Lionsgate released a new trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping on September 16. The film arrives in theaters and IMAX on November 20, 2026, with Joseph Zada playing sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy.

The story takes place twenty-four years before Katniss Everdeen enters the arena. This is the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, and the Capitol has doubled the usual field by taking four tributes from every district.

The prettiest arena may also be one of Panem's cruelest

The new footage gives the arena much more room to breathe. It is an open landscape of mountains, flowers and bright colors rather than an immediately hostile wasteland.

That beauty is part of the design. The Capitol's Games have always turned murder into television, and this arena makes the contradiction unusually visible: the prettier the spectacle looks from outside, the more disturbing the violence inside it becomes.

Haymitch eventually allies with fellow District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner, played by Mckenna Grace. Ben Wang plays Wyatt Callow, while the expanded Quarter Quell means every district has twice the normal number of children trapped in the competition.

This Haymitch still believes he has something to lose

There is no mystery surrounding the identity of the victor. Anyone familiar with The Hunger Games already knows that Haymitch survives and later becomes the damaged mentor played by Woody Harrelson.

That changes the dramatic question. Sunrise on the Reaping is about the distance between those two versions of the character.

Director Francis Lawrence has described the younger Haymitch as more hopeful and innocent. The trailer steadily strips that away as he studies the machinery of the Games and begins looking for ways to resist the Capitol from inside its own spectacle.

Panem's familiar faces are being rebuilt a generation earlier

Ralph Fiennes plays President Coriolanus Snow, bridging the character between Tom Blyth's younger version in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Donald Sutherland's older dictator from the original films.

Elle Fanning appears as Effie Trinket, Jesse Plemons as Plutarch Heavensbee and Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman. Maya Hawke plays Wiress, Kelvin Harrison Jr. is Beetee and Lili Taylor takes on Mags.

Glenn Close joins the Capitol side as District 12 escort Drusilla Sickle, with Billy Porter as stylist Magno Stift. Whitney Peak plays Lenore Dove Baird, Haymitch's girlfriend back home.

The story may eventually reach Katniss and Peeta again

Multiple industry reports have also said Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are returning as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. Their precise involvement has been kept largely under wraps, although Suzanne Collins' novel includes a later epilogue that brings Haymitch back together with the two former victors.

That connection matters because Sunrise on the Reaping is not simply another isolated trip into Panem's past. Haymitch's experience becomes part of the resistance that eventually reaches Katniss, even if decades separate their respective Games.

Francis Lawrence directs from a screenplay by Billy Ray and Michael Lesslie. Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Lawrence produce.

The Second Quarter Quell reaches theaters on November 20.