Lionsgate has dropped a new trailer for its prequel film “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” at CinemaCon.
It’s been 8 years since “The Hunger Games : Mockingjay-Part Two” hit theaters, bringing the story of Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games to an incredible conclusion. The new trailer tributes Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) and Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), with Peter Dinklage as the vindictive Casca Highbottom, Dean of the Academy, creator of the Hunger Games. Viola Davis is Head Gamemaker Volumnia Gaul.
It’s the annual reaping ceremony of the 10th annual games, set 64 years before the first film. Lucy represents impoverished District 12 and 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow is her unwilling — at first — mentor. He’s much more conflicted in his views in this film, decades before he becomes Panem’s tyrannical president. “
Following the trailer screening at CinemaCon, producer Nina Jacobson (who produced all four original films) and Francis Lawrence (who directed all but the first entry), eagerly broke down the biggest moments from the trailer for Variety and teased what’s still to come.
“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” stars Tom Blyth as 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird. In the first shot audiences see of Zegler’s Lucy, she curtseys sarcastically — an action that will be familiar to fans of the original franchise, as Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss does just the same.
“It is such a completely original Lucy moment,” Jacobson says. “She’s such a different character from Katniss. She’s such a performer. Katniss is the opposite. This is a woman who loves and lives to perform. To see the connection there, the history that she represents, and to think that Katniss Everdeen grew up knowing about Lucy Gray and this moment, it was just a great kind of microcosm of both how much of a new ground it is and how rooted it is in what we’ve seen, but in this backward-looking way.”
The prequel in the $3 billion-grossing global franchise will hit theaters around the world on November 17. Hunger Games franchise sequel producer Francis Lawrence directed and also produced with the series producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson. Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, Tim Palen and Jim Miller are executive producers.