“The Hunger Games” Viral Review: Pretty Standard Fun

The Hunger Games may have gotten positive ratings across the board, but what of its viral campaign. Yes The Hunger Games had a subtle viral campaign that helped appease fans before the movie’s release, and now that the movie has already been released, the viral sites are officially inactive. From the official website of the Captiol, (how does District 12 get any internet access anyway?), to Effie Trinket’s makeup, the basic necessities of a viral was in The Hunger Games campaign. But how does it rank, hit the jump to find out.

It all started with the Capitol.pn website, with a blurred image that can only be cleared by connecting to your twitter/facebook accounts. The more tweets and hashtags related to the site, the more clear the image got. Basically like the viral site for The Dark Knight Rises to debut the new image of Bane. Is it to late to ask for a Bane-esque Occupy Gotham Viral site?

Just a few days after the site revealed itself to be the offical site for the Capitol, and allowed users to be registered for districts. The site had some pretty fun features, like population, district jobs, and a Capitol news ticker. All things to keep the fans interested before the movie hit theaters.

The following months, the Capitol site gave users the official seals for their districts, allowed users to vote for District mayors. It was all pretty standard viral activity until Lionsgate unveiled the twitter puzzle scavenger hunt.

100 days before the release of The Hunger Games, 100 individual sites (including ours) were given one piece of The Hunger Games movie poster puzzle. Twitter users scoured the twitter world in search of the 100 pieces that would reveal the poster for the movie. Hours after the scavenger hunt began, a twitter user had found all 100 pieces and revealed the poster.

After that, it went all down hill. From promotional ads for Effie Trinket’s makeup to motion posters for faux Panem products, the viral activity for The Hunger Games didn’t have as much impact as it did when it started.

The generic tweet sweepstakes to see The Hunger Games early in your city was launched, and then the movie was released. But in a strange turn of events there was one more piece of the viral campaign that had to be launched. And it was pretty much one of the best things about. Citizens of Panem were given identification cards or DIPs (District Identification Pass). Lionsgate and CafePress partnered to offer Hunger Games fans their own DIPs when they register with The Capitol. It was really cool to be honest, complete with you photos, you home district, and a QR code.

Grade: B-