I love the Hunger Games books. Certainly, the fans are there. They're grown enormously since the beginning. When I first brought the books to Lionsgate, they had sold about 150,000 copies, which is a very good result for a YA book. And to their credit, Lionsgate was very excited and committed to the movie, from the beginning.

The most powerful decision-making part of the audience is women. Boys have a lot of impact on the industry, but it's often women who impact what stories get made.

Ultimately, only audiences decide what's a franchise.

[On the racial backlash about Hunger Games casting]: "People should have ignored the five racist idiots.

Deb Zane, our casting director on the Hunger Games was very sanguine, from the beginning, about just blocking out what everybody else says that they want.

I think that one of the greatest perspectives that I have, from being a buyer for my whole career until I became a producer, is that I have a pretty good understanding of the buyers mentality.

We both [with Suzanne Collins ] felt strongly that you wouldn't want to age up the characters, no matter the age of the actors playing the roles. They should be playing the age that they are in the [Hunger Games] books. It would let people off the hook, if you said, "Well, instead of 12 to 18, why don't you make them 18 to 25 or 16 to 21?" If you don't stay true to the horror of the fact that they are 12 to 18, you're not doing justice to the book.