The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes isn’t ‘a sequel for the sake of a sequel,’ says producer — it’s trickier

polygon.com:

The Hunger Games movies turned Jennifer Lawrence into a certified A-lister and ended Hollywood’s YA adaptation boom with a grace note to the tune of $3 billion worldwide. But in spite of immediate whispers that Lionsgate would quickly turn to spinoffs or reboots to keep Hunger Games fans well fed, longtime franchise producer Nina Jacobson says that was never really a possibility; if there was going to be another movie, Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins would have to write the novel for one.

“You could have gone with a fan favorite — Let’s do Haymitch’s story! Or do Finnick’s games! — but that would be doing it to do it,” Jacobson tells Polygon. “If [Collins] had a story in this world with something she wanted to talk about, something to explore, then great. But if not, better to leave a franchise as something people feel fondly about rather than crank out a sequel for the sake of a sequel.”

What Jacobson didn’t realize as she put Hunger Games behind her was that Collins did have another story to tell: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. A prequel set 64 years before the events of the original story, Collins’ Songbirds and Snakes introduces a new combatant from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird. Set amid a nascent, janky version of the Hunger Games, the novel has a familiar narrator: a young version of future Panem president Coriolanus Snow, Katniss Everdeen’s chief antagonist in the original Hunger Games trilogy.

Jacobson never spoke to Collins while Songbirds and Snakes was in development, but after reading the grim 517-page odyssey, she had no hesitation over whether the film franchise could continue. The movie adaptation arrives Nov. 17.

“Suzanne, the originator and North Star of everything that we try to do with these