'The Hunger Games' Scenes That Were Too Dark To Make It From Book To Film

Just like in the book, Katniss and Peeta face giant gentically engineered wolf-dogs at the end of their first Hunger Games. What the movie doesn't include is that these mutts are given the same eyes as the Games' fallen tributes. One of the mutts kills Cato, and Katniss and Peeta are forced to take shelter in the Cornucopia as they listen to him being torn apart. 

The dogs in the movies are still monstrous, but they're wiped of the genetic tinkering that gave them their human qualities in the book. While this may feel like a small detail, it does a lot to illustrate the utter disrespect and cruelty the Capitol shows to these children they've forced to kill each other for sport. 

In both the book and movie adaptation of Mockingjay, Messalla meets an untimely end. The movie makes his death a lot less gruesome than the books, though. In the film, he steps into a beam of light which shatters his body into pieces. The book takes this scene much further: the beam of light traps him as skin melts off his body, all while Katniss watches in horror. 

Early in the first book, Katniss and Gale watch helplessly as a young man and a red-headed girl get abducted by one of the Capitol's hovercrafts. The man is killed instantly, but not before he is impaled with a giant harpoon. More troubling is the fate of the girl who later shows up in the Capitol as an "Avox," a servant who has their tongue cut out as punishment for their crime.

Although the Avoxes do make several tacit appearances in the films (and Katniss does make a reference to tongues being cut out at one point), we never fully understand the horror of this situation. The scene in the book makes the fate of the red-headed Avox personal, and it illustrates just how gruesome the Capitol's tactics are. 

Although Peeta does appear gaunt and broken during his latter interview in Mockingjay - Part 1, the movie is not as graphic in depicting his treatment. In both the novel and the film, Peeta breaks from his script during the interview to warn District 13 of an upcoming bomb attack. Where the book differs is that he is savagely beaten on camera in front of Katniss and all of Panem following this outburst. The movie implies he is about to be punished but stops short of showing it. 

The final battle between the Capitol and District 13 is just as important to the movie version of Mockingjay - Part 2 as it is to its source material, and Katniss is an active participant in both. However, while Katniss is badly burned in the movie, her wounds aren't as severe and lasting as they are in the book. Collins describes her flesh as sensitive, permanently scarred, and often bleeding. 

It's the trilogy's final, cruel irony, that in the end, the "Girl on Fire" becomes a burn victim. 

In one of the more random and harrowing acts of violence in the original version of Mockingjay, Katniss and her allies are hiding out in the Capitol when they come upon what appears to be an abandoned house. When a woman surprises them by calling for help, Katniss shoots her on instinct. 

Although it's understandable why the filmmakers didn't want to include this moment for fear of what it would make the audience think about Katniss, it is a key moment in the novel. This scene shows just how much the uprising against the Capitol has changed Katniss, and how polarized the people on both sides have become.