Well, The Hunger Games franchise had a good run. The wildly successful series, which will almost certainly clock in at around $3 billion worldwide between all four movies, has come and gone and for a lot of people who love post-apocalyptic stories, they aren’t exactly sure where to look. Yeah, some people are getting their dystopian fix by playing Fallout 4 but ultra-violent video games aren’t for everyone.
Luckily, there are a lot of great dystopian films available for you to track down if you’re still feeling the need to live vicariously through the fictional survivors of an apocalyptic event. Here are some of the best dystopian movies you may not have seen to sate your hunger now that the Games are over.
13A Boy and His Dog
If you like your dystopian futures closer to Fallout than The Hunger Games, then A Boy and His Dog are definitely for you. A young Don Johnson plays a drifter whose only friend is a telepathic dog, as the duo wander around only to find a strange town seemingly frozen in the 1950s. Like we said: this is definitely one for Fallout fans.
12Snowpiercer
If you haven’t seen Snowpiercer you’re missing out on one of the most inventive, violent, stylish dystopian action movies in recent memory. Sure, it shares a few plot twists with other science fiction films, but Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton alone are worth checking this one out for.
11Battle Royale
Did you like the first Hunger Games but wished it was a lot more violent and featured 100% more Japanese actors? Well, Battle Royale is the movie for you. You’ve probably heard of this film if you’re a fan of Hunger Games since that series inevitably gets compared – or accused of ripping off – Battle Royale in every review.
10Death Race 2000
One of the strangest, darkly hilarious post-apocalyptic films you’re likely to find is Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000. We can’t even really begin to explain the plot other than to note that it involves a car race where drivers get points by murdering innocent civilians with their cars, and it features a very young Sly Stallone.
9Sleeper
Who said dystopian films can’t also be hilarious? One of the more underrated films set in the far distant future is Woody Allen’s Sleeper, in which Allen plays a man cryogenically frozen for 200 years only to awake to a much different world than the one he left. By the way, that’s also basically the premise for Fallout 4.
8THX 1138
Does that odd combination of letters and numbers sound familiar? It should, considering director George Lucas slipped it into basically every film he ever did, all in reference to this, his first feature. Robert Duvall stars in this film about a young man becoming increasingly disillusioned in the sterile, dystopian society around him.
7They Live
“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass…and I’m all out of bubblegum.” This ad-libbed line by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper is just one of the many reasons you should seek out John Carpenter’s dystopian satire on consumerism, which also features one of the most brutal fistfights in movie history.
6Metropolis
Yep, we’re going all the way back to 1927 for this one, a silent film from Germany about a dystopian future that’s a pretty scathing look at the class structure in society. At the time, it was the most expensive film ever produced and has recently been restored so it’s worth seeking out.
5On The Beach
One of the lesser-known films on this list, this 1959 movie features a great cast including Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire as apocalyptic survivors in Australia, trying to keep on living even as the resources all around them are quickly drying up.
4Logan’s Run
This is one people have been talking about remaking for years, but never seems to get off the ground. A cult classic, it tells the story of an idyllic domed city where as soon as citizens turn 30, they’re killed to prevent overpopulation. Michael York stars as Logan, an enforcement officer who learns the truth and rebels against the system.
3Idiocracy
Since things have been getting pretty heavy, let’s go back to comedy for a moment with Mike Judge’s under-seen Idiocracy. In this film, Luke Wilson plays an average guy who wakes up 500 years in the future to discover he’s by far the smartest man left alive. It’s a scathing satire of our cultural and intellectual decline.
2Gattaca
Considered something of a flop when it was first released, Gattaca has slowly but surely developed a devoted following. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a man living in a society wherein “perfect” people are conceived through genetic manipulation, with Hawke playing a man born the old fashioned way trying to overcome genetic discrimination.
1Soylent Green
Spoiler alert: Soylent Green is people. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you no doubt know that line from this Charlton Heston film about a dystopian future in which Heston ultimately learns the harsh truth of humanity’s primary food source.
