As The Hunger Games Expands, It Jeopardizes What Made the Originals Work

As far as YA dystopian franchises go, The Hunger Games remains one of the best. The premise is the perfect blend of introspection and raw commercial appeal. The story of a group of children sent to battle to the death is horrifying and gripping. Each cinematic installment builds nicely off the previous one to construct—and then tear down—a profoundly flawed dystopian world. Katniss is a protagonist who can effectively waver between rebelliousness and reluctance. Her romance with Peeta may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but its sweetness is a nice counterpoint to all the violence and bloodshed. At the center of everything is a genuinely insightful story about revolution and how authoritarian regimes perpetuate themselves.

But what really makes The Hunger Games so entertaining is the games themselves, which make for a gripping narrative engine that simultaneously immerses the viewer in an incredibly high-stakes world and draws out the series’ most interesting thematic implications. For instance, the light satire of reality TV that accompanies the concept is made more cutting because of how it implicates the series’ audience. Yes, this is a story about children killing each other, and yes, the brutality of that concept is a major draw. The series utilizes the same kind of sensationalism that it incisively critiques on screen, and it gets away with this because of how it plays with the audience’s investment. You can cry over the death of Rue and cheer for Katniss as she releases tracker-jackers onto a group of the most bloodthirsty tributes, but at the end of the day these are all children. As Haymitch explains in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second film in the series, there are ultimately no winners here.

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The last film of the original series, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, was released nearly a decade ago in the fall of 2015, but in recent years the franchise has expanded. The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which follows a young version of principal antagonist President Snow, was released in November of 2023, and Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which will follow a young version of Haymitch Abernathy, is expected to release in November 2026. Expanding the world of The Hunger Games to flesh out secondary characters can be fun—and commercially successful—but also feels unnecessary on a base level. The original film series already told a complete story, so now any additional installments face the extra burden of adding something new to a series that already stood on its own.

A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes struggles to do this, as an origin story for a villain that didn’t really need one. As we see him in the film, Coriolanus Snow is a young man whose cold ambition is shaped by a growing infatuation with Lucy Gray Baird, a contestant in one of the earlier iterations of the games. Snow is the best thing about the movie, supported by a strong performance from Tom Blyth and a constantly disconcerting point of view. Thankfully, the film doesn’t try to frame him as a hero gone wrong, or a purely innocent figure corrupted by an evil institution. There’s clearly something evil in him from the start; his infatuation with Lucy Gray Baird is sometimes romantic but usually creepy. What’s most interesting is how the institution Snow belongs to draws out what’s been inside him from the beginning. The Capitol may not have made him into a monster per se, but it empowered him to follow and profit from his worst tendencies.

Snow makes for an interesting protagonist, and the film has some fun setpieces—it’s hard not to get excited when a tank bursting with snakes is dropped into the arena—but as an origin story, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes lacks purpose. Snow’s history makes sense with what we know about the character from the original series, but it doesn’t so much give new insight as further elaborate on what was already there. What makes Snow such a good antagonist in the original series is that he was simultaneously evil in his own right—a fun, entertaining kind of evil—and a product of the institution that backed him. A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes builds itself around this idea, which makes for a thematically coherent story that ultimately feels a bit pointless. Worst of all, it risks diluting the menace of the character by over-explaining his motivations.

Questioning the purpose of a movie often feels reductive. Does art need to have a purpose? Is entertainment alone enough of a reason for a film to exist? The Hunger Games is a beloved franchise, and there’s certainly a lot of enjoyment to be had from spending more time in its world. The upcoming Sunrise on the Reaping is exciting because it promises a deeper exploration of one of the original series’ best and most well-loved characters. It’s unabashed fan service, and is there really anything wrong with that?

The problem is that the more The Hunger Games adds to itself, the more it muddles what the original series achieved. There’s a conciseness to those original four films that’s now being overshadowed by spin-offs that don’t really have anything new to say. Characters like Snow and Haymitch are interesting on their own, but a big part of what made them so effective to begin with is the role they played in Katniss’ story. Haymitch in particular is fascinating in how he complicates the mentor trope—he’s more reluctant, mean, and pessimistic than we would expect from a character in his position. His abrasiveness toward Katniss speaks to a pervading bleakness that Haymitch revists again and again: there can be no triumph in the world of Panem, only survival. Removing Haymitch from this context isolates the character from his original significance. Sure, learning his backstory might be interesting, but like with A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it’s likely to be more extraneous than enlightening.

As long as there are Hunger Games movies, people are likely to watch them. Still, there are diminishing returns to revisiting a franchise that already has one of the best reputations of its genre. Worst-case scenario, the new Hunger Games films face the fate of all the worst spin-offs: to become nothing more than shadows of the original series, entertaining only because they remind you of the real thing.