"Let the games begin!" screamed the headlines when The Hunger Games arrived in 2012, kickstarting a filmic quadrilogy based on Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of bestselling YA books. But prequel movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes gives us the real start, showing how Panem’s Capitol rises from the ashes of war to become a shiny, soaring powerbase, and how the Games progress from rudimentary violence to mass entertainment.
Set 64 years before The Hunger Games, we meet an 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) as he’s assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) for the 10th annual Hunger Games. The future tyrannical president is initially alarmed, given that Lucy is a tribute from impoverished District 12. But when she defiantly sings during the reaping ceremony, he spies an opportunity to turn the odds in their favor – her by surviving the deadly combat, and him by growing the Games from their grubby gladiatorial roots into a show-stopping event full of theatre and spectacle.
