Fans who are looking forward to a return to The Hunger Games, have a lot to be looking forward to. The runtime of the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, has been revealed, and it will be the longest movie in the franchise, clocking in at one second short of 157 minutes. This makes it 10 minutes longer than The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which previously had the franchise runtime record.
The two-hour and 37-minute runtime reported by GamesRadar isn’t necessarily that shocking considering Songbirds and Snakes is the longest Hunger Games novel, coming in at about 130 pages more than Catching Fire or Mockingjay. On the other hand, Mockingjay was split into two films in order for it to get everything in and not make it a four-hour movie. At some point, you need to make the decision to either split your film or make it shorter.
Cearly there’s a feeling that there’s a lot in the 500 pages of Songbirds that needed to be included in the film. The good news is, at this point, a two-and-a-half-hour franchise movie has become essentially normal. So it’s unlikely anybody is going to have a particularly hard time with the film’s runtime.
It’s almost surprising that there wasn’t a call made to split the new Hunger Games prequel into two movies. Although it has been a while since we got one of these movies, so maybe it wasn’t clear how big the audience would be. Since it’s a prequel giving us essentially all-new characters, it might not automatically attract all the people who made the Hunger Games movies so successful previously. Still, the Songbirds and Snakes trailer certainly hits all the beats we’d expect from a Hunger Games movie, so anybody who enjoyed those stories is likely to find something they like here.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set more than 60 years prior to the events of The Hunger Games trilogy. It sees a young Cornelius Snow, Donald Sutherland’s less-than-sympathetic character from the previous films, becoming a mentor to a young Hunger Games contestant, played by Rachel Zegler. The Songbird and Snakes cast is stacked, in addition to the up-and-coming Zegler it includes Peter Dinklage as the man who created the Hinger Games, as well as other stars like Jason Schwartzman and Viola Davis.
There aren’t any more Hunger Games books, so it appears this will be the last movie in the franchise, at least for now. Of course, there has been talk of creating new Hunger Games movies based on the ideas and characters previously established, without official source material. If Songbirds and Snakes is a box office hit, it’s a safe bet we’ll be hearing that talk start up once again.