The Hunger Games

Lionsgate originally announced that Danny Elfman and T-Bone Burnett would score The Hunger Games, with Burnett also acting as the film's executive music producer to produce songs for the soundtrack. Due to scheduling conflicts, Elfman was replaced by James Newton Howard. The score album was released on March 26, 2012.

Arcade Fire also contributed to the movie's original score. The group composed the grand, fascistic-inspired, ominous Panem national anthem, entitled "Horn of Plenty", an important and signature leitmotif appearing throughout the film. "We were interested in making music that would be more integral in the movie, just as a mental exercise," Butler, who co-wrote the song with Chassagne, explained. "And there's an anthem that runs throughout the books, the national anthem of the fascist Capitol. So as a thought experiment, we tried to write what that might sound like. It's like the Capitol's idea of itself, basically." He further added that "it's not a pop song or anything. More of an anthem that could be playing at a big sporting event like the [Hunger] Games. So we did a structure for that, and then James Newton Howard made a movie-score version of it that happens in several places in the film."Arcade Fire's Panem national anthem has received strong reviews. According to Spin, "'Horn of Plenty' pulls off the neat feat of sounding both exactly like Arcade Fire and exactly like a futuristic anthem. It still has one foot in the band's uncorrupted neighborhoods, but another is up on the podium at the end of Star Wars accepting an Olympic gold medal or something. Horns blare, a choir booms, strings swell, the martial percussion steals the show, and we just realized how much we love Big Brother."

The film also featured a rather obscure analog track from the 1970s composed by Laurie Spiegel for its "cornucopia scene", as well as music by Steve Reich, Ólafur Arnalds, and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. These do not appear on the soundtrack or score releases.