The battle royale is such a satisfying setup for a movie; it’s kind of surprising we haven’t seen more of them over the years. The concept is simple: drop a group of people in a secluded location, throw a few weapons and exploding collars in the mix, and let nature take its course.
It’s an idea that dates back at least as far as William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. These days, you can see it in everything from Squid Game to Fortnite. With Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale about to celebrate its 25th anniversary and a new version of Stephen King’s The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright, set for release very soon, what better time to look back at ten of the best movies to utilise the concept?
Read on to discover more about them and hit the guide below to find them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
10. Battle Royale 2: Requiem (2003)
Granted, Battle Royale 2: Requiem had a mightily tough act to follow—but even with respect to the movie’s troubled production, the director, Kinji Fukasaku, died of cancer, having filmed only one scene, at which point his son, who co-wrote both movies, stepped in to complete it—it’s a hard one to fully rally for.
All that said, this is a wild curiosity and features surely the most batshit use of rugby in the history of cinema. What can we say: if you really love the first one, or similarly unhinged movies from the era (Miike’s Happiness of the Katakuris comes to mind), it’s probably worth checking out!
9. Death Race (2008)
Journey to one of the weirder corners of film Reddit and you’ll probably find a bro posting an essay on why Paul WS Anderson is less a hack than a misunderstood auteur. I haven’t bought into that theory just yet (the truth is probably somewhere in the middle), but his 2008 movie Death Race certainly ain’t bad.
The movie reimagines Roger Corman’s 1975 exploitation classic Death Race 2000 as a kind of battle royale movie—and one with Jason Statham in the lead role. For the story, Anderson moves the action to a prison, where a group of inmates fight to the death to earn their freedom. This is pulpy, late-’00s trash, but with a distinctly dystopian flavour—imagine a mid-tier blend of Mad Max and The Hunger Games and you’ll know where to set your expectation levels.
8. Guns Akimbo (2020)
The most recent entry on our list is Guns Akimbo, a movie in which Daniel Radcliffe plays a video game developer who wakes up with guns bolted to his hands and a target on his head—and if that setup sounds like your kind of thing, this might be the one for you.
The movie has some vague things to say about the dark web (like many movies on this list, the fights are watched by paying customers), but it’s more of a wild ride than a satire—imagine a similar mood to movies like Nobody or Novocaine, and you’ll know what you’re in for.
7. The Belko Experiment (2016)
As much as we love the originators, it’s great when a movie comes along with a new spin on familiar material. The Belko Experiment does just that, taking a battle royale setup but moving it to a building in Colombia where 80 American office workers (uniform white shirts and all) find themselves in a fight to the death. This is a sharply written, corporate-satire riff on the genre and features a surprisingly stacked cast—including David Dastmalchian, Adria Arjona and John C. McGinley.
The movie was directed by Greg McLean, the Australian horror filmmaker behind the brutal Wolf Creek movies, but, more interestingly, was written by none other than James Gunn—so if you like Gunn’s earlier work (think Slither, Dawn of the Dead), you’ll wanna check this one out.
6. The Running Man (1987)
This one is a tiny bit of a cheat, as some people would say Stephen King’s The Running Man is more appropriately described as a cat-and-mouse movie. That said, there’s no denying its influence in the battle royale genre—certainly on plenty of movies on this list.
The 1987 original, directed by Paul Michael Glaser, stars the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger as a soldier who gets locked up for not following orders. He then breaks out but soon finds himself fighting for his life on a brutal reality TV show. This is one for fans of late ‘80s Arnie—especially movies like Predator and Total Recall. Make sure to catch it before the new one comes out!
5. Series 7: The Contenders (2001)
Series 7: The Contenders just about pips The Running Man on this list as, even though it’s clearly influenced by it, the story adheres much closer to the key battle royale theme: ordinary, randomly-selected people, fighting against each other in a fight to the death. The twist is that it’s shot like a late-’90s reality TV show, giving a unique vibe to the brutal satire.
This inventive movie was the directorial debut of Daniel Minahan, the filmmaker behind the Deadwood movie, as well as the Jacob Elordi-starring On Swift Horses, so if you’re a fan of those, you might want to check it out.
4. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)
Catching Fire is the best sequel in the Hunger Games franchise and not just because it features Philip Seymour Hoffman—though of course, that certainly helps. The key reason, which really should be a no-brainer for the series, is that most of the running time is focused on what happens in the arena—something that later instalments often failed to do.
The movie sees Katniss return to the games to fight again, this time against a selection of past winners that includes Jena Malone’s Johanna Mason and Jefferey Wright’s Beetee. But of course, Hoffman’s Plutarch Heavensbee, a Gamemaker and a rebel, is the movie’s MVP—especially if you like seeing the actor in big-budget movies, like Mission: Impossible III.
3. The Hunt (2019)
The Hunt is another movie on this list that, like The Running Man, comes at the battle royale setup from a slightly different angle. In this one, a loose adaptation of Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, a group of regular people wake up gagged in the woods and soon discover they’re being hunted for sport. The odds, as you might have guessed, are heavily stacked against them—but with a little cooperation, they start fighting back.
The movie stirred up some controversy upon release as it depicted the villains as liberal elites, but I think that built-in provocation only adds to the fun. This is a good old-fashioned exploitation movie, and if you like horror films where wealthy people behave badly and get their comeuppance (like Ready or Not or The Cabin in the Woods), you’ll want to check it out.
2. The Hunger Games (2012)
Adapting a wildly successful YA novel—especially one with a devoted fanbase—is always going to be a daunting task, but Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games was basically a home run: a movie that managed to achieve the unlikely feat of pleasing the converted while bringing in a whole new group of fans.
Despite its PG-13 rating, this is a movie that fans of the battle royale genre immediately fell in love with—especially anyone who had enjoyed Jennifer Lawrence’s work in movies like Silver Linings Playbook and Winter’s Bone and wanted to see the actress in a franchise leading role.
1. Battle Royale (2000)
Last-man-standing stories, even ones with political themes, had existed in movies and literature long before Battle Royale came along, but Kinji Fukasaku’s masterpiece quickly blew them out of the water. This is a movie with a tremendous amount of style and subversive energy, not to mention a haunting subtext that still resonates today—there’s a reason why it’s still considered the pinnacle of the genre.
Naturally, if you’re a fan of Squid Game and The Hunger Games, I can’t recommend it enough. The same goes for fans of Japanese horror from that era—think Audition, Ring, Ichi the Killer, and all those other dark classics.
