content.
There is, of course, a full-length featurette called “The World is Watching: The Making of The Hunger Games” that takes you through the entire making-of process from Suzanne Collins’ novel to the reception of the first film. What’s great about it, though, is that the featurette is divided into chapters based on topic. Do you care most about casting? Or production design? Or the screenwriting process? You can skip to the parts you care about easily so you’re not blindly fast-forwarding through features.
What I found most interesting, though, were the smaller, more focused featurettes. One, called “Letters From the Rose Garden,” focused exclusively on the relationship between Hunger Games director Gary Ross and Donald Sutherland as they built the complex character of President Snow. Apparently, when he first accepted the role, Sutherland wrote Ross a three-page letter about the nature of power and how it relates to this film, which gets read in this featurette. They then talk about how that letter inspired the scenes President Snow has in the rose garden in the film – scenes that couldn’t be in the book, because they’re not Katniss’ POV, but that add depth to the film and to the world of Panem.
Another great featurette was “Game Maker: Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games Phenomenon,” which tackles the success of both the films and the book series and examines how Collins combining war, reality television, and the Greek myth of Theseus gave us the story we now know and love.
The packaging is beautifully designed and streamlined, and of course — because we’re living in Modern Times — the Blu-ray also comes with digital codes for all four films so that you can have digital copies of all this content in addition to the discs.
Whether you’re a Hunger Games fan yourself, or you’re looking to buy a great gift for a loved one who is, I’d definitely recommend splurging on The Hunger Games Complete 4-Film Collection. It’s a great value for what you get, and will allow you to enjoy the world of Panem for a long time.
(images via Lionsgate)
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