A dystopian prequel is getting a sequel. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, the 6th entry in the Hunger Games franchise, is scheduled to be released by Lionsgate on November 20, 2026. Based on the 2025 novel of the same name written by Hunger Games scribe Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping takes place after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes—starring Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler—and 24 years before the events of Jennifer Lawrence‘s Hunger Games tetralogy.
Sunrise on the Reaping follows 16-year old Haymitch Abernathy, played as an adult in the original Hunger Games films by Woody Harrelson, and his girlfriend, Lenore Dove Baird. Deadline reports that two rising stars will play the young lovers: Joseph Zada and Whitney Peak.
Francis Lawrence, who has directed every iteration of the Hunger Games franchise thus far, will direct the upcoming film from a screenplay written by Billy Ray and adapted from Collins novel. The film is being produced by Color Force’s Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, with Cameron MacConomy executive producing.
Who are the stars in Sunrise on the Reaping? And how does Sunrise on the Reaping fit into the Hunger Games franchise? Here’s everything we know about The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
Wait: when does Sunrise on the Reaping take place?
Much like Star Wars, the Hunger Games franchise apparently began in the middle of the story. In 2012, Lawrence starred in the first Hunger Games film as Katniss Everdeen, the 16-year-old girl from district 12 who takes her sister’s place in the 74th annual Hunger Games—a dystopian tradition in the totalitarian society known as Panem in which 24 children must fight to the death. From 2012 to 2015, Lawrence would star in three more Hunger Games films—Catching Fire, Mockingjay, and Mockingjay: Part Two—where, spoiler alert, she would eventually topple the regime and end the Hunger Games once and for all.
Rather than looking to the future to continue the franchise, Collins looked to Panem’s past. In 2020, she published The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which takes place 64 years before the events of the first Hunger Games novel. Songbirds and Snakes follows Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird, the female tribute from District 12 for the 10th Hunger Games, and a young Coriolanus Snow, played by Blyth, who will eventually become the dictatorial President of Panem. In the original films, Snow was played by the late, great Donald Sutherland.
Sunrise on the Reaping, meanwhile, takes place 40 years after Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and 24 years before the first Hunger Games novel. It follows the events of the 50th Hunger Games, also known as “The Second Quarter Quell.” This time, district 12’s tribute is not a teenage girl but a teenage boy: Haymitch Abernathy. Eventually, he’ll become a rotund drunk memorably played by Harrelson, but in Sunrise on the Reaping, he’s simply a 16-year-old with a girlfriend named Lenore Dove Baird, whose mother is suspected to be Lucy Gray Baird’s cousin.
Who will star in Sunrise on the Reaping?
Haymitch Abernathy will be played by Australian newcomer Joseph Zada. He currently stars as Charlie in the Stan Australia Original Series Invisible Boys, based on the bestselling novel by Holden Sheppard. Next, he can be found starring in Prime Video’s series We Were Liars, which premieres in June. He also recently completed production on Netflix’s seven-episode East of Eden limited series, based on the 1951 novel by John Steinbeck.
Finding Zada was apparently no easy feat. “Nobody can be Woody Harrelson but Woody Harrelson,” Jacobson told Variety. “But you have to find that mischief that he has in him inherently and try to understand, if you turn back time from the man you meet at the beginning of The Hunger Games, who he was before all of that, and why he became that.”
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