The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping – twice the tributes, half the hope (trailer 2).
Somewhere in the Capitol, a committee of men with ruinous eyebrows once sat around a table and asked the question that has troubled tyrants since the dawn of time: “What if we killed children, but more of them?” The answer was the Quarter Quell, and Lionsgate’s second trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping shows us how it works. It is Panem’s version of a two-for-one supermarket offer, except that the thing on offer is dying in a forest.
The new film goes back to the morning of the 50th Hunger Games, 24 years before Katniss Everdeen ever picked up a bow. Because this is the second Quarter Quell, every district must hand over twice the usual number of tributes, which means 48 teenagers go into the arena instead of 24. Only one comes out. The maths is bleak, and the Capitol evidently thinks the ratings are worth it.
Our unlucky entrant from District 12 is a sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy, played by Joseph Zada. Readers of a certain vintage will know Haymitch as the man Woody Harrelson played with the permanent air of someone who has just been woken by a fire alarm and has decided not to leave. So this is an origin story, and we already know how it ends. Haymitch wins, and the winning turns out to be the worst thing that ever happened to him. It is roughly the plot of Better Call Saul, with a bigger body count.
The cast is stacked. Ralph Fiennes takes over as President Coriolanus Snow, making him the third actor to play Panem’s favourite rose-sniffing dictator after Donald Sutherland and Tom Blyth. Fiennes has already played Voldemort and M, so he could probably do villainous authority in his sleep. Jesse Plemons plays a young Plutarch Heavensbee, the part Philip Seymour Hoffman once filled with such weary cunning. Elle Fanning plays the young Effie Trinket, and the world waits to see whether the wigs are already at full altitude or still in their foothills.
Kieran Culkin, meanwhile, plays the ever-grinning host Caesar Flickerman. After years of playing Roman Roy in Succession, Culkin is well qualified to play a man whose job is to smile at the powerful while the powerful do something appalling in the background. Glenn Close turns up as Drusilla Sickle, a District 12 official, and Glenn Close handing out death sentences with a clipboard is exactly as frightening as it sounds. Mckenna Grace plays fellow tribute Maysilee Donner, Whitney Peak plays Haymitch’s sweetheart Lenore Dove Baird, and Ben Wang is District 12 contender Wyatt Callow. Maya Hawke and Kelvin Harrison Jr. play younger versions of Wiress and Beetee, those two electrifying brainiacs from Catching Fire, with the stress on “electrifying”.
Francis Lawrence is back as director, which makes this his fifth film in the series after Catching Fire, both halves of Mockingjay and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. He also directed last year’s Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, in which teenagers are forced to walk until they die. At this point Lawrence seems to have cornered the market in films about young people being killed for the entertainment of a bored audience, which is quite a niche. One imagines his next project will be a gentle rom-com in which someone is only very slightly reaped. Billy Ray wrote the screenplay, adapting Suzanne Collins’s 2025 novel.
Lionsgate has not been shy about the money, either. The budget is reported at somewhere between 170 and 200 million dollars. In a film about a cruel regime spending a fortune on a lavish spectacle to keep the masses entertained, we can leave that irony where it lies. It is probably a safe bet. The novel sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first week, the biggest launch of any book in the series, and the films have taken over 3.4 billion dollars worldwide. In Panem terms, the odds are very much in the studio’s favour.
The trailer itself gives us golden Capitol excess, grey District 12 misery, and a lot of young people looking up at things that are about to kill them. There is also the usual sense that something about this particular Games will go badly wrong for the people running it. Fans of the book know what that something is. Everyone else can find out in the cinema, where the popcorn will cost about the same as a District 12 family’s weekly grain ration.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives in cinemas and IMAX on November 20, 2026. May the odds be ever in your favour, and may your ticket not come with a reaping.
Watch the trailer on YouTube: The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping – Official Trailer 2
