Yes, I wonder if there was a connection! I also think that the crazy Capitol fashion lends itself most to cosplay, which might also be a motiviating factor. I was rather surprised when I saw that the official transmedia campaign was designed around the Capitol. It made me wonder if the studio thought through any parallels one might draw between them and the position the Capitol occupies in the Hunger Games diegesis.

Every now and then, agencies will champion unfettered works, like when Deep Focus helped bring back the unofficial Mad Men twitter accounts. However, the C&Ds and DMCA complaints keep flowing.

Something else that struck me while reading this- there’s probably no way to quantify this, but I wonder to what extent the large number of Capitol cosplayers at various premieres/midnight screenings of the film can be credited to the transmedia promotional paratexts’ emphasis on Capitol Couture and culture. There’s something perversely fitting about the studio latching on to the Capitol as the cornerstone of its campaign…but conceptually smart, for all the reasons you list above.

Writing this post, I’ve also come to the realization that perhaps studios don’t entirely understand that fans are happy to go along with multiple iterations of the same plot or concept (after all, that is what fanart and fanfiction is all about). Fans participated in both the fan-made and the official Hunger Games ARG, for example. Where studios might see competition, fans see multiplicity.