The first trailer for The Hunger Games movie is out. It looks simply awesome and seems extremely faithful to the book.

The movie's challenge will be capturing on film all the things in the book that happen in Katniss' head. Her thoughts and strategies during the competition are an essential part of what is going on, but she rarely speaks them out loud. I imagine they will solve a lot of it by just partnering her up with Rue very quickly and then having her find Peeta soon after.

The Hunger Games movie hits theaters at the end of March. Pre-production has already begun on second film in the series, Catching Fire, with a scheduled release date 18 months later, in November of 2013. That says to me that the studio expects the first film to build a larger audience because a mid-November release is a much more high-profile slot than a late-March date. The plan is to take the third/last book in the series, Mockingjay (which, I think, is the weakest of the 3 books), and make it into 2 movies (like Twilight and Harry Potter did). My bet is they will target November 2014 and summer 2015 as release dates for those.

-Jason "of course, everyone thought The Golden Compass would lead to 3 or 4 films, but the movie sucked so bad that only one got made" Evans