Yahoo News “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ”director considered splitting the movie into two parts
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The odds were not in director Francis Lawrence's favor when he split Mockingjay, the final Hunger Games installment, into two films — but he admittedly considered the same approach when he returned for the ambitious prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
At nearly three hours, the film centered on a teenage Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, taking over the role from franchise star Donald Sutherland) has the longest runtime of any Hunger Games movie. "There was, like, one second where I thought, Do we do two movies?" Lawrence says in EW's special Hunger Games collector's edition, on newsstands Nov. 3. "I decided, no, we're not going down that road again."
In his defense, there is a lot of ground to cover.
Murray Close/Lionsgate Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth in 'Hunger Games' prequel 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes'
Based on Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins' prequel of the same name, the dystopian romance drama traces the school days of a pre-tyrant Snow during the 10th Hunger Games, an annual televised event wherein children fight to the death as punishment for a past insurrection against the Capitol. He's tasked with mentoring District 12 female tribute Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a member of the Covey musical group.
Split into three chapters on the screen, the first chronicles the young Snow's time at the Academy, the Capitol's elite secondary school, alongside wayward classmate Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), headmaster Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), and dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage). The second dives into the deadly games, while Coriolanus and Lucy Gray's budding romance takes center stage in the third and final act. "The length was daunting," franchise producer Nina Jacobson says, though she notes that the movie "really goes by so fast."
Murray Close/Lionsgate Rachel Zegler in 'Hunger Games' prequel 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes'
Lawrence recently revealed that he regretted splitting Mockingjay into two, much like the approach for the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises. "What I realized in retrospect — and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics, and people at the split — is that I realized it was frustrating," he told PEOPLE last month. "And I can understand it."
He continued, "In an episode of television, if you have a cliffhanger, you have to wait a week or you could just binge it and then you can see the next episode. But making people wait a year, I think, came across as disingenuous, even though it wasn't. Our intentions were not to be disingenuous." That's not to say he isn't happy with the fact that they got to dive into more of the source material.
Murray Close/Lionsgate Tom Blyth in 'Hunger Games' prequel 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes'
"We got more on the screen out of the book than we would've in any of the other movies because you're getting close to four hours of screen time for the final book," Lawrence added. "But I see and understand how it frustrated people."
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes arrives in theaters Nov. 17. You can buy Entertainment Weekly's The Ultimate Guide to The Hunger Games here, or on newsstands.
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