CW Wants A Battle Royale TV Series

The Hunger Games is kind of riding high right now. What with the movie being a smash hit and the books being what they are, people are loving themselves some murdering children. Now it seems that The CW, the network behind Gossip Girl and Smallville, have jumped on the bandwagon. They are currently in talks to have a TV series made based on the 2000 Japanese movie Battle Royale.

Battle Royale, based on a book by Koushun Takami, is set in a dystopic future where Japan is under the rule of a totalitarian government. Every year one high school is chosen by lottery and sent to an island where they have to kill each other. Each student is given a bag with some supplies and a random item. Could be a weapon or it could be some binoculars, who knows. The students also have on metallic collars. If they refuse to kill someone, the collar explodes. If they wander into a randomly selected danger spot on the island, the collar explodes. If they try to take off the collar, the collar explodes. If more than one person is left alive when the contest ends, every collar explodes.

This could make a good TV show. Have each season focus on a different group of students in the contest and see all the horrible, messed up shit they do to each other. HBO could probably do something great with it. The CW, on the other hand, I have less faith in.

Battle Royale isn’t the only young person murder contest show CW is working on. They also have The Selection, a show about woman in a competition to see who will become the new queen of some war-torn nation. The show was described as an “epic romance set 300 years in the future,” so I don’t see how that could possibly go wrong.