Lionsgate is Very Serious About Those HUNGER GAMES Prequels
For the past year or so, people at Lionsgate have been hinting (threatening?) that they have plans to make prequels to The Hunger Games movies. The last installment, Mockingjay — Part 2, didn't perform nearly as well as the company would have hoped — perhaps because Part 1 was dreadfully boring and splitting it into two parts was a blatant cash grab? Are audiences finally getting sick of this trend? I hope so! — but it still made enough that the executives aren't going to leave the franchise alone.
THR reports that Lionsgate entertainment vice chairman Michael Burns told a crowd at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference that the Hunger Games franchise will "live on and on and on."
"The one thing that kids say they missed (from the early Hunger Games films) was there was no arenas," he said, referencing the stadiums where children killed each other and noting the prior films only covered the 74th and 75th competitions. "If we went backwards there obviously would be arenas."
So it's a safe bet that we won't be seeing Jennifer Lawrence and Katniss Everdeen any more, but if they cast a hot young actor to play President Snow, return to the killing-centric arenas, and drop the political subtext (read: everything that makes the current movies even vaguely interesting), I can see how they could still manage to turn a profit. Will the prequels be as good? That's up for debate, and, of course, largely depends on how you feel about the current films. But I'm sure we'll have that conversation in a few months when a prequel is officially announced. (Director Francis Lawrence already has an idea for how to do one.)
Not content to exhume the corpse of just one franchise, Lionsgate intends to "get more out of its other big franchises — including Twilight, The Expendables and Saw, nodding towards reboots, prequels or sequels for each of them." So...yeah. Get ready for a lot more iterations and entries into Lionsgate franchises we're already familiar with.
