Rumors spread in 2006 that a remake was imminent, hard on the trail of successful reimaginings of films like "Ju-On" and "Internal Affairs." The initial rumors suggested that New Line Cinema had purchased the rights to "Battle Royale" for audiences in the United States. But according to an article that followed in the New York Times, this wasn't quite true. New Line was in the final stages of purchasing the rights, and the remake producer-king Roy Lee was on board. Yet the deal had not yet been closed, and the Times even suggested that rights-holder Toei had been spooked by the earlier leak. But in the years to come, the film's producers would confess that the project was long dead, a casualty of current events and the changing. Two events killed the remake plans. The first was the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, the deadliest school shooting in the history of the United States at the time. Mass student violence had already been a sore point in the country, with the ghost of Columbine still in the media's rearview mirror. Virginia Tech brought that specter roaring back into the light. Already in poor taste, the idea of producing a film about students killing each other immediately became even more gauche. The second was the release of the novel "The Hunger Games" in 2008. That franchise soon supplanted "Battle Royale" in the minds of audiences in the United States at that time. It was feared by Toei that audiences would see Battle Royale as just another copy of Games. Lee and his production studio, Vertigo Entertainment, were forced to put the project on the back-burner until audiences were ready for it again.
