Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Gets Streaming Premiere Date

The latest adventure in the Hunger Games saga is making its streaming debut next month. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is based on the novel of the same name, from Hunger Games creator and author Suzanne Collins. The story takes place more than six decades before Katniss Everdeen volunteered for the Reaping and follows a young Coriolanus Snow, long before he became President. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was released in theaters last fall and earned more than $337 million at the box office. Soon, it’ll be heading to streaming.

Lionsgate and Starz announced this week that The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will debut on the network and service on May 14th. Other Lionsgate hits like John Wick: Chapter 4 have been given the same streaming release strategy.

Tom Blyth on Taking Over for Donald Sutherland

Coriolanus Snow is the lead character of Songbirds & Snakes, though he’s a much different person as a young man than the older tyrant people came to know in the original Hunger Games saga. He’s played by Tom Blyth in this new movie, after Donald Sutherland ruled as President Snow in all four of the original films.

Ahead of the Songbirds & Snakes debut in theaters, Blyth opened up about stepping into Sutherland’s shoes.

“Yeah, I kind of had to reserve or refrain myself from going down the rabbit hole of watching all those movies again and watching his performance again,” Blyth said. “Obviously the first instinct I had was to try and recreate it somehow or to nod to it in kind of a savvy way. But the thing is that’s never going to be slick. It’s never going to be savvy. Everyone’s going to be like, ‘It feels like you’re copying a performance that has already been great.’ And you can’t, the minute as an actor you try to recreate anything that works, whether it’s something you’ve done or something another actor has done, it’s the death of spontaneity, and you just can’t recreate. It has to be fresh and it has to be in that moment. So very early on I kind of put that to the side and Francis [Lawrence] and I talked about making my own and also just asking what drives him now as opposed to what drives him later on when he is president and a dictator and a tyrant.”

As anyone who has read the prequel book already knows, this younger version of Coriolanus Snow is much different than the one in the original Hunger Games trilogy. That alone gave Blyth a lot of freedom to make the character his own.

“He has a different character in this movie. In the book, he’s a character who is a brother and a grandson and a student and an ambitious kid who just wants to do well in his life,” Blyth explained. “And then by the end of the movie he’s something totally different because of his relationship to Lucy Gray and because of his relationship to the Capitol in general and what he sees and what he learns, and the beauty of the film is that you get to see that transition in real time, and that’s what draws me to him so much as a character. And I think what fans are drawn to as a character is seeing that he’s not just one thing, he ends up as a tyrant, but 64 years before that he was something else entirely. And the interesting part is seeing what he goes through to get there.”