‘I’d be really interested in being a part of it’: The director of the prequel to a $3 billion trilogy inevitably open to mining even more spin-offs

Given its status as one of the most popular and lucrative new franchises to come along in the last decade, the chances of another Hunger Games movie happening were already pretty high, even before author Suzanne Collins announced that prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was in the works.

Fortunately, that cut out the middle man and negated the need for rights-holders Lionsgate to come up with a brand new story, with the feature-length adaptation coming to theaters in November. With Jennifer Lawrence having laid down a marker that saw the original trio net almost $3 billion at the box office, there’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of returning director Francis Lawrence and star Rachel Zegler.

Inevitably, discussions about what comes next have already tentatively taken place, with the filmmaker admitting to Entertainment Weekly that he’d be more than willing to dive back into the world of Panem should the right opportunity present itself story-wise.

“If Suzanne has another thematic idea that she feels fits into the world of Panem — whether that’s with new people [or] familiar characters [like] Finnick, Haymitch, whoever — I’d be really interested in looking at it and being a part of it. But I don’t have any pull of just going, ‘I would love to do Finnick’s games.’ He’s a great character, but what’s the thematic underpinnings that make it worth telling and relevant?”

There’s almost zero chance that the studio won’t want more Hunger Games content should The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes stack up to its predecessors on both a critical and commercial level, but there’s just as many people out there who’d much rather see Lawrence move onto that Constantine sequel with Keanu Reeves instead.