Fans of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games franchise can mud off their bow and arrows because the sequence returns to the silver display screen with the long-awaited prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, out Nov. 17.
The movie, based mostly on the Collins’ 2020 prequel to the hit Hunger Games trilogy, stars Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird and Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow, along with a stacked solid that features Hunter Schafer as Snow’s cousin, Tigris; Viola Davis as Dr. Volumnia Gaul; Peter Dinklage as Dean Casca Highbottom; and Jason Schwartzman as Lucky Flickerman. The prequel, which works again 64 years earlier than the occasions of The Hunger Games, offers audiences a take a look at an earlier period of Panem, because the Capitol prepares for the tenth annual Hunger Games.
In the e-book and film, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes particulars a basic turning level for the Hunger Games and attracts out Snow’s backstory, including dimension to the villainous character who later turns into Panem’s tyrannical president. Snow is essential to creating the Hunger Games not only a brutal massacre however a type of inescapable leisure for the Capitol. Songbirds and Snakes units into movement the occasions of The Hunger Games trilogy. Here’s what to know.
How The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes connects to The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games sequence and Songbirds and Snakes is about in Panem, a war-torn dystopian model of North America, comprising 13 districts and the Capitol, which has all the money and a solid of colourful characters. Each district has items they produce for the Capitol (oil, lumber, fish, and many others.) and are numbered based mostly on class, with District 1 being the wealthiest and resource-rich, whereas the others are much less so.
After an unsuccessful three-year rebel towards the Capitol by Panem residents, a few decade earlier than the occasions of Songbirds and Snakes, the Hunger Games had been established as a yearly custom of violent management. Each district is made to ship a teen boy and lady—chosen throughout a ceremony known as “The Reaping”—to an area the place they combat to the dying, leaving the only survivor because the winner. The Capitol imposed the sport to punish the districts and remind them who holds the ability.
The Hunger Games seen in The Hunger Games films are a well-oiled machine of leisure and spectacle: the tributes get makeovers and weapons coaching earlier than getting into violent battle in an area that may change at any time on the whims of the sport’s controllers. The video games are televised, turning the tributes into characters with storylines for the Capitol audiences to root for—and, finally, assist by sending remedy and meals to their favored fighters.
Songbirds and Snakes opens on a merciless however a lot much less thrilling model of the Hunger Games. In the primary 10 years of the video games, tributes are despatched into an area with nothing however weapons, and left to combat—main the sport to finish inside a pair hours. Decades earlier than Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark enter the image, the makers of the video games are determining the best way to, primarily, improve rankings and curiosity within the video games.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tells President Snow’s backstory
Students on the most prestigious college within the Capitol grow to be mentors to the tributes in an effort to make the video games extra entertaining. Coriolanus Snow, a scholar on the Academy, means that the video games play to viewers pursuits and units the precedent of tributes receiving items via sponsors. Along along with his classmates, Snow can be tasked with mentoring one of many young tributes. When he meets tribute Lucy Gray, a member of a musical nomadic individuals who obtained caught in District 12 in the course of the warfare, they kind an surprising bond, throwing Snow’s future into query. She and Snow should work collectively to make sure her survival however, in fact, not every thing goes in keeping with plan.
In the Hunger Games, Snow is Katniss Everdeen’s foil. True to his title, he’s icy and has it out for Katniss after she forces the hand of the gamemaker into letting each her and Peeta win. Songbirds and Snakes reveals why Katniss’ unwavering confidence in herself and her skills is a selected thorn in Snow’s aspect: they remind him of Lucy Gray.
