Even in our fractured pop culture climate where a piece of art breaking through the zeitgeist to claim national recognizability feels like an outlier instead of a norm, IP movies usually come with some fanfare.

Intellectual property might not be the massive slam dunk at the box office it used to be, but rarely do we go through tentpole season without at least somewhat of a cultural awareness that these movies are coming out.

Even if you didn’t have any interest in, say, the latest Guardians of the Galaxy film, you at least probably knew that it was playing in theaters. Disney always puts on ferocious advertising blitzes near a release date.

Would you believe me if I told you a brand-new Hunger Games film was coming out in three weeks?

Yes, really, like The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen, bow-and-arrows, Panem, that whole thing.

No, really, like they made a reportedly $100 million Hunger Games prequel that has Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage, Hunter Schafer, Jason Schwartzman, Josh Andrés Rivera and Burn Gorman in it. It comes out November 17.

Don’t believe me? Here is a literal trailer for this new Hunger Games movie.

This is not some sort of scarily impressive A.I. creation; this is an actual movie that you and all your family and friends can go see next month in a movie theater near your house.

While there is plenty of hand-wringing about how the latest Marvel Studios film The Marvels will perform at the box office, there at least seems to be some sort of general recognition that it exists and is coming out soon.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes? I literally had to reference the title of it as I just typed that out because if you offered to give me a billion dollars to tell you what the full title of this movie was, I could only stare at you and watch a billion dollars fall right through my hands.

This is a major franchise movie with multiple notable actors. It’s directed by series regular Francis Lawrence and carries the first screenplay credit from Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt, an Oscar winner, in nearly 10 years. I didn’t realize that until I opened the Wikipedia page.

It’s not necessarily the film’s fault that it is about to arrive with a frightening lack of audience awareness. The book that inspired this film came out during the COVID-19 pandemic, one that details main series baddie Coriolanus Snow’s rise to power. The plot’s a bit like the Star Wars prequels in that way, but The Phantom Menace arrived as arguably the most hyped-up release of all time back in 1999.

In the early 2010s, The Hunger Games was a Star Wars/Marvel-level event franchise, one that skyrocketed Jennifer Lawrence to superstardom and made nearly three billion dollars at the global box office across four films.

Early tracking suggests this film might only make around $50 million in its opening weekend, which isn’t a bad number in a general sense but is roughly half of what the last film in the series, the part two of a two-partner, made in its 2015 debut. That result was considered a disappointment compared to where previous Hunger Games films had opened.

This latest Hunger Games film has chosen to stick with its November release date despite the lack of publicity its actors could grant it with the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike. It will open in the shadow of a Marvel film in its second week with a vastly overlapping audience, and a possible Disney behemoth in the animated musical Wish awaits on Nov. 22 to siphon even more of this Hunger Games film’s traffic for the Thanksgiving holiday.

While not having Jennifer Lawrence in the movie won’t help, she wasn’t necessarily a household name when the original Hunger Games film came out. Blyth and Zegler are the main characters, and the latter was front-and-center for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Still, no J-Law doesn’t help.

With low tracking at the box office, an inability to mount a thorough press campaign, no Jennifer Lawrence in the cast and a seeming lack of cultural awareness, the odds do not seem to ever be in this film’s favor. It’s coming out in less than a month, and it feels like a genuine surprise that it even exists.

Sure, strong reviews would help this film’s bona fides, and perhaps Hunger Games fans will volunteer as tribute to help get the word-of-mouth campaign going. It’s not really clear if this franchise’s ship has just sailed from cultural interest, or if there really just isn’t a lot of awareness that this film is coming out.

The idea of a new Hunger Games film feels like a welcomed one in comparison to, say, more Marvel or DC. We haven’t seen anything from this universe in nearly a decade, keeping it decently fresh in an age where IP fatigue is a real thing for moviegoers. However, you can’t have a comeback if nobody knows that you’re coming back.

It’s hard to tell where this will all go, but it just… feels incredibly strange that it feels incredibly strange that we’re getting a new Hunger Games film in three weeks. It’s not that the fire isn’t burning bright for this one; it just feels like somebody forgot to light the fuse to let folks know this even existed.