So, like none of these folk read The Running Man then?
Or many of the hundred times this idea has been used in Sci-fi.
This was my first version:
And that is pretty much just a ripoff of the movie The Running Man.
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.)
They’re both just rip offs of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel “10 Little Indians.”
Now known as “And Then There Were None.”
10 Little Indians was actually the second title for the book. The first one was worse.
Great mystery though.
