The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Lionsgate | Release Date: November 17, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
54
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
19
Negative:
8
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
PolygonPetrana RadulovicNov 17, 2023
It’s a sharp, exciting movie — one that finally gives YA dystopias the ending that the genre trend deserves. Read full review
90
Screen RantRachel LaBonteNov 9, 2023
With top-notch performances and production design, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a worthy addition to the Hunger Games franchise. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichNov 9, 2023
Significantly more intimate and grounded than the previous “Hunger Games” movies (despite being longer than any of them and responsible for seeding all of their lore), “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” is the rare prequel that manages to stand on its own two feet and still feel taller than the other stories it’s ultimately meant to support. Read full review
80
Film ThreatBenjamin FranzNov 21, 2023
Seek out The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It’s deeply mesmerizing and engrossing. You will not be disappointed in this trip to the Districts. Read full review
80
We Got This CoveredRob SperdutoNov 20, 2023
Despite uneven pacing and inconsistent acting, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is a triumphant prequel and the most impressive depiction of Panem representative of a director firing on all cylinders. Read full review
80
VoxAlex Abad-SantosNov 17, 2023
Remarkably, Songbirds & Snakes has found a way to make the Hunger Games feel new and sharp. Read full review
80
NMELou ThomasNov 17, 2023
What makes this fifth film the best of the franchise is its tense, paranoid latter half. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeNov 9, 2023
We all know where this is headed — Snow’s destined to become Panem’s authoritarian “president” — but there’s still enormous room for surprise and debate, even among readers of Collins’ prequel. Read full review
80
Paste MagazineTara Bennett Nov 9, 2023
Even with its last act problems, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an effective return to the cautionary tale that is Panem. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliNov 20, 2023
If someone was going to make a Hunger Games prequel, this is about the best one might hope for. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesChase HutchinsonNov 16, 2023
The pieces still come together to reveal a thorny portrait of how little a push it takes to create a villain. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireNov 16, 2023
“Snow always lands on top” is the longtime credo for Coriolanus and his family. The question of how it falls, and whether it sticks, makes “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” a surprisingly suspenseful prequel. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineJustin ClarkNov 14, 2023
The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 14, 2023
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has an overwrought title, but it’s the best movie of the film franchise. Read full review
75
USA TodayBrian TruittNov 9, 2023
Imagine if “The Phantom Menace” was better than every episode of George Lucas’ original “Star Wars” trilogy. Kind of bonkers to think about, right? But that’s pretty much the situation with “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”, an enticing blend of dystopian action epic and musical drama that surpasses the previous films starring Jennifer Lawrence. Read full review
75
ObserverEmily ZemlerNov 9, 2023
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is long, which means that it sometimes lags, but its cast and the well-crafted visuals keep it as entertaining as possible. Read full review
75
ColliderRoss BonaimeNov 9, 2023
By focusing on the gray between the good and the bad, and with a scale and scope that the other films never quite had, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes might just be the most engrossing film in this series—and almost makes one wish there were more stories here to be told. Read full review
70
Vanity FairRichard LawsonNov 16, 2023
Songbirds is the rare intelligent, useful prequel; its origin story (or, really, stories) actually do better elucidate what we’ve already seen. Read full review
70
Rolling StoneDavid FearNov 16, 2023
Like the movie itself, the performance doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel in terms of how a good man goes evil. But both the actor and Ballad seem to respect the fans and the franchise, not just in terms of investment but in building out things sideways instead of forward. Read full review
70
Screen DailyTim GriersonNov 9, 2023
This action-romance provides the requisite thrills while offering new characters and narrative turns, creating a portrait of blossoming evil that is thoughtfully executed. Read full review
70
IGNEmma StefanskyNov 9, 2023
Actors Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler are brilliant additions to the franchise with equally magnetic takes on their very different characters, but aren’t given enough time to fully flesh them out. Read full review
65
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzNov 9, 2023
While Lawrence and his producing partners got deserved flak for breaking up Collins' third novel, Mockingjay, into two films, they've learned the wrong lessons here, compressing what should have been either two films or a miniseries into one excessive production.
63
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJun 25, 2024
This prequel—drawn from the novel by series creator Suzanne Collins—retains the hard edge that made most of those movies register as piercing satires of our reality-television age, rather than hypocritical exploitation flicks. Read full review
63
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiNov 16, 2023
Despite the lacking wrap-up, “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is, like most of the “Hunger Games” films, a well-made dystopian yarn that’s better acted than it needs to be. Read full review
63
Washington PostThomas FloydNov 15, 2023
The shaggy but ultimately satisfying installment, set six decades before the four movies starring Jennifer Lawrence, carves out its own identity by leaning into its subtitle. If music is food for the soul, “Songbirds & Snakes” serves its tunes with a heaping side of venom. Read full review
63
The Associated PressJake CoyleNov 9, 2023
Whether The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicMeredith G. WhiteDec 20, 2023
While Blyth's portrayal of a well-despised character can't go unnoticed and Zegler brings brightness to a bleak world, the issue is there isn't enough time to develop their relationship and make sense of Snow's turn from normal to bloodthirsty. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeNov 20, 2023
Davis’s deranged games designer Dr Volumnia Gaul and Jason Schwartzman’s showboating compere Lucky Flickerman justify the price of admission. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshNov 17, 2023
There’s so much that works about The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, it’s unfortunate that it’s all been crammed into one overly-long film. Read full review
60
The New York TimesAmy NicholsonNov 15, 2023
Our world so hauntingly echoes Collins’s fictions that the film, shot last summer, moves us to spend its gargantuan running time reflecting on contemporary headlines, mourning the generational tragedy of anger and fear begetting anger and fear. Read full review
60
Total FilmKevin HarleyNov 9, 2023
Davis, Dinklage, Zegler, and the Games thrill, but Snow doesn’t quite summon the substance needed to fulfil this long-haul prequel’s ambitions. Read full review
58
Original-CinLiz BraunNov 15, 2023
Despite some interesting action scenes, the movie is far too long at two hours and 40 minutes. Worse yet, you’re always aware that you’re watching a movie. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubEric FranciscoNov 9, 2023
The Hunger Games is all about televised misery, authoritarianism, the blood cost to shape a better world, and the discomforting shade of the Venn Diagram they share. It’s only The Hunger Games’ own blinding success as a massive IP that threatens to derail the value inherent to its messaging. Read full review
55
The Daily BeastNick SchagerNov 9, 2023
This rote affair would deserve the designation “for fans only,” if not for the sneaking suspicion that even they won’t be wowed by this return trip to Panem. Read full review
50
TimeStephanie ZacharekNov 17, 2023
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, directed by Francis Lawrence, strives to offer spectacle, drama, and excitement. But it’s really just a tired rehash, albeit an extravagant one, this time with less appealing characters. As dystopias go, it’s a real bummer. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 16, 2023
"Songbirds and Snakes” takes its job SUPERseriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 15, 2023
A visually underwhelming saga that tests (and fails) our patience with a whopping 2-hour-and-37-minute running time — and even with all that storytelling room, engages in some whiplash changes of character in the final act that make little sense and feel forced and contrived, as if the filmmakers suddenly remembered they had to draw a connection between this story and subsequent events the audience already knows about. Read full review
50
SlashfilmJeremy MathaiNov 9, 2023
For all the storylines it juggles — part love story, part franchise extension, and part treatise on how mind-numbingly awful group projects in class can be (seriously, this early section might actually be the highlight of the movie) — The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes feels caught between its humbler, more character-driven aims and the blockbuster expectations of reinvigorating a brand. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)Roxana HadadiNov 17, 2023
It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness. Read full review
40
ABC NewsPeter TraversNov 17, 2023
It’s a risk doing a prequel to this hit film franchise without the power surge of star Jennifer Lawrence and the safe and sorry result, set 64 years before Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen ever drew breath, is seriously overlong and underwhelming. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesNov 15, 2023
The problem in adaptation here is that Collins’ source book accessed Snow’s inner monologue, a churn of competing emotions and priorities at odds with his unruffled outer self. Without that insight, Snow’s evolution from war-scarred orphan to what Donald Sutherland is playing in the original quadrilogy is rendered as blank as, well, snow. Read full review
40
EmpireHanna FlintNov 9, 2023
It has a few laughs and some stylish outfits, but this is unfortunately a shallow prequel, one which fails to breathe new life into the Hunger Games franchise. Read full review
40
TheWrapTomris LafflyNov 9, 2023
“The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” unlike the stellar predecessors of the series, feels curiously starved for real insights into the opposing shades of the human soul. Read full review
40
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyNov 9, 2023
Jason Schwartzman, as “weatherman and amateur magician” Lucretius Flickerman, lands some surprisingly good one-liners. Their performances hint at the true narcissism of Panem – something you’ll struggle to find in any of the limp, neutered romantics of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Read full review
40
The TelegraphRobbie CollinNov 9, 2023
The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise. Read full review
38
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 15, 2023
No tolerable climax is complete without a clock-watching anti-climax that so stretches things out that you start to discount the fabulous production design, the pointed parable about America’s rural vs. urban schism and how much fun Jason Schwartzman, in the Elizabeth Banks role, is having with all this. Read full review
38
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonNov 14, 2023
Even if you’ve only seen one of these films, you won’t need to spend 156 minutes witnessing the rise of a madman whose actions never required any backstory in the first place. Read full review
35
CNNBrian LowryNov 16, 2023
Splitting the movie into three chapters seems appropriate, since the film delivers a trifecta: overwrought, overacted, and overlong. Read full review
30
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsNov 16, 2023
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer want to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup. Read full review
30
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyNov 9, 2023
The contestants just lack dimension. And Lawrence’s journeyman handling of the more character-driven drama provides sputtering momentum at best. Read full review
30
The Film VerdictAlonso DuraldeNov 9, 2023
It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here. Read full review
20
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithNov 16, 2023
This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen. Read full review
20
The GuardianPeter BradshawNov 9, 2023
This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago. Read full review
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