Unsurprisingly, A Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes will be chock full of Hunger Games easter eggs

When Suzanne Collins’ original Hunger Games novel came out in 2008, it spawned an almost immediate fanbase for its fleshed-out worldview and incredibly fresh take on young adult dystopia. Ditto for the first round of movies, which took Collins’ vision and executed it with grand sets and even grander performances.

Now, for the first time in almost a decade, moviegoers will be able to revisit the world of Panem (and its many fucked up traditions) in The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, a prequel set decades before Katniss came onto the scene. But if you thought this would be a new story independent of the influence of the Mockingjay—perhaps because she hasn’t even been born when the new film is set—think again. This is a franchise film, after all. And modern franchise films are all about reminding their audiences that they are, indeed, part of a series where other things also happened.

Much of the Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes press tour has been intentionally concerned with these little shouts rather than the film’s story itself. Talking about a shot of lead actor Rachel Zegler taking a deep bow reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence’s from the original film, director Francis Lawrence told Entertainment Tonight that “it was something that I made up on the day and had Rachel do, because we’re constantly looking for, in the making of this, little sort of Easter eggs that would excite the fans.”

“I thought, wow, this is really cool. If she does this then, you know, Katniss could have heard generations later about this kind of rebellious, irreverent act of this woman that was a singer and did this sort of bow curtsy at the reaping,” he continued. “It just gives a different sort of meaning to Katniss’ action… I think that it’s a really fun element of this movie, to get lots of those moments.”

Prequels always have a tough line to tread in figuring out how to tell an original story without either tarnishing or flat-out refuting events that canonically happened decades later. Take President Snow’s character, for example, a teenager in the prequel who goes on to become a kid-killing dictator in the original series. Lawrence had to “seed in all the elements of ambition, that hunger for power and greed and the darkness, so that when he does go dark, it’s believable and truthful and honest and you understand it,” he said.

Still, while we won’t know for sure until the film is released, conversations around it sound worryingly like an illustrated coffee table companion rather than an intriguing story in its own right. For once, it would be nice to get excited about a fandom movie that doesn’t just remind us of how good the other ones were.