The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes Flutters Into $45 Million+ Box Office Opening
"The Hunger Games" prequel "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" isn't the beginning of a new saga, like the fizzled-out "Fantastic Beasts" series was to the "Harry Potter" movies. Instead, it's a standalone origin story based on Suzanne Collins' 2020 novel, which reveals how future Panem president Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) helped shape the Hunger Games from a depressing slaughterfest into must-watch entertainment. But eight years after the release of "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2," are the Hunger Games still the box office draw they once were?
The short answer is no, but that doesn't mean "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" is a bomb in the making. After grossing $19.1 million on Friday (including Thursday previews), the "Hunger Games" prequel is on track to gross somewhere north of $45 million at the box office in its opening weekend, per The Hollywood Reporter, with the studio hopeful that it could hit $50 million. That's a long way short of the mammoth debuts enjoyed by the original quadrilogy, which ranged from $158 million on the high end ("The Hunger Games: Catching Fire") to $102 million on the low end ("Mockingjay – Part 2"). But with an estimated budget of $100 million, the bar for breaking even is a lot lower for "Songbirds & Snakes" than it is for last week's big release, "The Marvels," which is weighed down by its reported $220 million price tag.
"The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" received a B+ CinemaScore from audience exit polling and currently has a 61% score on Rotten Tomatoes, both scores being the lowest of all the "Hunger Games" movies. Both audience and critic responses are more complex than a number, though, and anecdotally I've seen a number of people describing it as the best of the "Hunger Games" movies. Certainly, it might be the most divisive.
Songbirds and Snakes might be better off without a sequel
Hollywood loves a franchise, and box office hits tend to lead to sequels by default. But "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" doesn't feel like the start of a new series. It's a self-contained story about the origins of a villain (a concept that has always been somewhat complex in the "Hunger Games" series) and the complicity from the greater population of Panem that allowed the Hunger Games to become such a popular event. Despite being set many decades before the start of the original series, it functions quite neatly as a coda to Katniss Everdeen's story. If this is the last "Hunger Games" movie, that would probably be just fine.
For comparison's sake, "Dune" had an opening weekend of $41 million back in October 2021, and went on to gross $402 million worldwide — not a megahit, but successful enough (especially with the extenuating circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic) to justify the upcoming "Dune: Part Two." The first movie had "Part One" in the title screen and ended halfway through Frank Herbert's novel, so not greenlighting a sequel would have very clearly meant leaving the story half-finished. That's obviously not the case for the "Hunger Games" prequel.
Producer Nina Jacobson and director Francis Lawrence both told People that if a sequel to "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" was in the cards, it could be interesting to focus on Coriolanus' cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer). Though she's as close to him as a sister in "Songbirds & Snakes," by the time of "Mockingjay – Part 2" Tigris (who has since transformed herself into a cat-person through cosmetic surgery) actually aids Katniss and her allies in their efforts to reach Coriolanus and kill him. "I think there's a really interesting shift there," said Lawrence.