THE HUNGER GAMES
PRODUCER NINA JACOBSON AND DIRECTOR FR ANCIS LAWRENCE EXPLAIN HOW THEY FOUND THEMSELVES BACK IN
With its final image of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) holding her baby and wistfully looking on as her family plays in a meadow, the big-screen era of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy came to a close in 2015 on a hopeful note. The four-film franchise was an unlikely global sensation, considering its core themes of oppression and the sobering costs of war. However, Lawrence’s bold heroine, who becomes the spark of defiance against an autocratic regime, ignited the global box office.
“It was humbling to see how much stories that we tell can resonate and last, and what they can mean to people in such different circumstances,” The Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson tells SFX. “What they see and how it moves them was an incredible experience the first time around. But honestly, that’s because we did faithful adaptations of Suzanne’s books.”
It was Jacobson and her production company Color Force who secured the film rights to those books, and then shepherded them to the screen with director Gary Ross and then director Francis Lawrence for the final three instalments. “She’s writing about these big ideas, and we’re just trying not to screw them up,” Jacobson says. “I feel first and foremost a responsibility to Suzanne, who entrusted me with these books. I feel fiercely loyal to her and servicing the ideas that she explores.”
And that’s why The Hunger Games film franchise has remained dormant since the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II in 2015. Despite Lionsgate exploring original spin-off ideas for new instalments, both Jacobson and Lawrence were vocal that they would not be. “I knew there was a writers’ room of some kind, but I honestly had zero interest,” Lawrence confirms to SFX. “Unless
Suzanne was championing it, I really didn’t have any interest.” Until the late summer of 2019, when the director got a phone call from Collins herself…
Over the ensuing years, the two kept in touch, checking in with one another. “We always texted each other if The Hunger Games ended up on Jeopardy, or something like that,” he laughs. But this call floored the director.
“She said, ‘I’m almost done with the Hunger Games book.’ And I’m like, ‘What? Are you serious?’” he remembers. “She told me she was inspired not long after Mockingjay, and started working on it. She kept it really quiet.” In that call, Collins sketched out the basics: that it was a prequel set 64 years before the first book, featured only one crossover character, and there was a musical element to it.
In the early days of 2020, Lawrence and Jacobson were invited to Collins’s agent’s office to g
