After becoming wildly successful New York Times bestsellers, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games novels were quickly adapted into a multi-film franchise beginning in 2013. All four entries in the series grossed more than $600 million worldwide, but The Hunger Games has remained dormant since 2015’s Mockingjay - Part 2. That’s going to change next year, as Lionsgate is deep into development on a prequel film titled Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, based on the novel of the same name, which was released in 2020. The cast of the next chapter in the Hunger Games story already includes Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, and Hunter Schafer, and now a member of the Lannister family is heading to Panem.
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Deadline is reporting that Peter Dinklage is the latest to join Songbirds & Snakes in the role of Casca Highbottom. In the novel, Highbottom serves as the dean of the Academy, and develops the idea of the Hunger Games as a theoretical event for a school project. Highbottom has a contentious relationship with the father of Coriolanus Snow, which results in the dean being poisoned by the end of the tale. Dinklage is perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning role as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, but the actor has an extensive filmography that also includes Cyrano, Avengers: Infinity War, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Previous work in high-profile franchises and fantasy epics should make Dinklage a perfect fit for the world of The Hunger Games.
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Songbirds & Snakes is a Return to the YA Boom of the 2010s
Lionsgate
The success of The Hunger Games played a massive part in the deluge of film adaptations of young adult novels that exploded in the 2010s. While Harry Potter opened the floodgates and Twilight kept the momentum going, Hunger Games picked up the torch and created a new wave of films catered to young readers of such novels as Divergent and The Maze Runner. The YA novel-to-film pipeline has largely gone dry over the last few years, but Lionsgate is clearly hoping there’s enough residual love for The Hunger Games to launch a new era for the franchise off of Songbirds & Snakes.
The prequel film is currently in production and is being directed by Francis Lawrence. After Gary Ross directed the first Hunger Games film, Lawrence took over the reins for the final three entries in the franchise. Lawrence’s biggest project since then was 2018’s Red Sparrow, which was a reunion with Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence, and his next film will be Slumberland, releasing on Netflix later this year. As announced by Lionsgate at CinemaCon in April, Songbirds & Snakes will be hitting theaters on November 17, 2023.
