How a film audience responds to a character is often subconsciously based on how a character looks and what they say or do.
Film makers are forced to condense a lot of material into a short time. They rely on a fixed, exaggerated image of a person as a kind of summary between them and the audience – or films would end up 10 hours long. (Ain’t nobody got time for that!)
Stereotypical female
A lead fantasy woman on film is seldom unattractive, overweight or disabled. The character of Katniss in the book is half-starved but the actress on-screen looked healthy and beautiful despite the fact she was from a poor district. Women are stereotypically on-screen to be looked at and admired for their physical perfection. The Hunger Games film played around with the whole idea of image and we saw Katniss being cleansed and prettied up so that she would appeal to the TV audience for the Hunger Games around Panem. Coincidentally that made her more attractive for the cinema-going audience who had paid their money to watch this product.
