Alan Ritchson’s turn as Gloss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, back in 2013, is getting another look right now. Watching the sequel again, you can see an early version of the actor who’d later end up leading Prime Video’s Reacher.
Ritchson plays Gloss, a Victor from District 1 and a Career tribute thrown back into the Quarter Quell alongside his sister, Cashmere. That puts him in direct conflict with Katniss and Peeta, and it also drives home one of the Capitol’s ugliest habits: even its favored winners are still expendable. Gloss doesn’t get much dialogue, but Ritchson makes him feel dangerous anyway. He’s physically imposing, controlled, efficient. Looking back, it’s hard not to see that as an early sign he was headed for leading-man roles.
If you’re going back through Ritchson’s career after Smallville, Titans, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, Catching Fire is well worth revisiting. It’s still the critical and commercial peak of The Hunger Games series, pulling in about $865 million worldwide against a $130 to $140 million budget. The politics hit harder, the emotions land better, and the movie now feels like an early marker for the kind of rise Ritchson would later have with Reacher, especially since that version of the character is much closer to the books than the Tom Cruise Reacher films were.
You can catch Ritchson now in Reacher on Prime Video. But The Hunger Games: Catching Fire still holds up as one of the biggest modern sci-fi franchises he passed through before he became a household name, even if the argument over the all-time greatest still belongs to series like Star Wars and Star Trek.
Author: Jesús Bosque
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