New President Snow prequel of Hunger Games will be made into a movie

The Hunger Games Prequel movie adaptation is in the works according to insiders speaking from New York Comic Con.

Speaking at NY Comic Convention, Hunger Games books publisher David Levithan explained:

“I found out about two and a half years before I was allowed to tell anybody else [about the prequel] so that was its own challenge in a really exciting way. [Suzanne] approached it because she wanted to talk about the philosophy behind [the Hunger Games] and human nature, and how does human nature and the Locke vs. Rousseau battle turn into who Snow becomes. That was fascinating to me … I don’t like him but I really am fascinated by him.”

As we have already reported, the story will be set decades before the events of the original book series, focussing on time after the “dark days”- a failed rebellion. Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins explained how this setting “provides fertile ground for characters to grapple with these questions and thereby define their views of humanity.” Set 64 years before the events of the trilogy, the story follows Coriolanus Snow, a teenager at this point, and begins on the morning of the reaping of the tenth Hunger Games.

“We see the evolution of Snow and that’s interesting. But to me, the more interesting part was seeing the evolution of Panem and seeing the Hunger Games in its 10th year and seeing how rudimentary it was,” Levithan went on. “And seeing how all of the themes and all of the ideas that we’ll see later in the trilogy are having their origin story. When you see them in the trilogy, it’s a foregone conclusion: The Hunger Games is what it is, it is evil, it is punitive. But seeing where it didn’t have to go that direction, seeing how it sort of wobbled, and seeing how the forces pushed it into existence, that was fascinating to me because there are lessons to be learned about human nature and about societies and governments that we would really do well to listen to.”

Having the story centre on a villainous character was risky but the prequel is more nuanced than what we may assume: “Everybody at first thought it was going to be a fallen angel story, like Snow’s going to be a hero and then something happens and he becomes bad,” Levithan explained. “What Suzanne shows is that it’s so much more complicated than that. His personality was what it was but it was outside forces that either amplify pieces of who you are or help you go a different direction. You see a tug of war in this book.”

Nina Jacobson produced The Hunger Games movies and will also be adapting the prequel and she says is going to be a far cry from the original four movies.

“I’ve very excited about introducing [the new character of] Lucy,” Jacobson said. “I love, for fans, the connective tissue between Lucy and District 12 and Katniss and the Hunger Games movies. The weaving of that connective tissue of what Snow’s history is with 12 and the way it comes back to Katniss, the first movies will be even richer for living in a world with this prequel. And Lucy is a character who is much more aware of the power of her femininity. Katniss is much more quiet, a woman of few words. Lucy as a performer is a very different kind of character … Lucy is more mysterious because she is an entertainer. She is playing, in her own way, to the crowd.”

“This is the 10th Hunger Games as opposed to Catching Fire’s 75th. The Hunger Games are considerably less fancy than they ultimately become, so there’s a lot of fun in that and seeing what they used to be. And seeing a Capitol character with a point of view that takes you through a good part of the story is something we’ve never really done. We’ve had great Capitol characters but we’ve only really ever seen them through the eyes of our District protagonists. We’ve never seen the world through the eyes of a Capitol character, especially a Snow.”