No sooner did the Twilight films round out their reign of artistic terror did a Jennifer Lawrence-shaped beacon of hope shine upon the pool of young adult fiction adaptations, announcing what would go on to become a defining box office juggernaut of the mid-2010s — one that was, remarkably, actually good.

Indeed The Hunger Games movies always knew they were going to draw a beefy crowd, but that didn’t stop them from resting on their laurels in the storytelling department. That was true of the inaugural 2012 film all the way to part two of Mockingjay, and it’s also true of , even if that wasn’t as widely agreed upon.

And yet, a year and change later, it’s still keeping attention. Per FlixPatrol, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is holding fast in the 10th and final position of the United States’ Starz film charts at the time of writing. It’s currently living under the boot of fellow franchise cog Spider-Man: No Way Home (ninth place), all while the likes of John Wick: Chapter 4 (fifth place) tangos beneath a top-ranked 1992, the final film appearance of the late Ray Liotta.

Set 64 years before the events of the original 2012 film, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes stars Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow, who goes on to become the President of Panem, but for now is hoping to get his family out of poverty via the coveted financial gains of the Plinth Prize scholarship. One of the hurdles on this road involves mentoring a tribute for the 10th Annual Hunger Games, and he’s assigned one Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) of District 12. Before long, he finds himself torn between his duties to his family, his love for Lucy Gray and her vibrant humanity, and the dark impulses hiding beneath his straight-laced surface.

Some lambasted the film for portraying Coriolanus as a protagonist we ought to root for, but that’s an oversimplification of what’s really at play here. We only ever root for Coriolanus whenever his best interests are aligned with Lucy Gray’s, and it’s her cutthroat adherence to love and humanity that serves as the emotional heartbeat of the cynical world that The Hunger Games occupies — a world that Coriolanus ultimately becomes a part of.

In other words, we’re not actually rooting for Coriolanus to win; we’re rooting against Coriolanus’ descent into darkness. His humanity is the audience’s win condition, but it is not Coriolanus’ win condition. This successfully drives the thematic core of the film — one that, plainly put, is interested in the the perpetual shade of gray that is the human condition — which had to succeed in lieu of anything suspenseful, since we know Coriolanus’ fate from the get-go.

Sunrise on the Reaping, a Hunger Games prequel novel centered on the character Haymitch Abernathy and due out on March 18 later this year, will have its film adaptation released to the world on Nov. 26, 2026. Like the book, it will be set 24 years before the events of the original 2012 film, and 40 years after The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. With any luck, it will join Scream in bringing a streak of top-notch franchise films to six.

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