Lionsgate released a Haymitch first look on Saturday. The studio debuted a “Meet Haymitch” featurette for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. The featurette marks Reaping Day in the story’s fictional world of Panem. The clip gives fans their first extended footage of Joseph Zada as a young Haymitch Abernathy. He won the 50th Hunger Games and is the central figure of the franchise’s fifth film.
The featurette moves through Haymitch’s Reaping, his interviews in the Capitol and scenes from inside the arena itself. It mixes finished footage with behind the scenes interviews from the cast and crew. Woody Harrelson played an older Haymitch across the original Hunger Games trilogy. Director and producer Francis Lawrence called that performance “a very iconic portrayal of a character.” This Haymitch first look instead shows the character decades earlier. He is still a teenager processing what he survived, rather than the hardened mentor Harrelson brought to the screen.
Sunrise on the Reaping adapts Suzanne Collins‘s 2025 novel of the same name. It traces Haymitch’s Games and the events that shaped him before he became a mentor to Katniss Everdeen. The Haymitch first look arrives months ahead of the film’s release. That gives the studio room to build anticipation, the way the earlier prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes did before its 2023 debut. That film went on to gross more than $345 million worldwide at the box office.
New faces fill familiar roles
Zada is not the only actor stepping into a part audiences already know. Elle Fanning plays a young Effie Trinket, a role Elizabeth Banks originated in the earlier trilogy. The film also traces how Effie and Haymitch’s relationship first began, decades before the events of the original story. New actors fill several other returning parts as well. Ralph Fiennes now plays President Snow, and Kieran Culkin plays Caesar Flickerman. Jesse Plemons takes on Plutarch Heavensbee, while Maya Hawke and Kelvin Harrison Jr. step into Wiress and Beetee. Mckenna Grace and Glenn Close join the cast as new characters Maysilee Donner and Drusilla Sickle, both fellow tributes from Haymitch’s Games.
When Sunrise on the Reaping arrives
Francis Lawrence has directed every Hunger Games film since 2013’s Catching Fire, and he returns to both direct and produce Sunrise on the Reaping. Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson also produced the film. Cameron MacConomy and Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins are executive producers. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters on Nov. 20. That gives fans several more months to study this Haymitch first look before the character’s full backstory reaches the screen. Lionsgate has not yet set a date for a full trailer, though the studio typically expands marketing through the fall as the wide release approaches.