The odds were in Lionsgate's favor. The studio has announced that Tom Blyth will be playing Coriolanus Snow in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the upcoming Hunger Games prequel film based on author Suzanne Collins' 2020 novel of the same name.
Blyth, who stars in Epix's Western series Billy the Kid and has appeared in HBO's The Gilded Age, is the first actor to officially board the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Francis Lawrence, who directed three of the four Hunger Games movies and returned to helm the prequel, praised both Blythe and his Hunger Games character. "Coriolanus Snow is many things -- a survivor, a loyal friend, a cutthroat, a kid quick to fall in love, and a young man ambitious to his core," the director said in a statement. "Tom's take on the character showed us all the complex ambiguities of this young man as he transforms into the tyrant he would become."
Franchise producer Nina Jacobson added: "Tom's performance will both fulfill and disrupt everything you think you know about Coriolanus Snow. He's a tremendous talent who will show why Snow always lands on top." The character was previously played by Donald Sutherland in the four Hunger Games movies released between 2012 and 2015.
Lionsgate has been interested in developing future Hunger Games films since 2017. In 2019, Lionsgate Motion Picture Group chairman Joe Drake announced that the company was working with Collins to adapt the then-unreleased Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The film adaptation officially entered development in April 2020, one month before the young adult novel hit bookshelves. The book serves as a prequel to Collins' original Hunger Games trilogy of novels, which consists of 2008's The Hunger Games, 2009's Catching Fire and 2010's Mockingjay.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will be set several decades before the events of the original film quadrilogy and before Snow became the tyrannical President of Panem. The film will instead focus on an 18-year-old Snow, who is seen as "the last hope for his fading lineage, a once-proud family that has fallen from grace in a post-war Capitol," reads the film's official logline.
The prequel film will follow Snow as he is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird, one of the tributes from District 12, at the 10th annual Hunger Games, but "after Lucy Gray commands all of Panem's attention by defiantly singing during the reaping ceremony, Snow thinks he might be able to turn the odds in their favor."
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is scheduled to open in theaters on Nov. 17, 2023.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter