There was a time when the villain’s sidekick simply turned up, fully formed and sneering, and nobody asked where he had trained. Those days are gone. Modern franchises want to know how everyone got that way, and Lionsgate’s new featurette for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is called, with admirable directness, “Origins”. Think of it as Muppet Babies for a totalitarian state.
Released on Monday, the clip gathers director Francis Lawrence with Joseph Zada, Elle Fanning, Jesse Plemons, Ben Wang, Maya Hawke and Ralph Fiennes to explain where their characters are when we first meet them, 24 years before Katniss picked up a bow. The roll call covers Haymitch, Effie Trinket, Caesar Flickerman, Plutarch Heavensbee, Beetee, Wiress, Mags and President Snow. Panem, it turns out, was a smaller town than we thought.
Zada says he wanted his sixteen-year-old Haymitch to begin the film playful, loving and hopeful, so that the turn hits harder when it comes. Since we have all met Woody Harrelson’s version, essentially a hip flask with a man attached, the destination is hardly a spoiler. The journey is the point. Fanning, meanwhile, describes her young Effie as a Capitol fashion student and a true believer in the Games, with a fire in her belly to prove herself. Picture a promising design graduate who regards a child-murder pageant as a perfectly reasonable catwalk, and you are probably in the right postcode.
Lionsgate’s publicity machine has been running for months with Capitol efficiency. There was a “Meet Haymitch” featurette on 4 July, which in Panem is both Haymitch’s birthday and Reaping Day, proving that someone in Collins’s world has a sense of humour, however dark. A second trailer followed in September, then fourteen character posters on 16 October, fresh stills via Entertainment Weekly and a push for everyone to rent or buy the whole saga before the new one arrives. The studio has clearly worked out that a prequel works best when you remember what comes after it.
A few new details have also surfaced. The film runs two and a half hours. In America it is rated PG-13 for strong violence, bloody images, disturbing material and “some smoking and teen drinking”, which is a gloriously American list of concerns for a story in which 48 teenagers are sent into an arena to kill one another. Snow would no doubt approve of the cigarettes being the real scandal. The screenplay is credited to Billy Ray and Michael Lesslie, adapting Suzanne Collins’s 2025 novel, and the ensemble also includes Lili Taylor as Mags, Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Beetee, Kieran Culkin as Caesar, Glenn Close, Billy Porter, Whitney Peak and Mckenna Grace.
If you missed our take on the second trailer, it is here. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in UK cinemas and IMAX on 20 November. Bring tissues for the final act and a hip flask for the queue. Haymitch would want it that way.
Watch the featurette on YouTube: The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping – Origins featurette
Join the conversation (0)