The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping Preview — Why Haymitch’s Story Could Be Panem’s Darkest Yet

We have met Haymitch Abernathy before: sardonic, sozzled and slumped at the back of a train, the only living victor District 12 has to show for itself. Woody Harrelson made him funny, then devastating. Sunrise on the Reaping goes back to the morning that made him that way, and anybody who read Suzanne Collins’s novel knows it is not a gentle origin story. On Friday 20 November, the Hunger Games returns to UK and US cinemas with its most tragic hero yet and a franchise director who knows exactly where the bodies are buried.

Release at a Glance

• Film: The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (2026)
• Director: Francis Lawrence
• Screenplay: Billy Ray, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
• Starring: Joseph Zada, Whitney Peak, Mckenna Grace, Jesse Plemons, Ralph Fiennes, Elle Fanning, Kieran Culkin, Glenn Close, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr.
• Also returning: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Woody Harrelson
• Distributor: Lionsgate
• UK and US release: Friday 20 November 2026, in cinemas, IMAX and 3D
• UK early showings: From Wednesday 18 November at selected cinemas
• UK certificate: 12A (BBFC: moderate violence, injury detail, threat, upsetting scenes)
• Running time: 158 minutes (2 hours 38 minutes)

Confirmed So Far

Lionsgate’s official synopsis is crisp. The film revisits Panem and follows young Haymitch Abernathy, played by Joseph Zada, twenty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell.

Francis Lawrence directs, making this his fifth trip to Panem after Catching Fire, both Mockingjay films and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Billy Ray, who co-wrote the 2012 original, adapts Collins’s 2025 novel. Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson produce with Lawrence.

The supporting cast is a who’s who. Ralph Fiennes plays President Snow, Elle Fanning is a younger Effie Trinket, Kieran Culkin is the grinning host Caesar Flickerman and Jesse Plemons plays Plutarch Heavensbee. Whitney Peak plays Lenore Dove Baird, Mckenna Grace is fellow District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner, Glenn Close is Drusilla Sickle, and Maya Hawke and Kelvin Harrison Jr. play the future victors Wiress and Beetee. Lili Taylor, Billy Porter and Ben Wang complete a line-up that would not look out of place at an awards ceremony.

There is one more piece of casting news. Jennifer Lawrence has confirmed that she plays Katniss Everdeen again, and that Josh Hutcherson and Woody Harrelson also return as Peeta and the older Haymitch. We covered her announcement in our Evening News, and we will say no more about where they fit in.

The BBFC has passed the film 12A, and at 158 minutes it is the longest Hunger Games film yet. For every other big November release, see What Is Coming Next: November 2026.

Why Haymitch Is the Story Fans Wanted

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes took a risk by asking us to spend a film inside the head of a young Coriolanus Snow. It worked better than many expected, but it was always going to be a film about watching a boy choose evil. Sunrise on the Reaping is the opposite proposition: a film about a decent kid with a smart mouth who is broken by a system designed to break people.

That makes it the purest Hunger Games story since Catching Fire. Collins has always been writing about war, propaganda and the way spectacle numbs an audience into complicity. Haymitch’s Games are the point where those themes cut deepest, and Collins’s novel arrived in 2025 to a readership that suddenly understood every sarcastic line he ever said to Katniss.

The Quarter Quell matters, too. These anniversary Games are designed by the Capitol to be crueller and more theatrical than usual. It is the franchise’s most efficient device for turning the screw, and Lawrence used it brilliantly in Catching Fire.

The Casting Gamble

Joseph Zada carries the film, and that is the biggest unknown. He is playing a character audiences already associate with one of the most lived-in performances of the original series. The trick will not be to impersonate Harrelson but to give us a teenager who could plausibly become him.

Around him, the older cast is doing something clever. Fiennes as Snow is a casting so obvious it feels inevitable; Donald Sutherland’s velvet menace is a tough act, but Fiennes has never needed to raise his voice to frighten anybody. Fanning’s Effie and Culkin’s Caesar should give the Capitol scenes the blackly comic sparkle that Elizabeth Banks and Stanley Tucci brought to the originals. Plemons as Plutarch, a role last played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a quietly brilliant fit.

Ranking the Hunger Games Films So Far

Before the new one joins the table, here is our order. Expect arguments.

5. Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014). Splitting the final book into two was a studio decision that showed. Strong moments, particularly the propaganda war, but it is half a story.

4. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023). Bold, overlong and better than its reputation, with a terrific Viola Davis and a genuinely unsettling third act.

3. Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015). Grim and uncompromising, with an ending far braver than most blockbusters would dare.

2. The Hunger Games (2012). Raw, handheld and anchored by Jennifer Lawrence’s star-making performance. The reaping scene still chills.

1. Catching Fire (2013). Francis Lawrence’s first entry is the series at its peak: political, propulsive and built around the first Quarter Quell we saw on screen. Sunrise on the Reaping has the same director and the same kind of Games. The bar is set.

What Book Readers Will Be Watching For

Fans of the novel will arrive with a checklist, and the first item is tone. Collins’s book is, by some distance, the bleakest story in the series, and the original films found clever ways to convey brutality without losing a broad audience; the earlier instalments were classified 12A in the UK. Sunrise on the Reaping has now been passed 12A too, for moderate violence, injury detail, threat and upsetting scenes. Lawrence has walked this line four times before and knows how much the camera needs to show for the audience to feel it.

The second is the Capitol. Collins’s great trick is that the most frightening people in Panem are the ones smiling on television, and this cast is stacked with performers who can be charming and chilling at once. The third is the ending. Without spoilers, anyone who has seen the original films knows where Haymitch ends up, and the drama of a prequel lies in how, not whether. The UK and the US get the film on the same day, 20 November, so there is no transatlantic spoiler gap to worry about, though UK early showings start on Wednesday 18 November. Avoid social media that week anyway.

What to Look For

Watch the reaping itself. Every Hunger Games film lives or dies on the moment the names are called, and this one starts on that very morning.

Look at how the film frames the audience inside the story. Collins’s great subject is people watching violence as entertainment, and the Capitol’s broadcast machinery, from Caesar Flickerman’s studio to Plutarch’s ambitions, should be central.

And notice how Lawrence uses the large format. The film is coming to IMAX and 3D, and his work on Catching Fire showed he knows how to make an arena feel both beautiful and lethal.

Where will Sunrise on the Reaping land in your Hunger Games ranking, and is Catching Fire still the one to beat? Tell us below.