I read that The Hunger Games was supposed to pull in a lot more boy viewers than the Twilight movies. Don't remember if they expected it to appeal to boys as much as girls, though.

eta: Huh. Jessica's link seems to contradict what I read.

Yeah, I've read a lot of uninformed complainants assuming that any YA book with a female protagonist must be Twilight-esque, and that Twilight is effectively identical to the whims of teenaged girls.

I suspect that the period during which you're least likely to get entertainment gender crossover is during adolescence, but I have nothing to back that up with. Just that kids younger than that don't care yet, and that adults have made more peace with their gender identity, but that being a teenager can be fraught with considerations of "appropriate" gender behaviour.

Harry Potter has a more balanced gender makeup, plus I suspect, as with many things, it's more acceptable for chicks to poach nominally male-branded territory than vice versa.

Harry Potter has a white het male title character - he's the default. (He's British, but that's apparently less of a marketing hurdle than if he were black or a girl. This is why I have Tivo and AdBlock.)

OH MY GOD PEOPLE...I just read the article on Jezebel about people being appalled that a black girl was cast as Rue.

I mean, I can't even...

/hates peoples

OH MY GOD PEOPLE...I just read the article on Jezebel about people being appalled that a black girl was cast as Rue.

Wait, what? I thought the book mentioned her "brown skin" a lot, which, from the point of view of someone like Katniss with "olive skin," would seem to pretty clearly mean black.

Yeah, what? She's pretty clearly written as black, as far as I remember.

The teenage girls that were at my showing were scary. There was lots of whistling and giggling at inappropriate times. Like the shot just after games start where they pan over all the kids that already died? There was a group in the back that was laughing and clapping.

Exactly. And it's part of the whole socio-political-economic description of Panem; she and Thresh are from what's now the South, and it's been returned to black people working the fields.

But apparently many readers pictured her as JonBenet, and "her death didn't mean as much" if she's black. [link]

I just read the Jezebel piece, too. I want to be sick. I didn't think I could be more appalled at Twitter than after the Grammys with the Rihanna/Chris Brown stuff, but I was wrong.

(I mention the "from the point of view of someone with olive skin" part because I remember the character of Shirley in the last few Anne of Green Gables books, who is consistently described as "the little brown boy" and having "brown skin," but since this is within the context of a family where half the people have red hair and freckles and most of the rest are described as having black hair and ivory skin, I figure that, in that context, "brown skin" just means a darkish white kid who tans rather than burns in the sun. But when Katniss is describing herself as having olive skin, and Rue and Thresh are definitely described as darker than her, that doesn't leave much room for Rue and Thresh to just be darkish white people.)