How Hunger Games Did Ads

With the Hunger Games ads pretty much everywhere and the movie opening in four days, the New York Times found how the people at Lionsgate were able to make a low budget film (in Hollywood) seem huge with keeping the anti violence theme in the books.

"Last summer, the Lionsgate team, including Nina Jacobson, a producer, and Joe Drake, then the studio’s top movie executive, started debating how to handle the movie’s subject. The usual move would have been to exploit imagery from the games in TV commercials. How else would men in particular get excited about the movie? But Mr. Palen was worried.
“This book is on junior high reading lists, but kids killing kids, even though it’s handled delicately in the film, is a potential perception problem in marketing,” he said.One morning, he floated a radical idea: what about never showing the games at all in the campaign? Some team members were incredulous; after all, combat scenes make up more than half the movie. “There was a lot of, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t see how we can manage that,’ ” Mr. Palen recalled.
Eventually, he prevailed. “Everyone liked the implication that if you want to see the games you have to buy a ticket,” he said. Boundaries were also established involving how to position plot developments; in the movie, 24 children fight to the death until one wins, but “we made a rule that we would never say ‘23 kids get killed,’ ” Mr. Palen said. “We say ‘only one wins.’ ” The team also barred the phrase “Let the games begin.”“This is not about glorifying competition; these kids are victims,” Mr. Palen said. A few months later, when a major entertainment magazine planned to use “Let the Games Begin” as the headline on a “Hunger Games” cover, Ms. Fontaine, traveling in London, frantically worked her cellphone until editors agreed to change it."

I think they did an amazing job with the promotion of the movie!