Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson knew immediately that Suzanne Collins’ prequel book The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes would become a movie. Lionsgate found great success in adapting the original Hunger Games trilogy for the big screen in the 2010s. After splitting The Hunger Games: Mockingjay into two parts, the studio put out four films starring Jennifer Lawrence in consecutive years. The popularity of the franchise was high, as the four movies collectively made nearly $3 billion worldwide at the box office.
The success of the Hunger Games movies originally generated talks of possible prequels, but none materialized until 2019 when Collins announced The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Lionsgate announced plans to turn the prequel novel centered around a young Coriolanus Snow into a movie before it was even released. That decision hardly came as a surprise considering how popular the Hunger Games brand became, and that’s why Lionsgate immediately knew they wanted to make The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes a movie.
As part of New York Comic Con, the Hunger Games franchise held a virtual panel with producer Nina Jacobson and publisher David Levithan. The panel consisted of them discussing how they turned the hit young adult novels into one of the biggest movie franchises of all-time. But, they also discussed plans for the upcoming adaptation of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. According to Jacobson, it was always the plan to turn the Hunger Games prequel book into a movie.
Yes, I knew unequivocally that we would want to adapt it. It presented different challenges than the others, [this is] a bigger book, a longer book, but I knew for sure that yes there was no way we wouldn’t want to see it adapted and on the big screen.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set over 50 years before the events of Katniss Everdeen’s story, with a teenage Coriolanus Snow at the center. It revolves around the 10th Hunger Games, which are far less elaborate than the ones depicted in the movies, and follows Snow as he becomes a mentor to one of the 24 tributes. More specifically, he is assigned to the girl tribute from District 12, the beautiful, outgoing, and talented Lucy Gray. The movie adaptation has officially been in the works for the last year, but Lucy Gray and young Snow have yet to be cast.
Despite the mixed reception to the book, Lionsgate is still moving forward with plans to make The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes as a movie. They recently announced that Franchise Lawrence is returning to direct after helming the last three films, with Michael Arndt (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) returning to write the script. It’s no secret that the Hunger Games franchise fizzled out last time around, but hopefully Lawrence, Arndt, and Jacobson can recapture some of the magic with their adaptation of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
