Will There Be Hunger Games Theme Parks in the Future?

In 2017, Avatar Land will open at Disney, not to mention there may also be Star Wars rides coming to the Magic Kingdom as well. (This is pretty much be a given considering Lucas sold the franchise to Disney._ But would you be interested in taking your kids to a Hunger Games theme park?

On November 22, the next installment of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, will be hitting theaters, and it’s certain to be a huge success. Potentially, it could even be a bigger movie than the first installment. So now according to Variety, Lionsgate, the company releasing the Hunger Games films, is indeed looking into building theme parks based on the saga.

Apparently Jon Feltheimer, who is the CEO of Lionsgate, recently made this disclosure during a business conference that he’s looking into possibly developing Hunger Games theme parks in “two territories,” which are likely to be Florida and California, but no other details are known at this time. 

Yet even though we consider The Hunger Games to be Battle Royale lite, we also get the impression it’s a franchise that might be a bit dark for a theme park, especially with children attending. Obviously the focus would be on the adventure of the story, and fighting your way through obstacles, not killing people, but again, it still may not be theme park appropriate. 

It’s one thing to have villains like a cartoon witch, or a wicked stepmother, but as Giant Freakin Robot puts it, would you want to vacation “at a post-apocalyptic, totalitarian, and dystopian theme park?” You’d also have to consider that the Hunger Games trend won’t last forever, the movies will be completed by 2015, and by the time a theme park is up and running, the franchise could already be yesterday’s news. 

So we’ll see how this all develops, if it ends up developing at all. The Hunger Games franchise should continue to take in a ton of cash whether a theme park ever opens or not, although a Games theme park could one day become a funny footnote in amusement park history if it doesn’t end up coming together.