The Hunger Games cast Voldemort as President Snow — fans are already comparing him to Donald Sutherland

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters and IMAX on November 20, and this week Lionsgate started rolling out individual character posters. The Snow one shows Fiennes in tight close-up: swept-back white hair, pale blue eyes, white roses on thorny vines creeping into frame. In this story, set 24 years before Katniss, Snow is in his late fifties — not yet the old man from the original films, but long past the ambitious student of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

The fan reaction splits into two threads. The first is still processing the casting itself, more than a year after it was announced:

"It's been more than a year, film comes out in like a month, and it's still surreal to me that they got Voldemort to play President Snow lol"

— a commenter on r/Hungergames (85 upvotes)

The second thread is tougher, and it's the one Lionsgate should be reading. Donald Sutherland played Snow across four films, and for a large part of this fandom he is not a role, he's a memory:

"He's not as intimidating as Donald Sutherland. I mean I know Ralph's performance is going to be stellar but Donald had that smiling sociopathic look down to a T"

— a commenter on r/Hungergames (36 upvotes)

That "smiling sociopathic look" is the specific thing a poster can't show. Sutherland's Snow terrified people while being pleasant; the poster's Fiennes is simply cold, and fans noticed the difference immediately.

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The harder recast nobody talks about

Most of the prequel coverage has treated Joseph Zada's young Haymitch as the film's big gamble, since he's stepping into a Woody Harrelson role at the center of the story. The posters suggest the riskier handoff is Snow. A protagonist can be reinterpreted; the franchise's defining villain gets compared, shot for shot, with four films of evidence.

Sutherland, who died in June 2024 at 88, got the part in 2012 by writing director Gary Ross an unsolicited letter about why the role mattered politically. Fiennes came to it the opposite way — Lionsgate sought out the man who'd already played the most famous screen villain of his generation, and he has been openly careful about the inheritance:

"I'm not going to try and be Donald Sutherland, because no one can be him."

— Ralph Fiennes, to The Hollywood Reporter, June 2025

He added that he hopes to echo "the complexity of that psychology." The two actually shared the screen once, in 2006's Land of the Blind — where, in a detail too neat for fiction, they played men plotting to assassinate their country's ruler.

Sutherland asked for the role of Snow with a letter in 2012. Fourteen years later, the role had to go looking for Voldemort.

Director Francis Lawrence, who shot every franchise entry since Catching Fire — including all of Sutherland's later appearances — is the continuity between the two Snows. He has a month to prove the pale blue eyes can do what the smile did.

Previously we wrote: Universal Orlando closure dates: Harry Potter's Forbidden Journey shuts down in 2027 — and the Hogwarts Express stops running even sooner