Very mixed reviews coming through and its the franchise's lowest "preview" earnings so far with its near $60m being just 50% of the previous lowest earner. Zegler's vocal talents get good reviews but not much else about her acting abilities, likely due to story or direction rather than a lack of talent I'd suggest -
Time - "This is a movie stuffed with too many characters and, sadly, none of them are played by Jennifer Lawrence who was the best feature of the earlier entries....................... Zegler is charming, but no single performer can carry a movie this unwieldy."
The prequel starring Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth is an extravagant but dreary dystopian prequel..
time.com
Rolling Stone - "
The Ballad of Songbooks & Snakes is really about the slow, methodical making of a monster. This is another origin story of a villain, given the same treatment that Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, and many, many other recognizable big bads of past pop-culture touchstones."
This return to Panem rewinds back to the early days of the Hunger Games, when future villain Coriolanus Snow was young, hot and... a good guy?
www.rollingstone.com
Vanity Fair - "
Songbirds is a gloomy sit, but it is also confident entertainment, a studio cash-in that justifies its making through thoughtful applications of tone and texture."
It’s possible, Francis Lawrence’s movie suggests, to do something as cynical as a brand extension with care and insight.
www.vanityfair.com
New York Times - "Compared to Jennifer Lawrence’s stoic Katniss, Zegler’s Lucy Gray looks and acts like a meringue — she’ll drizzle sugar all over Snow to save her life."
This slow-burning prequel tells the origin story of Coriolanus Snow, the future president of Panem.
www.nytimes.com
The Guardian - 1/5
- "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"
Prequel to the hit teen dystopia recruits Rachel Zegler and Jason Schwartzman to labour over IP that is now starved of inspiration
www.theguardian.com
Variety - "[Zegler's] songs are the highlight of a dark thriller that’s half an hour too long and frustratingly unclear in the final stretch. Then again, Hollywood has long since decided that audiences like their blockbusters bloated, and “Ballad” is but the latest to over deliver."
An Academy mentor (Tom Blyth) and a Hunger Games tribute (Rachel Zegler) make an unlikely couple in a bold prequel focused on Coriolanus Snow's origins.
variety.com
Empire - 2/5 - "Best described as an adaptive exercise in cinematic skim-reading, returning director Francis Lawrence delivers a disappointingly edge-free and largely superficial villain origin story."
Return to Panem with Hunger Games prequel The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes. Read Empire's review.
www.empireonline.com
The Independent - 2/5 - "[Zegler] is pure theatre kid, dressed in a dainty, fairy gown with a freshly moisturised face; the rest of the tributes all look like baristas who’ve just been slammed face-first into a cow pat. It drains the games themselves of any intrigue."
This origin story for Donald Sutherland’s monstrous bad guy from the original films casts Rachel Zegler as a dystopian theatre-kid and squanders the anger of novelist Suzanne Collins’s source material
www.independent.co.uk
Most of the reviews seem to lament the same thing - The idea is good (the rise of Snow) but the implementation is poor - where it takes the "down and dirty" world of later films and applies a "Yassify" filter to them (I had to look that up, its a beauty filter), which strips the film of any sense of reality that the originals had.