The Hunger Games Prequel Director Reveals The Katniss Easter Egg Most Fans Missed

Despite being a prequel, "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" manages to stand firmly on its own two feet. Yet while it tells the story of a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) against the backdrop of the 10th Annual Hunger Games, there are nods to the books and films that preceded it, including a Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) reference that audiences may not have caught on first viewing.

The most obvious allusion to the future Mockingjay is when Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) mentions how she refers to "swamp potatoes" as "katniss." But speaking to Buzzfeed, director Francis Lawrence brought up a subtler Easter egg, "I have one little nod," he revealed. "There's a piece where Snow is actually in the arena and we see — because nobody uses a bow and arrow — we see a broken bow with a quiver of arrows that he sees. That was not in the script. So that was something that we added."

It's a brief moment that foreshadows what's to come for Snow. Between the swamp potatoes and the bow and arrows, Snow must have had a serious case of deja vu when Katniss Everdeen came around over 60 years later.

Rachel Zegler's character, Lucy Gray, may exist as the anti-Katniss, but it's intriguing to compare and contrast her with Katniss, especially in how the former may have influenced the latter. Francis Lawrence told Buzzfeed that another Katniss moment in "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" wasn't in the script but also became a significant moment.

Lawrence explained, "Katniss had that sort of curtsy bow at the Reaping, and it was not written in the book or the script that Lucy Gray does this. I came up with the idea with Rachel for her to do it on the day." Katniss bows in "The Hunger Games" when the people of the Capitol ignore her during her archery demonstration, so after firing an arrow at an apple, she bows sarcastically. Lucy Gray has a similar demeanor for her bow; both women almost make fun of the elite for treating the entire ordeal as entertainment when it's literally a matter of life and death. 

Even though Katniss may have never met Lucy Gray, it's possible she became the stuff of legends, as Lawrence concluded, "I just thought that's a kind of cool idea to think that Katniss had heard through generations that there was a girl in the 10th Hunger Games that could've done this thing, and she's doing something she's heard about." After all, Lucy Gray wrote "The Hanging Tree," which lasted through generations, so who's to say members of District 12 didn't also pass down the full story of how the folk singer became a champion?