Haymitch Abernathy is heading back into the arena, and judging by the huge new trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Panem is about to put him through absolute hell. Australian actor Joseph Zada (We Were Liars) takes over the role as a 16-year-old Haymitch, with the footage unveiling the deadliest Hunger Games yet, a deceptively gorgeous new arena, plenty of familiar faces and the beginnings of a resistance that will eventually help bring the Capitol down. Watch the trailer above and get the full rundown of what to know below.
Meet the Haymitch We Never Knew
Woody Harrelson’s older Haymitch opens the trailer with a grim reminder: “Nobody ever wins the Games. Period. There are survivors.” It immediately sets up the tragedy at the heart of this prequel. We already know Joseph Zada’s young Haymitch gets out alive. We also know what he becomes.
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Sunrise on the Reaping turns the clock back 24 years before The Hunger Games, finding Haymitch on his 16th birthday in District 12. He’s not yet the booze-soaked, deeply cynical mentor Harrelson played across the original films, preparing Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark for almost certain death. He’s funny, hopeful, has a family he loves and assumes he’ll be getting on with his life once Reaping Day is over. Yeah, about that.
Producer Nina Jacobson and director Francis Lawrence have both stressed how important it was to find the person who existed before all that damage. Lawrence told Reuters in August: “This role really takes an actor through everything. To go from such sort of hope and optimism, and through such tragedy and horror…”
Jacobson made a similar point at the recent preview screening attended by SYFY Wire, explaining that the filmmakers wanted someone capable of capturing Haymitch’s optimism, hopefulness and carefree quality before the Games change him. Rather than asking Zada to simply do a teenage version of Harrelson, the film gets to show us what was there before the armour went up.
A big part of that life is Lenore Dove Baird (Whitney Peak), Haymitch’s girlfriend and someone already far less comfortable with accepting the Capitol’s rule as an unavoidable fact of life. Their relationship gives the film something especially cruel to work with: Haymitch has a future he can actually picture before Panem suddenly decides it belongs to them instead.
Why Are There 48 Tributes This Time?
Because apparently 24 terrified young people murdering one another wasn’t sufficiently celebratory for the Capitol.
Haymitch is selected for the 50th Hunger Games, otherwise known as the Second Quarter Quell. Every 25 years, the Capitol marks the anniversary with an extra twist, and this one is brutally simple: double the tributes. Each district must send two boys and two girls, creating a field of 48 competitors instead of the usual 24.
That makes these the biggest Hunger Games we’ve seen on screen, and the scale wasn’t exactly convenient behind the scenes either. Reuters reported that the production had those 48 tribute performers accompanied by stunt doubles, while substantial arena work took place in the remote Asturias region of Spain.
District 12’s group consists of Haymitch, Maysilee Donner (Mckenna Grace), Wyatt Callow (Ben Wang) and Louella McCoy (Molly McCann). Inside the arena, Haymitch and Maysilee end up working together, while his instinct to push back against the Capitol begins to matter almost as much as simply staying alive.
The New Arena Looks Beautiful. That’s Probably the First Warning.
The Capitol has really outdone itself. The Second Quarter Quell initially looks absurdly inviting, all sunlit countryside, colourful vegetation and harmless-looking wildlife. It’s closer to an idyllic getaway than a teenage slaughterhouse… right up until everything starts trying to kill people.
The new footage offers a much bigger taste of the arena’s tricks, creatures and environmental horrors, while repeatedly drawing attention to the force field around its boundary. Haymitch and Maysilee are both shown getting dangerously close to it, and anyone familiar with Suzanne Collins’ novel will know that’s not just some fancy invisible fencing. We’ll leave the specifics there.
The animal factor is a particularly nasty part of this year’s design. These Games don’t simply give the tributes dangerous terrain and hope they’ll take care of one another; the Gamemakers turn the wildlife against them as well. The trailer teases attacks involving birds and vicious squirrel-like creatures, while book readers will know the arena’s genetically engineered “muttations” get much, much worse.
It also gives one of Haymitch’s lines a little extra bite. “We’re not animals to kill for their entertainment,” he declares as his anger towards the Games grows. The Capitol is quite literally treating children like disposable creatures for sport while turning actual creatures into weapons against them.
What really stands out, though, is how viciously pretty everything is. Rather than telegraphing danger with endless darkness and rubble, this arena wraps the nightmare in colour. It’s cheerful, artificial and completely untrustworthy. Very Capitol.
A reporter from Parade was also at the presentation, where Lawrence discussed giving this period of Panem a more extravagant visual identity, with the Capitol’s showmanship reflected in both the arena’s enormous scale and the film’s brighter palette. That contrast certainly comes through in the footage. Basically, if something here appears cute, colourful or remotely safe, getting as far away from it as possible seems like a solid strategy.
Book Readers Will Recognise A LOT in This Trailer
Lionsgate isn’t exactly playing coy with this one. For newcomers, the trailer is a rapid-fire barrage of strange creatures, terrified tributes, explosions, bloodshed and Haymitch increasingly realising that his nice birthday has gone catastrophically off course. For anyone who’s read Sunrise on the Reaping, there are moments here that will have you pointing at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio.
Several major book sequences flash past, including incidents involving the arena’s wildlife, the force field and some particularly unpleasant situations awaiting individual tributes. There are also glimpses of events whose importance stretches well beyond the Games themselves.
We’re not spelling those out. Knowing that Haymitch eventually wins already changes the usual Hunger Games suspense; there’s no need to start giving away exactly how everyone else fares along the way. And that’s really the more interesting hook anyway: this isn’t a movie asking whether Haymitch survives. It’s asking what surviving costs him.
The Resistance Didn’t Begin With Katniss
One of the most interesting things Sunrise on the Reaping appears ready to explore is just how much history sits behind the rebellion audiences watched unfold in the original movies. Haymitch isn’t Katniss 1.0, but there are some striking echoes.
The trailer includes a terrific moment in which he gives President Coriolanus Snow (Ralph Fiennes) an exaggerated slow clap from inside the arena. Jesse Plemons’ younger Plutarch Heavensbee watches on, and you can practically see a little file marked “interesting rebellious District 12 kid” opening in his brain.
At the preview screening attended by SYFY Wire, Lawrence described this chapter as “the beginning of the resistance that leads into the stories with Katniss.”
That’s a major piece of what makes this prequel more than another trip into the arena. Haymitch’s story sits along a much longer line of people testing the Capitol, paying horrific prices and leaving pieces behind for somebody else to pick up. Katniss may eventually become the face that unites Panem, but people were pushing against the system long before she volunteered.
Jacobson made that point particularly well in a direct interview with People: “They have been resisting and losing for 24 years and made so many sacrifices, lost so many times, but yet they kept going.”
That extra history could make quite a few familiar characters look a little different the next time you rewatch the original films.
You’ll Recognise Plenty of Characters — Just Not Their Faces
The cast surrounding Zada is seriously stacked, with a sizeable group of younger versions of characters Hunger Games audiences already know.
Ralph Fiennes takes over as President Coriolanus Snow. Donald Sutherland played the older dictator throughout the original Hunger Games films, while Tom Blyth portrayed Snow decades earlier in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Fiennes’ version therefore lands right in the middle of that increasingly nasty evolution.
Elle Fanning plays Effie Trinket, the character memorably played by Elizabeth Banks alongside Katniss and Peeta. This Effie is considerably younger and much earlier in her relationship with the Capitol spectacle.
Jesse Plemons is Plutarch Heavensbee, previously played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Catching Fire and the two Mockingjay films. Here, Plutarch is still working much closer to the machinery surrounding the Games, giving us another piece of the character’s history before he becomes one of the rebellion’s most important players.
Kieran Culkin inherits Caesar Flickerman from Stanley Tucci, whose grinning television host became one of the franchise’s most memorable Capitol personalities. Early footage shown to press suggests Culkin isn’t simply doing a younger Tucci impression, with this Caesar already extremely conscious of the cameras, the performance and his own place within the spectacle.
Maya Hawke plays Wiress, the eccentric District 3 victor portrayed by Amanda Plummer in Catching Fire, while Kelvin Harrison Jr. takes over as Beetee Latier, played by Jeffrey Wright in Catching Fire and the Mockingjay films.
There’s also another returning District 4 favourite: Lili Taylor plays a younger Mags Flanagan, the elderly former victor played by Lynn Cohen in Catching Fire. Fans will remember Mags volunteering for Annie Cresta before becoming one of Katniss’ allies during the Third Quarter Quell.
Glenn Close and Billy Porter, meanwhile, are among the major newcomers without older movie counterparts. Close plays Drusilla Sickle, the Capitol escort overseeing District 12’s tributes, while Porter is Magno Stift, their stylist.
There’s an enormous amount of star power here, but the movie has one major balancing act ahead of it: making all these familiar characters feel like organic parts of Haymitch’s story rather than turning the experience into two-and-a-half hours of “Hey! It’s the younger version of that person!”
What the First 20 Minutes Tell Us About the Movie
Lionsgate has already given members of the press an early taste of the film, and perhaps the most interesting takeaway isn’t how quickly things become violent. It’s how much attention appears to be going into the machinery that turns that violence into Capitol entertainment.
A Mashable reporter attended an August filmmaker presentation in New York, where Lawrence and Jacobson screened the opening 20 minutes along with several additional scenes. Among the material shown was a reaping thrown into chaos by violence, forcing the Capitol to redo part of the ceremony for the cameras. Drusilla and a younger Plutarch are right in the middle of that process, making the point brutally clear: even terror has to look right on television.
Before the Capitol takes over his life, however, the opening reportedly gives Haymitch room to simply be Haymitch. We spend time with him on his birthday, see his relationship with Lenore and get a feel for the family and ordinary existence he assumes he’ll still have by the end of the day. That’s an important choice. The more time the movie gives us with this version of Haymitch, the worse it’s going to hurt watching him disappear.
Another separately screened sequence goes behind the polished television persona of Caesar Flickerman. Culkin’s younger Caesar appears less interested in charming the tributes than the cameras around him, offering another glimpse at how thoroughly performance, propaganda and celebrity have wrapped themselves around the Games.
And yes, the presentation also included arena footage. With 48 terrified tributes converging on the Cornucopia instead of 24, the opening bloodbath sounds every bit as chaotic as that number suggests.
Why Sunrise on the Reaping Is More Than Another Hunger Games Prequel
Suzanne Collins published Sunrise on the Reaping in March 2025, returning to an event fans had known about for years without truly knowing what happened.
Haymitch winning the Second Quarter Quell isn’t new information. Collins had already given us pieces of that history. The novel instead takes that familiar endpoint and changes its weight by showing the person Haymitch was, the people surrounding him and what happens when he refuses to play the role of grateful victor exactly as the Capitol expects.
It also digs deeper into propaganda, obedience and the stories powerful institutions tell in order to keep people accepting things that should be unacceptable. That makes the 50th Hunger Games more than franchise backstory: the arena may be where Haymitch fights for his life, but the larger battle is over who gets to control what everybody thinks they saw.
The book certainly found an audience. Scholastic says Sunrise on the Reaping sold more than 1.5 million World English copies during its first week and went on to become the No. 1 bestselling children’s/YA book of 2025 in the U.S., UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
Francis Lawrence Knows Panem Pretty Damn Well by Now
Lawrence is once again directing, continuing a run with this franchise that stretches back to 2013’s Catching Fire. He also helmed Mockingjay – Part 1, Mockingjay – Part 2 and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, making Sunrise on the Reaping his fifth Hunger Games movie.
Gary Ross, who directed the 2012 original, remains the only other filmmaker to have taken charge of a film in the series.
That familiarity could be especially useful here. Sunrise has to feel connected to movies we’ve already seen without simply copying them, particularly when it’s revisiting versions of Snow, Plutarch, Effie, Caesar, Wiress, Beetee, Mags and Haymitch himself.
And Lawrence certainly isn’t working small. Beyond the oversized tribute field, the Spain shoot had to transform remote landscapes into an arena that looks inviting enough to be suspicious before all hell breaks loose. Billy Ray wrote the screenplay, returning to the franchise after co-writing the original 2012 film and adapting Collins’ bestselling novel.
Are Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson Coming Back?
The prequel is also set to reconnect directly with the original duo, with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson reported to be returning as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark.
Anyone who’s read Collins’ book can probably make a pretty good guess about where Katniss and Peeta would fit without needing some wild time-travel twist suddenly dropped into Panem. Exactly how much we’ll see of them remains under wraps, and considering this trailer has already handed book fans enough material to analyse frame by frame, having a couple of things left for the cinema would be nice.
When Is The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping Released?
Australian audiences get back into the arena on November 19, with The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opening in U.S. cinemas and IMAX on November 20, 2026.
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