Casting around the 50th Hunger Games continues to fill up thick and fast with the prequel movie Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. Days after Maya Hawke was cast as Wiress, it's now been revealed that the legendary actor formerly known as He Who Must Not Be Named has been appointed as the new president of Panem. The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Ralph Fiennes will be taking on the role of President Coriolanus Snow in the upcoming film that will follow the games that turned tribute, Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada), into a legend as one of the only two District 12 victors in the games' history. Whitney Peak, Mckenna Grace, Jesse Plemons, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Lili Taylor and Ben Wang are also set to star.
Snow marks another iconic literary villain for Fiennes to check off his list after spending over a decade as Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films. While it's hard to determine just which one is worse (both are heartless kid killers in their own right), one star of the last Hunger Games movie was quick to chime in on the casting announcement. Taking to Instagram following the announcement of Fiennes in the role, Rachel Zegler, who played Snow's former love interest, Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, wrote, "Not my movie ex being Voldemort," which naturally got a lot of laughs from fans of the franchise.
Fiennes is now the third person to take on the role of Snow after Zegler's co-star in her prequel film, Tom Blyth, and the President Snow of the original Hunger Games movies, the late Donald Sutherland. For a talent such as the Oscar-winning Fiennes, who has brought a handful of monsters to life over the years, it'll be interesting if any traits from both former iterations will appear in the next president, if at all.
As is compulsory with every trip back to Panem, director Francis Lawrence will handle proceedings as he has with every movie since Hunger Games: Catching Fire, with the latest film set for release on November 20, 2026. His dabbling in dystopian worlds isn't stopping there, either, with his adaptation of Stephen King's The Long Walk, set for release on September 12, 2025. That film follows a group of equally plucky youngsters tasked with a dystopian challenge of walking non-stop along U.S. Route 1 to win a large amount of money. Unfortunately, the punishment for stopping on three occasions is being shot where they stand. Honestly, Lawrence, is a perkier tomorrow out of the question?
Fiennes also fights against a hellish future in Danny Boyle's long-anticipated horror threequel, 28 Years Later, which is set for release on June 20, 2025. In it, he joins Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Sinners' star Jack O'Connell in a world that continues to be ravaged by the Rage virus. Should you want to visit some other worlds of tomorrow in the meantime, check out our list of the 30 best sci-fi movies of all time here.
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