Songbirds

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ ending. If you thought you left your Hunger Games phase behind in 2015, it’s time to pull out your Mockingjay pin. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the highly anticipated prequel to the original trilogy, is finally out in theaters. Fans already enjoyed the book upon its release in 2020, but now they can see the rise of President Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) on the big screen. While fans were…

Film: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Dinklage, Viola Davis, Josh Andrés Rivera, Fionnula FlanaganDirector: Francis LawrenceRating: 2.5/5Runtime: 157 mins This prequel takes us back 64 years showcasing a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) before he becomes the tyrannical president of Panem. In this he is a love-struck teen who breaks the rules to save Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) a District 12 Tribute, a member of…

The latest silver screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ brilliantly designed world of Panem is finally here in the shape of Francis Lawrence’s new movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The prequel, set 65 years before the original trilogy, is centered around a young Coriolanus Snow (played by Tom Blyth) as he struggles in the war-ravaged Capitol and competes to win a cash prize that will turn his life around. His task? Making the Hunger Games appealing and increasing viewership. Although he’s…

Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler star as Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird in Lionsgate's "Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes."Lionsgate"Snow lands on top."It's the mantra of the main character Coriolanus Snow in the upcoming "Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" and the hope of its distributor Lionsgate.The prequel to the $3 billion Hunger Games franchise, based on the 2020 novel of the same name by author Suzanne Collins, is a standalone film set some 60 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteers…

Long before there was a Katniss Everdeen, future victor of the Hunger Games and Panem’s No. 1 revolutionary icon, there was Lucy Gray Baird — a young woman who also hailed from District 12 and found herself recruited as a tribute in a fascist world’s annual entertainment death march. She had a beautiful voice, a steel backbone, and enough wits to have the odds ever in her favor for the 10th edition of the Hunger Games. They were a little different back then — no one had figured out how to employ genetically modified…

Nearly a decade following The Hunger Games franchise concluding with the explosive Mockingjay ending, the film series continues this weekend with the dystopian world of Panem going backwards in time to the 10th Hunger Games. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows a much more primitive version of the games, but when the Hunger Games prequel’s cast imagined themselves in the arena, more cast members than you might expect were looking to the methods of one Peeta Mellark. When CinemaBlend attended The Ballad of Songbirds…

The Hunger Games time is nigh, and soon, we’ll all be gathering in the cinema room with our mockingbird pins, ready to revive our teenagehood in Panem – figuratively speaking, of course. This time, the film The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes will surround the tenth Hunger Games, marking the first instance our trilogy’s antagonist enters into contact with the deadly games. We never expected to see Coriolanus Snow’s backstory, and although it’s not the story we asked for, it is the story we didn’t know we needed. Nearly…

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a “ballad,” but you can’t call it “The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes” now, can you? Concision was never much in favor in the four “Hunger Games” films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015’s “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2.” The intervening years have done nothing to shrink the ambitions of this unapologetically gaudy dystopic series where the brutal deaths of kids are watched over by outrageously styled…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeJennifer Lawrence shot down a rumour that she will appear in the forthcoming film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.The 32-year-old actor played revolutionary Katniss Everdeen in four Hunger Games films between 2012 and 2015. Songbirds & Snakes is a prequel, reportedly set 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games. All of the films in the popular science…

Image via Lionsgate The cast of the Hunger Games prequel adaptation The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is damn near perfection, but its biggest star, by far, is Oscar-winning actress and legend Viola Davis. Davis shares the screen with Billy the Kid‘s Tom Blyth in the role of a young Coriolanus Snow, West Side Story‘s Rachel Zegler as District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird, and Game of Thrones‘ Peter Dinklage as the Dean of the Academy Casca Highbottom. Davis’ character, Dr. Volumnia Gaul, is an absolute…