A new trailer for Sunrise on the Reaping has arrived. It leans harder into the franchise’s brutality than any marketing before it. The clip follows a teenage Haymitch Abernathy, played by Joseph Zada. He is reaped into the 50th Hunger Games, the arena that leaves him broken decades before he mentors Katniss Everdeen.
Director Francis Lawrence returns for the film. He previously directed Catching Fire, both Mockingjay films, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The movie adapts Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel of the same name.
It follows Haymitch’s Games from the reaping through the aftermath that shapes the mentor Katniss later meets. Collins wrote the novel entirely from Haymitch’s point of view, a shift from the third-person narration used in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Sunrise on the Reaping recasts Snow, Effie and Flickerman
Ralph Fiennes plays a younger President Snow, a role originated by Donald Sutherland in the original trilogy. Elle Fanning takes over as Effie Trinket. Kieran Culkin plays Caesar Flickerman, the Games’ longtime television host previously played by Stanley Tucci.
The trailer gives each actor only a few seconds of screen time. Even so, the footage suggests a mix of glossy Capitol spectacle and outright horror. Early reactions online have compared its tone to Midsommar and Thor: Ragnarok, pairing bright pageantry with sudden brutality.
That shift shows up most clearly in the arena scenes. The trailer cuts between Capitol pageantry and sudden, close-quarters violence among the tributes. Lawrence used that contrast more sparingly in his earlier Hunger Games films.
Other District 12 tributes get their moment
Alongside Zada, the trailer introduces McKenna Grace as Maysilee Donner, Molly McCann as Louella McCoy, and Ben Wang as Wyatt Callow. All three play District 12 tributes competing in the same Games. Wang drew notice earlier this year for his role in The Long Walk. He gets several seconds of footage running through the arena alongside Zada.
The marketing does not hide where these characters end up. Collins’ novel makes clear that most of the District 12 tributes introduced here do not survive the Games. The footage cuts between quiet character moments and the violence that follows soon after.
When the film arrives in theaters
The movie opens in theaters on November 20. It follows The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes as the second prequel in the franchise. It is also the first prequel built around a character who already has a presence in the original films, through Woody Harrelson’s performance as the adult Haymitch.
Lawrence has built the last three Hunger Games entries around expanding Panem’s history, instead of continuing Katniss’s story directly. This film keeps that pattern. It uses Haymitch’s Games to explain why the character audiences met in 2012 arrived at the first trilogy already hardened by what the Capitol had done to him.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes already showed there is a substantial audience for stories set decades before Katniss volunteers as tribute, and Lionsgate is counting on that same appetite again.
Early reaction to the footage has been largely positive, with some fans online calling it a departure from the more romance-focused marketing used to sell earlier films in the series. That marketing shift lines up with the source material, since Collins wrote the novel as the bleakest entry in the series so far.