As 'Hunger Games' Tops Taylor Swift With $250 Million Global, How Lionsgate's Prequel Shifted the Odds in its Favor

Three key takeaways from the surprisingly successful 'Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes'

With Walt Disney’s Wish crashing and burning even harder than Walt Disney’s The Marvels, Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” has become, by default, the mainstream audience event movie of the season. With $250 million worldwide and counting, it has surpassed the current $249.5 million lifetime cume of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (with frankly a hell of a lot less free media).

It sits behind – for now -- only Now You See Me 2 ($334 million in 2016), La La Land ($447 million in 2016), Wonder ($311 million in 2017), John Wick: Chapter 3 ($321 million in 2019), Knives Out ($313 million in 2019) and John Wick: Chapter 4 ($435 million in 2023) among all Lionsgate films since The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II closed the book on the Katniss Everdeen saga eight years ago.  

The Rachel Zegler/Tom Blyth YA-targeted dystopian action-drama has passed $124 million domestic in 19 days after a slightly underwhelming $45 million opening weekend. The answer to the question “Will audiences care about a Hunger Games movie without Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen?” seems to be a qualified “Yes.”  

What are the main takeaways as a film many projected to outright tank proves itself, admittedly by default, to be one of the bigger Hollywood hits since Barbie and Oppenheimer? Well, I’m glad you asked.  

1. Don’t spend like it’s a sequel to an already successful picture. 

Plenty of folks wondered aloud why The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was initially hailed as a modest success after its $45 million domestic debut while, a week earlier, The Marvels was declared a spectacular whiff with its $46 million launch. Well, one big reason is that while the MCU sequel (which, warts and all, I kinda enjoyed on its own quirky merits) cost around $225 million, the Hunger Games prequel cost $100 million.  

Few expected this 60-years-earlier prequel, charting the tenth Hunger Games, which sees a young Coriolanus Snow (Blyth) giving into his tyrannical impulses, to measure up to the first Hunger Games quadrilogy (which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide). However, it was budgeted at a level that didn’t have to.  

The Francis Lawrence-directed YA flick was budgeted not like the final two Mockingjay films – which each cost around $150 million – but closer to the first Hunger Games movie ($90 million in 2012) and the three $90-$110 Divergent films. As such, this film will be profitable in theatrical even as it likely ends up closer to the first two Shailene Woodley-starring Divergent flicks ($276 million in 2014 and $295 million in 2015) than the $650-$850 million grossing Hunger Games movies.  

That showed a keen understanding of a moviegoing marketplace that has lost legions of general/casual moviegoers to Covid-specific variables, overall inflation and the convenience and financial value (relatively speaking) of at-home streaming/VOD options. Like Saw X, which also rejuvenated a once-definitive Lionsgate franchise via a surprisingly good prequel told from the point-of-view of the franchise’s main villain, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was a Hunger Games movie that was budgeted like it was the first in a series, so it didn’t have to break records to break even. 

2. Don’t promote your new movie by promising a new franchise. 

J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was sold as the start of a five-part prequel series to the Harry Potter movies. Blumhouse’s The Exorcist: Believer was positioned as the start of a trilogy of legacy sequels to the 1973 horror classic. Conversely, the smartest choice Lionsgate made all year, in terms of selling this return to the world of The Hunger Games, was merely promoting the picture as one single stand-alone motion picture. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was positioned as one single movie, based on one single Suzanne Collins-penned prequel novel. 

The last decade or so has been littered with failed franchise starters or re-starters. The likes of The Mummy (no Dark Universe for you!), Fox’s grimdark Fantastic Four reboot and the many (Jem and the Holograms), many (Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood also starring Blyth as “feral child #5”)), many (Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider reboot), many (King Arthur and the Legend of the Sword) “part one” pictures which served as feature-length prequels to sequels that never got made.  

Conversely, Blumhouse waited until David Gordon Green’s Halloween sequel hit paydirt before announcing a trilogy, and likewise, we didn’t know a damn thing about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom until the first trailer dropped in late 2017, 2.5 years after Jurassic World soared to $1.6 billion global.  

I don’t know if we’ll get another Hunger Games movie or even should. The film’s closed-book conclusion, at least in terms of the new characters, may make a sequel harder but works for the artistic betterment of this specific film. No loose ends or sequel teases here, folks. Lionsgate wisely sold this as essentially: “It’s not a trilogy, it’s not a new franchise, it’s just one movie and if you like it, maybe we’ll make more.”

3. Do appeal to today’s young(er) audiences. 

This isn’t Paw Patrol or Five Nights at Freddy’s, which are both refreshingly successful IP plays from relatively recent brands aimed at today’s kids. That said, The Hunger Games began just over a decade ago. This means that audiences who were kids or teens when the first four Hunger Games movies opened are still generally young enough to see this new film in a theater without splurging for a babysitter. Moreover, while technically a prequel and featuring its share of franchise callbacks, the new picture stood out as different from the others.   

It featured of-the-moment actors like Zegler — who frankly needed a hit after being touted as the next big thing years before West Side Story even opened — with supporting turns from prestige thespians like Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage as added value elements. The first Hunger Games featured a new song, “Civil War,” by Taylor Swift. This prequel offered “Can’t Catch Me Now” courtesy of current pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo.  

The first Hunger Games movies promoted Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen as an ass-kicking action heroine who (unlike Bella in the Twilight movies) was too busy fighting to survive to worry about which boy to choose. This new film offered a (non-white) female lead who does little violence and wins fans via her singing. More importantly, the film focuses on a uh… bad romance between a (future) prince and a present-tense pauper.  

The star-crossed romance -- between the problematic hunk and the spirited but mostly pure babe -- is a direct pitch to a generation of kids who’ve grown up on Wattpad fiction, anime melodramas and the romantic tension between Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren in Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy. This was a Hunger Games movie aimed not at folks my age but at the younger Kissing Booth/Reylo generation. Yes, that’s a compliment.

Epilogue - 

I guess I could add “make a good movie with strong production values, good actors showing up to play and visuals that feel believe-your-eyes authentic, but that should be obvious. Whether you liked it or not, it was a mostly well-made picture with vivid performances and a keen sense of place and scale.  And it was different enough from what came before to pass the Amazing Spider-Man test, whereby folks who just feel like watching a Hunger Games movie may watch this one because it has value and variables unique unto itself.

I’d also argue that its relentless cynicism certainly aligns with a generation that came of age during a Donald Trump presidency and a global pandemic amid a current Middle East conflict that (speaking as a pessimistic Jewish American) seems determined to repeat the mistakes of 9/11. That said, sometimes it’s just a matter of luck.  

Dune Part II fled to 2024 while both The Marvels and Wish cratered, leaving The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes as the de-facto tentpole/franchise event movie of the moment. That the film’s trailer presumably got lots of play in theatrical screeners of The Eras Tour (a film that didn’t exist on anyone’s radar until early September) and Five Nights at Freddy’s (which massively overperformed) didn’t hurt. This again shows the value of a good trailer in front of a demographically friendly blockbuster. Heck, if Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom continues this year’s superhero decline – and that’s a big “if,” then the Rachel Zegler-led melodrama will be the big PG-13 action tentpole of the moment until... uh... Argyle in early February?  

So, in this case, I suppose one could say that... the odds were in its favor.