I think The Hunger Games as movies miss a lot of the nuances that were at least implied in the books, like the racialized classist dynamics within District 12 that were described in Book 1. Like how the Seam is inhabited by dark-skinned, dark-haired, blue-collar coal miners that struggle to get by day-to-day while their children have to increase their odds to be selected by the Games just to feed the family, and how the well-to-do fair skinned, fair-haired townspeople – as tradespeople – are not as much at risk of being selected thanks to their privilege.
And how about the fact that Katniss’s mother – who came from a town-residing, family with a trade – was more or less disowned when she eloped with a dark coal miner from the Seam?
It’s not just wealth disparity that’s at play here, it’s also race, and that’s easy to miss when the cast in a visual representation of the novel gets white-washed.