When asked to name the best movie soundtrack of their teen years, twentysomethings often pick something from the Twilight franchise—which, fair! Those movies gave us “Roslyn” by St. Vincent and Bon Iver, and “Decode” by Paramore; there were some veritable bops written for those garbage films. But for my money, there’s a different woman-led, YA novel-adapted franchise that deserves to be in this conversation: The Hunger Games.
For a quartet of films about impoverished teens forcibly murdering other impoverished teens—and then revolting against this edict, leading to the death of even more impoverished teens—the fact that their soundtracks were a haven for some of the mid-2010s’ biggest pop acts is bizarre, in hindsight. Did the story of a 16-year-old (Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence) volunteering to die in the place of her younger sister resonate with known older sister Taylor Swift, who recorded two separate tracks for the first movie? What is it about a film in which a young woman watches her best friend (Liam Hemsworth’s Gale Hawthorne) be whipped in a public square that screams “Coldplay”?
The answer apparently offered by Republic Records, the major label that produced the four films’ soundtracks, was “everything.” Because as much as we remember The Hunger Games for the series’ gripping story, Jennifer Lawrence’s excellent, star-making performance as Katniss, and the persistent, to-me-inscrutable thirst for her boyfriend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), its music became just as much of a defining factor. So much so, in fact, that the new film adaptation of its prequel is, in many ways, a musical. It’s not a jukebox musical, either—The Hunger Games has always been chock full of songs written and performed by its characters too.
