The Hunger Games Returns to Haymitch's Own Reaping in Sunrise on the Reaping, Out November 20
Francis Lawrence is back behind the camera for the second prequel, sending a 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy into the 50th Hunger Games — the Second Quarter Quell, which doubles every district's tribute count.
Lionsgate is returning to Panem a third time since Suzanne Collins expanded her own franchise backward in time, and this one goes further back than any film has gone before: 24 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute, a 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy is reaped for the 50th Hunger Games. Joseph Zada plays the young Haymitch, a role that eventually became Woody Harrelson's — the film adapts Collins' 2025 novel of the same name, the second prequel after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
The 50th Games carry a structural twist that the marketing has leaned on hard: they're the Second Quarter Quell, one of the rule-altering anniversary Games Collins built into the original trilogy's backstory, and this one doubles the number of tributes drawn from every district. Haymitch isn't just fighting 23 other kids — he's fighting 47, in an arena built for a bigger, crueler show. The film's teaser poster tagline, "Break the Machine, Change the Games," points at where his arc is headed: this is the story of how Haymitch became the bitter, drunk mentor Katniss meets decades later, and what the Capitol did to make him that way.
Francis Lawrence returns to direct — he's now made every Hunger Games film except the 2012 original, more than anyone else attached to the franchise — from a screenplay by Billy Ray and Michael Lesslie. That continuity matters for a prequel that has to match the visual language of Catching Fire and Mockingjay while still finding room for a Capitol two Quarter Quells removed from the one audiences already know.
The supporting cast does real narrative work. Ralph Fiennes plays President Coriolanus Snow, taking the role over from Tom Blyth's younger version in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes — Fiennes' Snow is roughly four decades further into his rule, already the man from the original trilogy rather than the ambitious student Blyth played. Glenn Close plays Drusilla Sickle, District 12's Capitol-appointed escort before Effie Trinket held the job — the tribute-wrangler whose entire function is cheerful, uncomprehending cruelty, the same role Effie later inherits and eventually outgrows. Jesse Plemons, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Mckenna Grace, Maya Hawke, Whitney Peak and Kelvin Harrison Jr. round out an ensemble built for a Games this much larger than the ones Katniss eventually survives.
Lionsgate has released multiple trailers building toward the November date, treating this less like a franchise footnote and more like a tentpole in its own right — a bet that Haymitch's story, largely gestured at rather than shown in the original films, has enough weight to justify a full theatrical treatment. Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters and IMAX on November 20, 2026.