We could quibble about the details, but all of them are fundamentally last-man-standing competitions.
The Hunger Games was indeed one of them. I didn’t mention it because it’s the most obvious one in current cultural memory (no need for me to point it out) and because Battle Royale came a decade earlier, and Battle Royal half a century before that. The characters’ situation is probably older than printed words.
Even if a competitive game format was unique to the Hindi film, it would be tough to argue that nobody else could have thought of that detail when making their own variation of the same theme. Calling it a “blatant rip-off” of Luck (2009) is quite a stretch.
(Incidentally, the Luck synopsis that I read says it focuses on gambling, not competitive trials or children’s games. A quick look at the video confirms it.)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/battle_royale
I wouldn’t be surprised if the theme also showed up in books that predate all of these films.
Battle Royale is about kids killing each other, not being killed in the course of competitive trials.
If anything, Hunger Games is a bigger culprit for that.
We could quibble about the details, but all of them are fundamentally last-man-standing competitions.
The Hunger Games was indeed one of them. I didn’t mention it because it’s the most obvious one in current cultural memory (no need for me to point it out) and because Battle Royale came a decade earlier, and Battle Royal half a century before that. The characters’ situation is probably older than printed words.
Even if a competitive game format was unique to the Hindi film, it would be tough to argue that nobody else could have thought of that detail when making their own variation of the same theme. Calling it a “blatant rip-off” of Luck (2009) is quite a stretch.
(Incidentally, the Luck synopsis that I read says it focuses on gambling, not competitive trials or children’s games. A quick look at the video confirms it.)