The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is a 2023 American dystopian action film produced and directed by Francis Lawrence from a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt, based on the 2020 novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. It serves as a prequel to The Hunger Games (2012) and is the fifth installment in The Hunger Games film series. The film stars Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Dinklage, Josh Andrés Rivera, and Viola Davis. In the film, Coriolanus Snow (Blyth) is called on to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Zegler), a Games tribute, as he seeks to restore his family's prosperity in Panem.