The 15 Best Movies Like The Hunger Games Series

In the dystopian, post-apocalyptic world of Panem, the society that remains is divided into districts. Once a year, tributes who are usually children are selected from each poor, agrarian district to compete in the wealthy, decadent Capitol in a gladiatorial combat spectacular called “The Hunger Games.” It’s a fight until only one competitor is left alive, and it’s broadcast on national TV, making it almost as important for the competitors to be telegenic as it is for them to be deadly.

This is the premise of Suzanne Collins’ original trilogy of Hunger Games novels, initially turned into a four-part film series. Jennifer Lawrence became a certified A-lister as protagonist Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers as tribute to save her little sister, and eventually escapes the games to lead a rebellion against the tyrannical President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Collins has since written two prequels, one of which has also become a film.

The franchise isn’t the first to put young competitors in death games in dystopian worlds, nor the last. If you like “The Hunger Games,” there are many other flavors to this type of story. Not all resemble it exactly, but they have at least one or two key aspects that’ll feel familiar. (Note that this is a list of movies only; otherwise, “Squid Game” would totally qualify.)

Here are the 15 best movies like the Hunger Games series. (Also, here are “The Hunger Games” movies ranked.)

“Battle Royale” is the movie most cinephiles compare “The Hunger Games” to. The former is one that never saw theatrical release in the United States in its first run because it was considered unreleasable. In the wake of the Columbine school shooting of 1999, Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 film about junior high school students forced by the Japanese government to fight to the death on an island felt just too shocking and brutal. Even American attempts to create a toned-down remake failed, at any rating. Merely twelve years — and untold tragic shootings — later, “The Hunger Games” would earn a PG-13.

“Beat” Takeshi Kitano, a multi-hyphenate whose many careers have included game-show host, serves as a familiar face to audiences and the villainous embodiment of a totalitarian government that hopes to curb juvenile delinquency through the deadly contests — exploding collars, a staple of dystopian sci-fi, ensure that the kids will cooperate lest their heads be prematurely blown up. In the sequel, completed by Fukasaku’s son Kenta after the director died right as production began, survivors of the game become rebels against the larger system, just like Katniss and friends. 

Fukasaku, adapting a horror novel by Koushun Takami, was inspired by his time working in a World War II munitions factory as a teenager, and seeing colleagues his own age die there. His rage comes through the film in a way its imitators have never fully captured.

In the wake of “The Hunger Games,” every studio wanted its own young-adult, dystopian, game-of-death franchise. Since this is a list of good movies, you won’t see a lot of them here. One that does make it is Fox’s “The Maze Runner,” based on a series of books by James Dashner. Its simple premise is easy to grasp and an instant source of jeopardy — teens awaken in a glade with their memories erased. There, they have the option to either create their own society, or try to escape from the giant maze that surrounds them, which is filled with death traps and bio-mechanoid creatures called Grievers. Naturally, there’d be no movie if everyone just stuck to option A.

The sequels petered out because once the surviving characters — SPOILER alert! — successfully escape the maze at the end, the most interesting part of the story is gone. (Not everyone agrees, as this list of the Maze Runner movies, ranked, shows.) Nevertheless, after Disney acquired Fox, the company did announce more would be coming.

Seventeen years prior to “The Maze Runner,” Vincenzo Natali made his feature directorial debut doing the concept slightly better, with seven strangers, among them Nicole de Boer of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” waking up trapped in a strange series of interconnected cubes. In the first film, at least, we never really know why, thought it’s implied that the whole thing is something of a corporate write-off being used for experiments. It’s not explicitly required that the participants kill each other, yet with deadly traps all around, they do anyway.

Natali was almost killed during the making of “Cube,” but prevailed, as the movie spun off a sequel, prequel, and remake, eventually revealing that the participants are prisoners who theoretically choose to be in the experiment rather than facing longer incarceration, though their consent is debatable, and not always remembered. Like the televised Hunger Games, it feels like a riff on reality TV, specifically the original “Big Brother,” and works best the less the viewer knows about the rules and the world outside.

Stephen King’s novel “The Running Man” was even more predictive of reality shows like “The Amazing Race” than the movie version, which reframed the action as a deadly game show. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Ben Richards, a cop framed for murder, even though what actually happened was that he refused to commit murder in behalf of the state. Instead, thrown into a wasteland arena, he must fight gladiators with outlandish gimmicks to the death, as a TV audience places bets. Real-life game show host Richard Dawson basically plays the absolute worst version of himself, even getting in a rare rebuttal to Arnold’s signature, “I’ll be back” line. (“Only in a rerun.”) The result is like ’80s WWE on even more steroids.

The book ended with Richards flying a plane into a skyscraper, an effect too big for the movie budget at the time, and too close to the events 9-11 for any potential 21st-century remake to touch, for a while anyway. Now that an entire generation has grown up since 2001, it remains to be seen if the upcoming remake with Glen Powell will go there.

Rob Zombie’s take on the death-game genre adds a distinct wrinkle that’s very him: the group of contestants forced to kill each other is half made up of carnival workers, and the other half murderous clowns. On Halloween, Oct. 31st (hence the movie’s title), an elite cabal of the spoiled wealthy looks on and places wagers. Unlike most entries in the genre, this takes place not in the future, but in the stylized, imagined grindhouse past of 1976. 

In another major departure from the familiar formula, the surviving players don’t ultimately unite to take on the real power brokers who forced them into the situation. Rather, they continue to maniacally pursue each other, with their final fates unrevealed. Though the overall premise is fantastical, that ending might be the most realistic part, made for a world where the richest oligarchs can increasingly persuade the lower classes to blame each other for their problems.

Misunderstood when it was released in 1997, “Starship Troopers” was never meant to be an earnest blockbuster, or even a proper adaptation of the Robert Heinlein novel upon which it was super-loosely based. Rather, it was a satirical fake propaganda film, made as if it existed to convince the youth of America that it’s sexy, patriotic, and cool to engage in a pointless, deadly war with giant killer bugs that we started in the first place. It’s the kind of movie they’d likely show Hunger Games contestants in Panem to make them believe their deaths are something more than a deliberate distraction from all of society’s real problems.

The movie has gained much more respect in the years since, as the War on Terror years showed us what actual propaganda looked like, and audiences came to understand that the wooden performances and bland good looks of Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards, alongside Neil Patrick Harris in an SS-style uniform, were deliberate self-parody choices rather than directorial ineptitude. Director Paul Verhoeven trusted audiences to see through the film’s superficial pro-violence message to his real point, but it was too smart for its own good, and took people a while.

It’s a different type of deadly futuristic game in this “Jumanji” spinoff, starring a pre-“Hunger Games” Josh Hutcherson as a ten year-old named Walter, with a pre-“Twilight” Kristen Stewart as his older, teenage sister. Here, a magical board game turns a house into a spaceship, and it must be played all the way through to eliminate the deadly threats of black holes, reptilian aliens, asteroids, and unwanted cryogenics. Viewers who had seen “Jumanji” probably knew everything would be okay in the end, but director Jon Favreau keeps the tension high so the stakes feel real.

“Zathura,” though popular with critics, was not as big a hit as the “Jumanji” films, but it was Favreau’s first directorial foray into special effects-heavy sci-fi, leading him on a path that would take him to “Iron Man” and “The Mandalorian.” The careers of Hutcherson, Stewart, Jonah Bobo as their younger brother, and Dax Shepard as an older version of Hutcherson’s character, were also evidently not harmed.

Want to see Jennifer Lawrence fight a dystopian future, but this time on the side of the bad guys? That’s what the crossover X-Men sequel “Days of Future Past” delivers. In a Terminator-ish future where the last X-Men are being hunted down and killed, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) goes back in time to the ’70s to prevent shape-shifter Mystique (Lawrence) from killing the creator of giant murder-bots called Sentinels. Paradoxically, said creator, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) must be allowed to overreach with his mutant-killing creations in order to prevent even worse versions in the decades to come. President Richard M. Nixon is no Coriolanus Snow — he is occasionally capable of seeing reason, if Mystique doesn’t go too far herself.

“Days of Future Past” is something of a franchise miracle. It manages to tell a compelling story, while also bringing together the casts of “X-Men” and “X-Men: First Class,” allowing for a continuity reboot that erased the two entries fans didn’t like: “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” This, of course, cleared the way for “Apocalypse” and “Dark Phoenix,” entries many fans liked even less, but we also got “Logan” out of the deal. (All the X-Men movies, ranked.)

Before Donald Sutherland was overseeing a young woman murdering people in his capital city’s arena, he was training a high-school girl to kill vampires. Prior to becoming a more serious horror TV series, “Buffy” gave us Kristy Swanson as a vapid, mall-obsessed California girl, who quickly has to level up when she finds out from Sutherland’s mysterious Merrick that she’s part of a long tradition of slayers, and bloodsuckers led by Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens are preparing to pounce. Writer Joss Whedon didn’t care for the more broadly comedic tone the movie gave his concept, hence the show that folks are more familiar with. The film, however, did give us the immortal phrase “So five minutes ago.”

Luke Perry plays slightly against type as a disheveled love interest, and the cast also includes David Arquette, Ben Affleck, Hilary Swank, Ricki Lake, Thomas Jane, Stephen Root, and Seth Green, who would go on to play a different major role on the TV version. Buffy’s victims are all evil vampires, so they deserve what they get, but in 1992, the ass-kicking blonde was a relatively new phenomenon, paving the way for Sarah Michelle Gellar to become a major star following in her footsteps. TV’s Buffy, in turn, led the way to Katniss.

You can’t really talk about stories in which kids kill each other without mentioning “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding’s 1954 novel about a group of boys, evacuating from a war zone, whose plane crashes on a deserted island. As they attempt to form something resembling society, things quickly deteriorate into pure aggression, and casualties ensue.

It’s been filmed three times, though the best-known version is the 1990 movie, which Americanizes the story, despite director Harry Hook being English. Balthazar Getty made his onscreen acting debut as Ralph, the advocate for civilization amongst the kids, as did James Badge Dale as Simon, the would-be voice of reason. In this telling, the boys are military school cadets, making the movie more of an indictment of militarism than Golding’s intended satire of boys’ adventure tales in which he felt the boys did not act as maliciously as real boys would. There are no eager spectators watching as in “The Hunger Games,” save for us, the viewers in theaters and at home. Fortunately, what we are watching is fiction, at least for now.

The Harry Potter series, mostly set at an English boarding school for wizards, isn’t typically comparable to “The Hunger Games.” However, in its fourth installment, “The Goblet of Fire,” effectively transitions the leads from kids to young adults. We got to see the students of Hogwarts (and other schools) enter the Triwizard Tournament, which ended in a death and the full-on resurrection of arch-villain Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). In-universe, it wasn’t supposed to be about a game of death, but the book had already come out and been devoured by Potter-heads, so most everyone going into the movie knew this would be the one where stuff gets real.

True, the major death is a new character who hasn’t been relevant previously, and the actor playing him was then unknown. How could we have predicted Robert Pattinson would end up being a sparkly vampire heartthrob and then Batman?

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has been remade multiple times, because it’s such a flexible premise and metaphor: everyone you know has been replaced by alien pod people who look just like them, and they all want to kill you and replace you too. Is it a riff on communism? Consumerism? Military life? The influence of advertising? Yes to all of the preceding.

The 1978 version most recalls “The Hunger Games,” and not just because it stars Donald Sutherland, and depicts a scenario in which the main couple has to survive everyone in the city hunting them down. It also reflects the cultural disconnect of the ’70s, as hippies became yuppies, and people in cities like San Francisco wondered what had happened to change their friends so. “The Hunger Games” struggle of oppressed agrarians versus decadent urbanites isn’t quite the same, but it’s still a class and cultural conflict between haves and have-nots, and the principles that have to be sacrificed in order to survive the divide.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” came out in 2015, the same year as the then-final “Hunger Games” movie “Mockingjay Part 2.” Its major heroine, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) was also a warrior woman in a post-apocalyptic future world, looking to smash the patriarchy as she knew it. In 2024’s follow-up prequel, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” we learned that, like the district champions of “The Hunger Games,” Furiosa was taken from her agriculture-centric home into the brutal wastelands, where she learned to fight or die as she curried favor with the veteran combatants.

With an unreliable mentor in Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and an outright evil patron/leader in Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) faces similar obstacles to the Games in an even less civilized world. In the end, she finds a fascinatingly original way to break the cycle of killing, by turning Dementus into a peach tree so he can finally do something useful by growing fruit.

Given that the events of “Fury Road” happen immediately thereafter, though, it’s not like she leaves violence behind forever.