IP Picks🔎: An Appalachian 'Northern Exposure'
➕ What can we learn from the wild success of the new 'Hunger Games' prequel
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along. Before we dive into this week’s picks, a quick update from the Hunger Games front.
I've been thinking a lot about what lessons we can take away from the hand-over-fist success of Suzanne Collins’ latest Hunger Games installment, Sunrise on the Reaping. Released on March 18, this prequel is set 24 years before the original trilogy and it already has Scholastic beating its chest over its initial sales figures. According to the publisher, Sunrise — the fifth book in the series and the second prequel (following The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) — has already sold 1.5M copies across all formats in English, 1.2M in the U.S. alone. It’s the top-selling book in the U.K., Canada, Ireland and Australia. Those early numbers are 2x the initial sales of Ballad, which admittedly came out during the pandemic. The book’s shoot-the-works rollout was greeted with strong reviews (NYT, Elle) as well as a deluge of BookTok content. Over on the film side, Lionsgate isn’t wasting any time either. The studio has already slated Sunrise’s big-screen adaptation for a November 2026 release.
None of this should be particularly surprising. The original trilogy has sold 100M copies to date and has outperformed the Harry Potter books on Amazon. Meanwhile, the original Hunger Games quadrilogy (the last book was split into two movies) grossed in the neighborhood of $3B at the box office. But sustaining a long-running franchise isn’t easy. Tastes change. Readers grow up. New franchises come along. It should also be noted that before last week, the Hunger Games franchise had begun to show some signs of fatigue. After all, Ballad sold “just” 3.5M copies, and the movie adaptation of Ballad grossed “only” $349M, the lowest tally of the five films. In other words, continued success isn't a given. That said, this week’s sales numbers seem to indicate that there’s still plenty of life left in the franchise.
So what lessons can we take away from all of this? The fact that Hunger Games books are still blowing the doors off the competition implies that multiple generations of fans (including the original ones) are still very invested in it. In fact, original readers may very well be introducing the books to their own kids. Hunger Games seems to land right in the sweet spot of being old enough to have grown-up fans, but not so old that those fans have outgrown it.
IMHO, Sunrise benefits from being a return to what made the original trilogy work in terms of action and romance. Hunger Games is dystopian sci-fi, not romantasy. But I think they overlap a bit. Purists who want to police genre boundaries might scoff, but for readers, the line is permeable and elastic. Sunrise’s out-of-the-gate success makes me more optimistic about the possibilities for romantasy on screen (specifically) and YA fantasy/science fiction (more generally). There's a viewing audience for these genres that hasn't felt catered to, which means there’s a huge opportunity. The trick, of course, is figuring out which flavor and serving size of these genres they want.
I also think Hunger Games has managed to stay relevant because it speaks to its readers uncertainty and apprehension about current events, with many reading it as a critique of the moment. It just underscores how difficult it is to predict how people's political views do or do not translate into their entertainment choices, especially when dealing with metaphorical stories set in fictional worlds as opposed to literal stories set in our actual world.
It will be interesting to keep an eye on Sunrise as it gets further away from its pub date. I’ll be keeping track of the numbers and trying to divine what they’re whispering to us about both the publishing industry and the movie biz. I think anyone interested in developing anything in this space should also be studying Reaping's success closely.
Does it come with a candy bar? Apparently, MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson), the super-successful YouTuber/entrepreneur/reality-competition host, is teaming up with James Patterson on a Squid Game-esque novel that they’re already trying to flip into a TV show. For Patterson, this would be at least his third high-profile celebrity collab in the past few years, following a thriller team-up with Bill Clinton and pushing an unfinished manuscript from the late Michael Crichton over the finish line. Deadline reports — so take this with a grain of salt — that the duo is already fielding eight-figure offers for just the book, tentatively titled The Most Dangerous Game. Deadline describes the plot as "Players fight to survive deadly tests held in dangerous locations around the world, as they battle to become ‘The One.’” So, basically Beast Games, but without the possibility (for now) of lawsuits.
On to this week’s picks, which include a fantastic memoir, a White Lotus-like thriller and a sweet coming-of-age story. The full lineup:
A dramedy that mixes Northern Exposure and Larry Crowne
A psychological thriller about a girl with amnesia, her oddly behaving parents and a locked room
A thriller with White Lotus vibes about a disappearance that rocks the friendship between longtime summer neighbors
An ’80s-set coming-of-age story about a girl working at an exclusive department store
