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In the book, Katniss and her partners received several pieces of bread during the course of the game. The amount and type of bread serves as a countdown for a start of the rebellion.

Bread seemed so innocent, yet was used to communicate between mentor and tribute for the start of a rebellion in the 75th Hunger Games.

This was a significant detail in the book, so why did they chose to leave it out in the movie?

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    why waste time on boring moss colored bread props when u have a 130M budget and can do poisonous fog & vamp monkeys?
    – user68762
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 13:40

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Books and movies are fundamentally different media, and require different storytelling techniques

Movies are better at conveying some things, like action or background events, but much worse at conveying other details, such as private character thoughts and expository details.

Also, movies have much less space for content than books do. Your average 100k word book does not fit in a 2 hour movie without significant trimming. Some things have to be cut.

The bread communication was intrinsically difficult to portray
The whole point of the bread was that the characters were not free to speak openly. That means that we would need some kind of internal monologue in order to explain the significance of the bread. An internal monologue or narration isn't something you can just add for one detail - you'd need to use it throughout the story, and it would significantly change the feel of the movie.

Something had to be cut for space reasons, so they chose this detail that was ill-suited for the screen as one of the cut items.

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    "An internal monologue or narration isn't something you can just add for one detail - you'd need to use it throughout the story, and it would significantly change the feel of the movie." Case in point: David Lynch's Dune. There's a reason that it's so rarely done in film.
    – Thunderforge
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 14:20
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    @Thunderforge Overall, this was the biggest difference between the books and the films in this case. The books spend so much time inside Katniss' head and all of that had to be left out of the movies because they didn't want use a voiceover narration. It had the unfortunate side-effect of making her performance seem a bit stiff and emotionless, but this is actually book-accurate because she had to conceal her emotions for the sake of the games. It just doesn't translate very well to film.
    – Darrel Hoffman
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 15:06
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    I agree that books and movies are different, a book can exploit so much more details than a movie but in this case, if I remember well, the amount and type of bread was explained by Beetee after they got out of the arena. So that's why I wondered why they didn't translated it to the movie.
    – Panchoa
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 15:19
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    @Panchoa I think that this answer is correct, but in this specific case there's also another factor. The point of the bread signals (plot-wise) is that they're extremely difficult to notice. For something to matter in a movie, it needs to be noticed by the audience (or at least be notice-able). It would be a challenge to make the bread, and its importance, clear to the audience throughout the story while also having it be subtle enough to be effective within the story. Perhaps it could be done, but it might be very challenging to do so and not worth the effort of the people making the movie.
    – Upper_Case
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 17:19
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    @Upper_Case But they have a 130M budget!!! IMO they should've done it.
    – Miriam
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 18:17

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