Hunger Games super fans, we have good news for you that nobody on earth will possibly care about: Katniss's cat has been recast in Catching Fire.
Odds are you may not remember much about Buttercup from The Hunger Games, who appears very early in the film to hiss at Katniss as she leaves to go hunt:
The cat may have been hired for its excellent hissing abilities, but it looked nothing like the Buttercup described in the book, as a "hideous-looking cat" with a coat either the color of rotting squash or a buttercup flower, depending on who you asked. Katniss's younger sister Prim loves Buttercup, and Katniss can't stand him; believe it or not the cat plays a pretty significant role in the third book, Mockingjay, and director Francis Lawrence apparently realized that, if they were going to feature the cat again, they were going to have to get it right. io9's Meredith Woerner was on the case and asked Lawrence about the cat recasting:
One of the first big changes I noticed from Hunger Games to Catching Fire was that you recast the cat. Why did you recast the cat?You know what that was actually, and I was happy to do it, that was a request from Nina the producer and Suzanne the author. That they thought the cat from the first movie was not the way he was described in the book. And that had annoyed a bunch of fans, and things like that. But it also just kind of bothered them that Buttercup was not a black and white cat. So I was happy to get one that felt like the Buttercup of the book.It's funny because now people are split. Some people think we should have continued on with what happened in the first movie. And some people are really happy. You never win.
I'm incredibly curious to meet the people who are Team Black And White Buttercup, because come on-- it's one thing to be loyal to a cat as featured in a trilogy of books, and another to be loyal to a cat featured in a few seconds of a single movie. Yes, I do in fact have a lot of strong opinions on this. Now, if you'll excuse me, my cat is meowing in a way that suggests I have missed our regularly scheduled play hour and I really need to get to work mending his bow tie before this weekend.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, complete with brand-new Buttercup, opens November 22. The cat isn't featured in this trailer, but you can pretend anyway.
