Hunger Games is expected to do $100 M its first weekend March 23. The story features a female heroine clearly modeled on My Fair Lady as follows
teens fighting for survival in a government-controlled world that hosts annual televised games in which young participants are forced to kill their opponents.
No wait I am thinking Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison in 1965, a social mood high. 1965 as the end of an 18 year up cycle. My Fair Lady one year and the Sound of Music the nest were perfect exponents of positive social mood.
While markets are up now, Hunger sounds more like 2008's The Dark Knight, The City Has no Hope. While the movie is compared with the vampire saga Twilight, other than a female lead, it seems to me this is not the proper parallel at all. Similar parallels in plot would be
The Running Man - this article lists several parallels, clearly I am not the first one to see the similarities
Surviving the Game was about a group of men that kidnap a homeless man to hunt him for sport. The plot is little different form Hunger Games. But, Surviving came out in 1994 when the mood was expansive and positive. Hunger on the other hand is an echo of 2008'sThe Dark Knight when the Joker relentlessly stalks an innocent city. Now vampires and zombies are all over television, movies and books, so the time is right for this sort of story. World wide people are fighting back at governments from North Africa to Spain to Russian, where 100,000 recently took to the streets in zero degree weather to protest the government.
Alien in 1979 is another example of timing and social mood. The second oil embargo had hit, America was in a malaise according to no less than the President. The story of a lone woman, an orphan, and a cat fighting an unknown powerful force resonated with a public struggling with their own forces of oil embargoes and double digit inflation. The story on screen resonated with the mood. Bingo, a series was born. Aliens in 1982 was the all too rare example of a sequel as good as the original as Ripley has Marine backups but faces a horde or Aliens.
The Prisoner was another well timed epic of individual versus government. Debuting in 1967-67 it ushered in the long 1966-1982/4 bear market. It probably resonated with a nation increasingly uncomfortable being forced to fight the VIetnam War amid considerable protest.
1967's Good Bad Ugly, is really the same story. Three unlikely individuals search for buried treasure amidst a horrific civil war which would take some 636,000 lives. The Draft Riots depcited in Scorceses's Gangs of New York depicts people conscripted against their will to fight an unpopular war.
Hunger is coming to the screen at just about the same time Dark Knight hit debuted in 2008. Then the stock averages had moved higher and higher. But the mood was increasingly negative. Mood won the day as the markets plunged that fall. Hmm, could a social mood top be far off?
Socionomics holds that exogenous mood determines societal events. Negative mood resultes in the stock market lows of last fall. Now mood has moved the opposite direction with some 90% of SPX stocks above their 50 day Moving Averages. In August-October that number was well less than 10%. Mood is ever changing and its consequences and effects are all around us. The trick to to get
'In the Mood' to take adbantage of such swings.
Professor Elam 
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