The Hunger Games movies are heading back to Panem. Francis Lawrence is preparing to do it again with Sunrise on the Reaping, the more recent prequel that will show Haymitch Abernathy in his youth.
That matters because Haymitch is the character fans first met as the hard-drinking mentor played by Woody Harrelson in the original films, and this new chapter rewinds the clock to a time long before that version of him existed. The book Sunrise on the Reaping debuted in 2025, giving the franchise fresh material six decades later.
The Hunger Games began in 2012 with a film adapted from Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, a dystopian teen series set in a future America where civil war gives way to an authoritarian government called Panem. In that world, each district must send one boy and one girl to compete in a televised fight to the death, a premise that turned the series into one of the most recognizable young-adult franchises of the last two decades.
The story did not stop with the original trilogy. The franchise returned with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which looked at an older Panem through the eyes of Coriolanus Snow, played by Tom Blyth in the film adaptation and by Donald Sutherland as President Snow in the original movies. Lawrence’s next prequel goes in the other direction, back to Haymitch’s younger years, and that choice gives the series a different emotional center.
The real tension is whether the new film can make a character already defined by his later bitterness feel new again. A prequel only works if it adds weight to what came before, and Sunrise on the Reaping is built around a figure audiences already know too well to meet casually. If the movie lands, it will not just extend the Hunger Games movies. It will explain where one of the saga’s most damaged survivors came from, and why Panem still has stories left to tell.
