FIRST LOOK: Entertainment Weekly’s ‘Catching Fire’ Cover

1/9/2013Catching Fire MovieAldrin

Fans of The Hunger Games have been waiting for their first look at the sequel, Catching Fire, ever since the last frame rolled in theaters. Knowing this fan base, perhaps some fans have been waiting even longer than that! Well, today is a big, big, big day, as Entertainment Weekly is giving us a preview of their Catching Fire cover! Check it out below!

Included with the cover preview are several sound bites from the article itself. All we can say is after reading the quotes below, we think you’ll be quite eager to get your hands on the mag when it hits new stands Friday.

After spending the day outrunning death in a nearby jungle, the 22-year-old actress ordered herself a Budweiser and kicked back in the Trump balcony lounge to discuss the sequel, her life now as a blockbuster star, and her willful inability to behave like the nice sound-bite machine Hollywood might expect her to be. “It’s almost like I subconsciously don’t want to work anymore so I’m trying to ruin my career,”

From her first meeting with new director Francis Lawrence (“I spit egg inside his mouth when I was talking. Into his mouth”) to the raucous party she hosted for the Catching Fire cast and crew (“When Sam walked in I was chasing Woody and we’d flipped over my couch and Woody had a sock all the way down my throat…”)

Then in an exclusive conversation, director Francis Lawrence described his vision for the sequel, his immediate three-day pow-wow with series writer Suzanne Collins to ready a script, and how one of his inherited cast members had a particularly hard time adjusting to the loss of Hunger Games director Gary Ross. (Woody Harrelson, who plays Katniss and Peeta’s wry and PTSD-ruined wreck of a mentor Haymitch.)

EW also sat down with Sam Claflin, the green-eyed, dimpled Brit who won the role of District 4′s charming and enigmatic golden boy Finnick Odair, for his first Hunger Games interview. He described filming the infamous sugar cube scene, in which Finnick teases Katniss while wearing nothing beyond some strategically placed netting, as “the scariest moment of my life. I’m on Twitter and so many people have been like ‘Don’t mess this up, or we will kill you.’”

Now that you’ve seen official images of Catching Fire, (and read a preview of the article in EW) and if you are able to type coherently, what do you think? Are you even more excited for Catching Fire? Is there something you would have wanted to see instead? Let us know in the comments below!

via Entertainment Weekly