There is a danger in playing to the fanbase on something like "The Hunger Games," because ultimately you don't need to convince the fans.  You need to convince people who have never read one of the books, and when you're kicking off a campaign, first impressions can be very important.

Lionsgate premiered the motion poster for "Hunger Games" today, and it's an interesting first image to share with an audience.  Obviously, if you've read the series then you understand the importance of the Mockingjay pin, and you know what it means to Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the lead character in the series.  But if you haven't, I'm curious what you'd make of the image.

Lionsgate has some time to start to really teach people about the world of Panem and the idea of the annual contest between the 12 Districts that make up the country, each of them forced to hand over two young people as tributes who will fight to the death.  This first film is the easiest to explain because it's all focused on that contest.  Over the course of the next two stories, the story becomes something far larger and more sprawling, and Lionsgate will be able to build onto whatever foundation they lay this time in selling those movies.

I hope they're paying attention to campaigns like "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" just as closely as they pay attention to campaigns for "City Of Ember" or "The Golden Compass," because it seems like for every book series that is successfully ported over to film, there are at least two or three series that got it wrong and never made it past the first film.  Which one of those scenarios are going to play out with this one?

Poster via Yahoo! Movies.

 

 

We'll find out in about eight months.

"The Hunger Games" opens March 23, 2012.