THE HUNGER GAMES GETS ITS BOYS

Not white-washing, perhaps... but a minor scrub of ethnic cleansing!  Mwuh huh huh...

I sent this to a couple of friends who have read the book.  I wonder how they'll react.

EDIT:  Elisabeth, my friend agrees with your take on the casting seeming more appropriate if they were switched.

Peeta is supposed to be a sort of quiet, inscrutable loner, so it looks like this kid might work.   Helmsworth looks a little too traditionally "HEROIC", but I'll reserve judgment until the second film, because Gale is a pretty minor character in the first book.

They're going to have to work hard to make all three leads look poverty-stricken and malnourished, though.  

I've been listening to the audiobook for The Hunger Games, and I may simply have projected these casting choices onto what I heard, but this casting seems OK to me. 

While these casting choices aren't too terrible, I lost a chunk of respect for Collins after her interview with Ross about the casting of Katniss. It was the same deflection that infuriated me deeply during The Last Airbender, and her reassurances about supporting characters fall utterly flat for me because the other other significant persons of color in the film will be Rue, who is fairly minor in the scheme of things and is the sacrificial inspiration that rejuvinates the hero, and one of the contestants, a boring Noble Savage stereotype if I've ever read one in YA literature.

Hailee Steinfeld would have been perfect, although I understand why they went for someone over 18.  Still, Steinfeld looks much younger, thereby retaining the shock in the film of seeing kids engaging in these brutal games, whereas Lawrence, her great performance in Winter's Bone notwithstanding, has a look that's a bit too matured, even for someone as tough as Katniss.

Also, this is slightly OT, but I wonder how Ross is going to adapt those mutations from the end of the book, arguably the silliest and least effective moment?

Collins gotta play the game!

Yeah, I did a bit of a double-take at the mutations too.  Hahahhah.