Don’t look now, but Suzanne Collins’ novel about the early years of Donald Sutherland’s character Coriolanus
SNOW is heading for the big screen
The Hunger Games movies represented a perfect storm for studio Lionsgate in the early part of the last decade. Jennifer Lawrence’s star status, combined with the remarkable popularity of young adult science fiction, meant those annual trips to the dystopian future nation of Panem stacked up more box-office gold than you might have found in the gilded Capitol’s brimming bank vaults. Lawrence carried the four movies in the bloodthirsty yet weirdly splatter-free saga virtually singlehanded: it’s impossible not to flash back to Katniss Everdeen’s anguished features when recalling the actor’s rise to
Hollywood fame and fortune.In the wake of the final (somewhat disappointing) brace of films, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2, there were reports that prequels were being considered. At the time, Lawrence dismissed the idea, saying: “I think it’s too soon. They’ve got to let the body get cold, in my opinion.” Does five years count as long enough? The Hollywood Reporter confirmed this week that Lionsgate will adapt Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins’s forthcoming novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snake, which takes place decades before the events of the original trilogy, for the big screen. Centre-stage this time will be a young Coriolanus Snow, the future president of Panem as portrayed so memorably by Donald Sutherland in the earlier films.