Lionsgate teases its Hunger Games prequel movie at CinemaCon

CinemaCon is an event for movie studios to tease their upcoming slates to theater owners and media insiders. Lionsgate, the studio behind a wealth of great movies ranging from John Wick to The Terminator and hundreds in between, also brought us the popular Hunger Games series of films, based on the books by Suzanne Collins. Those four movies were a monstrous hit, pulling in over $3 billion globally and helping launch the career of actor Jennifer Lawrence, who played lead heroine Katniss Everdeen.

So of course, if there’s a way to make more Hunger Games films, it’s gonna happen. Per Variety, a very short stinger was shown during the Lionsgate presentation for a Hunger Games prequel film; we pan over icy tree branches with superimposed gold text that reads, “The world will discover… who is a songbird… and who is a snake.” No actual footage from the film was shown, and thus far not a single cast member has been announced, so presumably this thing is still pretty early in pre-production.

Back in 2020, author Suzanne Collins published a prequel novel set 50 years before the events of The Hunger Games called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It was actually announced that Lionsgate was going to make a movie out of the prequel book before it had even been published, but this tease at CinemaCon is our first real bit of proof that it’s really in the works.

A Hunger Games prequel movie about a young President Snow is on the way

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows a young Coriolanus Snow long before he became the totalitarian leader of Panem. Here, Snow is chosen as a mentor for one of the contestants for the 10th annual Hunger Games, an event which sees chosen children from each of Panem’s 12 districts fight to the death for a chance at extra rations of food for their families. Katniss, for reference, competes in the 74th Hunger Games, so there’s an awful lot of ground to cover between then and the original films.

Snow was played by Donald Sutherland in all four of the Hunger Games movies. It’s unknown if he’ll return for the prequel, but given that the version that the character is much younger in the new story, it seems unlikely unless there’s some sort of flash-forward sequence.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that another Hunger Games movie is on the way, but for some reason I find myself giving this announcement the side-eye. Maybe it’s the fact that the third Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay, was split into two films that felt like less than the sum of their parts. The big question to my mind is whether this prequel movie will actually add something substantial to the film series. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will be out on November 17, 2023.

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