A blog post by another of our great staff writers, Grant Vanwinkle, kind of got me inspired to write my own blog. Grant was talking about how excited he is for the next installment of “The Hunger Games” movie trilogy. I myself am not a fan of of “The Hunger Games,” but I realize a lot of people are. The series was massively successful and, for that reason, I’m led to believe that something about the book and subsequent movie adaption must be enchanting or engaging even though neither really did much to entertain me.

I often feel like I’ve been cast to the social wayside when I just can’t get into something that someone else loves. However, I’ve discovered that while I generally like the premise of something (“The Hunger Games,” for example), my expectations for the greatness that it could encompass just aren’t met by the material that is there.

I thought the books were boring and the cast for the film was so lackluster — it didn’t even look like the world I had imagined when I was trawling through the books.

As someone who loves film, television, books and music, I’m constantly taking in new things. When I heard of a Japanese movie called “Battle Royale,” I was shocked by just how similar it seemed to the core basis of “The Hunger Games” so I decided to check it out.

“Battle Royale” was released years prior to the success or creation of “The Hunger Games” but it’s essentially about the same thing; teenagers are forced into a venue where they must battle for their lives knowing that only one of them will walk away.

While “Battle Royale” and “The Hunger Games” are similar, I found myself way more into the world that “Battle Royale” created. I was captivated by it the way that I had wanted so badly to be captivated by “The Hunger Games.”

Often times I think that people who love media often take for granted all of the options that we have when watching a movie. We have to be willing to look outside of the American entertainment market at times to find things that we want to watch! I’m glad I took the time to discover a great foreign film I would have otherwise missed out on had it not been for the insane level of success that an American franchise had.