The New Hunger Games Movie Makes an Unexpected—but Inspired—Choice

Before Friday’s release of the new Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, you might have scrolled on social media past this video of one of the film’s stars, Rachel Zegler, explaining the difference between this movie and the rest of the franchise. In impressively succinct terms, Zegler lays out what distinguishes the new movie, based on a book by original Hunger Games writer Suzanne Collins, from the four that preceded it: “Lucy Gray is a performer forced to fight, while Katniss is a fighter forced to perform.” I might put the difference between the movies in even bolder terms: The original movies were action dramas that featured rare musical performances, but the newest action drama is an actual movie musical.

OK, no one randomly bursts into song. But like such fellow movie musicals as Once, Sing Street, and A Star Is Born, Songbirds and Snakes follows a singer who performs a sizable number of songs throughout, songs that are as crucial to the movie as the action set pieces. The prequel is set during the 10^th year of the Hunger Games, 64 years before Katniss Everdeen first volunteers as tribute, and tells the origin story of Coriolanus Snow and how he became the sadistic, totalitarian president of Panem. Eighteen-year-old Coriolanus (Tom Blyth) might be the movie’s main character, but Songbirds and Snakes is best when spotlighting Lucy Gray Baird, the tribute from District 12 with a deeply moving talent for song, whom Snow falls in love with when he’s assigned as her mentor for the Games. Lucy Gray comes from a nomadic group of musicians called the Covey who have temporarily settled in the district. Because of this, she uses music to express her most severe emotions, to calm herself down in moments of stress, and, of course, to connect with the audience.

Given how central Lucy Gray’s songs are to the story, it’s no surprise that the movie cast Zegler, who rose to fame as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story, for which she won a Golden Globe, and who will soon star in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Snow White. Equally inspired was the choice to hire Dave Cobb—the Nashville veteran who’s won nine Grammys for his work on country and Americana albums by the likes of Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, and Jason Isbell—to produce the soundtrack. (Cobb is also no stranger to soundtracks, having worked on the music for the aforementioned A Star Is Born.) The movie’s musical nature is right there in the title, and the titular ballads were set to music by Cobb from lyrics that Collins wrote in the book (with an assist from William Wordsworth), drawing from the same folk and country traditions in which Cobb now works.

According to Zegler, director Francis Lawrence had her sing the songs live on set, and you can tell because the electricity of live performance comes through the screen. Lucy Gray grips all of Panem when she defiantly sings “Nothing You Can Take From Me” as a televised reaction to being chosen during the Reaping for the Games, and when she gives her take on “The Hanging Tree”—a song made popular by Jennifer Lawrence’s rendition in Mockingjay Part 1—and when she sings the eerie two-part story of “Lucy Gray,” the folk tale she was named after. However, the most striking musical moment happens during the climax of the film, when, confronted with death, Zegler’s Lucy Gray stuns with her performance of “The Old Therebefore.”

And while perhaps not every dystopian franchise would be a natural fit for staging a musical, The Hunger Games is, because, as Zegler suggested, the idea of performance has always been central to the series. In these early days of Panem, when the twisted Hunger Games are risking cancellation due to sagging ratings, Lucy Gray emerges as the perfect tribute because she knows how to put on a show. Between her talents and Coriolanus’ astute ideas about how to keep viewers invested, the orchestrators of the Games begin to understand, and weaponize, the idea of spectacle. The trajectory is clear: This idea of spectacle is what forces Katniss the fighter, years down the line, to be a performer whose defiant acts and acting spark a rebellion. What better way to make a movie about performance and spectacle than to make a musical?

Musicals can seem cheesy and annoying, I get that, and certainly some are just that. But when done right, like this one is, musicals can be incredibly effective, melting the hearts of even the coldest Broadway skeptics. Here, the importance of the sung tunes is inextricable from the importance of the composed score. In the end, if any Hunger Games fan doesn’t appreciate the power of theatricality, they’ve missed one of the key lessons of the franchise—and it doesn’t get more theatrical than a musical. So it only makes sense that the Capitol, and Snow, would learn this lesson from someone like Lucy Gray: a person with a beautiful voice and something to say, a reason to sing.