Director Francis Lawrence tried as best as he could to make a good movie out of “Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”— the end result was a decent effort which could have easily snipped 30 minutes out of its unnecessarily lengthy 160 minute runtime. All of this to say that ‘Songbirds and Snakes’ came in at $44 million this weekend. This result is below expectations as it was originally projected to hit $50 million. The last ‘Hunger Games’ movie — Mockingjay: Part Two’ — had an opening weekend of $100 million in 2015. Rachel Zegler isn’t Jennifer Lawrence, that’s for sure.
For months, people close to CEO David Ellison had hinted that he would leave if state AGs didn't drop their antitrust suit against the $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger.