Why did Snow turn evil in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes? Tom Blyth says it happened in three stages

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes hit theaters on November 17, 2023. It's Francis Lawrence's adaptation of Suzanne Collins's prequel novel, set 64 years before Katniss Everdeen's Games. Snow (Blyth) is 18, from a once-powerful family that has lost its money and is pretending it hasn't. He's assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), District 12's tribute in the 10th Hunger Games, with a scholarship called the Plinth Prize on the line. The story is back in the conversation because Sunrise on the Reaping opens November 20, 2026, set 40 years later, with Ralph Fiennes playing Snow.

Blyth's Snow has to end up in the right place for Fiennes to pick him up.

"As the film progresses, in those three acts that are distinctive, he gets more and more close," Blyth told Total Film.

Closer, that is, to the Snow audiences already know. The film is split into three parts with their own title cards: "The Mentor," "The Prize," and "The Peacekeeper." Each one takes something from him.

Blyth credits Collins with the question underneath it all. "What makes a person bad? Were they born bad?" he told Variety.

Stage one: The Mentor

In the first act, Snow isn't a villain. He's a status-obsessed kid.

"His biggest priority was how he was going to be perceived by his classmates," Blyth told Esquire Singapore.

"He wanted to avoid losing status at any cost," he added. The Plinth Prize is how he plans to keep it, and Lucy Gray is how he wins it. He earns her trust on a visit to the Capitol Zoo, where the tributes are kept in cages. When a rebel bombing tears up the arena before the Games, he slips her rat poison and points out the tunnels the blasts opened.

That's cheating, but it's still cheating for someone else.

Stage two: The Prize

The second act puts blood on his hands. When Snow's classmate Sejanus Plinth sneaks into the arena to honor his dead friend, Head Gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) sends Snow in to bring him back. The two are attacked, and Snow kills the tribute who goes after them.

The script played it as self-defense. Blyth didn't. He added an extra swing at a tribute who was already motionless. The film was aiming for a PG-13 rating, so the crew also shot takes without it, and the swing made the final cut anyway. At a screening, Blyth's family "winced."

"It resonates so much better story-wise," Blyth said. "It was callous, violent and intentional."

He keeps cheating, too. Before Gaul releases genetically engineered snakes on the remaining tributes, Snow drops a handkerchief carrying Lucy Gray's scent into their tank, so they leave her alone. Lucy Gray wins. Dean Casca Highbottom traces the handkerchief back to Snow and sends him off to the Peacekeepers. Snow bribes his way into a posting in District 12, and Sejanus follows him there.

Stage three: The Peacekeeper

In District 12, Snow stops cheating for anyone but himself. He secretly records Sejanus planning to help the rebels, then confronts the group, and in the fight he shoots a girl named Mayfair dead. His report reaches the Capitol, and Sejanus is hanged for treason.

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He runs for the woods with Lucy Gray, finds the guns that tie him to Mayfair's death, and watches her stop trusting him. She disappears into the trees. Snow, bitten by a snake hidden in a scarf he once gave his mother, opens fire into the woods after her.

Back in the Capitol, Gaul gets him pardoned, and Sejanus's parents, who have no idea what Snow did to their son, make him their heir. Then he poisons Highbottom's drug supply.

"Coryo comes back to the Capitol changed and I wanted to reflect that," Blyth told Esquire Singapore.

He did it with his voice. "So I slowed down his speech, used his consonants a little more precisely, and made his cadence a bit more calculated," Blyth said. He put it more bluntly to Total Film: "He's gone away to District 12 and come back and has been through some shit."

The part that hurt was letting go. "I was heartbroken when I had to let him fall off the deep end," Blyth told Variety.

The film closes on Donald Sutherland's older Snow, in archival audio from Mockingjay – Part 1. The next Snow is Fiennes, and Blyth hasn't called him. "I haven't talked to Ralph Fiennes," Blyth told PEOPLE on November 8, 2026. "I think he's fine without my help."

Previously we wrote: Disney's banned Song of the South turns 80 — and its few viewers say you're missing nothing