Hollywood has never let a good franchise lay dormant when there is money to be made, so they’ve cranked out a so-so prequel to “The Hunger Games” that will really only entertain the fans.

The original “Hunger Games” movies, based on the popular book series, made upwards of $2 billion when they came out in the late 2000s. They were quite popular, but they’d adapted all of the available books. What, then, is Hollywood to do? Apparently, they get the original author, Suzanne Collins, to write a prequel book and then make that into a movie. “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” isn’t a bad movie or a dull movie; there is definitely something to watch. But it is a very unnecessary movie.