The latest addition to The Hunger Games franchise, dubbed The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, has been met with a mixed reception, and fans and critics seem to be extremely divided on the movie. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes revolves around the 10th Hunger Games as a young Coriolanus Snow falls for tribute Lucy Gray Baird on his journey to becoming the iron-fisted tyrant who rules Panem. Francis Lawrence, who helmed the last three Hunger Games movies, is back in the director’s chair for the spin-off.
Although it’s received the highest audience score of The Hunger Games franchise on Rotten Tomatoes, the critical score is much lower. Fans have enjoyed the new movie enough for the spin-off to nearly make back its production budget in its opening weekend, but it can’t boast the critical acclaim of earlier Hunger Games films. The star-studded cast, which includes Rachel Zegler, Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage, and Hunter Schafer, has been widely praised, but The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has been criticized for its rushed ending and bloated runtime.
The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes’ RT Scores Easily Break Hunger Games’ Record Gap
The gap between The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’ critics’ rating and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is the biggest in The Hunger Games franchise’s history. With a tepid critics’ score of 63% and a much more generous audience score of 91%, the gap between The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’ two Rotten Tomatoes scores is 28%. This is seven times the previous biggest gap between Hunger Games ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, which was just 4% for Mockingjay Part 2.
The gap between the two scores for Catching Fire and Mockingjay Part 1 is just 1%, while the gap between the critics’ score and the audience score for the first Hunger Games movie is 3%. In the cases of all four previous Hunger Games films, the fans and critics were pretty closely aligned in their assessment. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes marks the first time that critics and audiences have been massively polarized in their opinions about a Hunger Games movie.
Why The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes’ Rotten Tomatoes Scores Are So Different
The disparity between the fans and critics’ opinions on The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is similar to the recent divide between the critical and audience response to Five Nights at Freddy’s. Easter eggs aren’t enough to win over critics, but they will win over fans who pick up on them. Diehard Hunger Games fans appreciate that the prequel has filled in the backstory of President Snow, and explained how he became the way he is in the original movies. Some critics felt it wasn’t worth revisiting the world of The Hunger Games, but Hunger Games fans don’t feel the same way.
