Lionsgate has dropped an extended teaser for Sunrise on the Reaping, the sixth film in The Hunger Games franchise and a prequel that leads into the 2012 original. The film centers on a young Haymitch Abernathy, played by Joseph Zada, as he is selected as one of the tributes for the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell.
The teaser puts the brutal premise front and center: each district must send twice as many tributes to the Capitol for the 50th Games, raising the stakes before the story even begins. Haymitch’s District 12 tributes are Maysilee, Wyatt and Louella, played by Mckenna Grace, Ben Wang and Molly McCann, while the cast also includes Jesse Plemons as a young cameraman named Plutarch, Ralph Fiennes as a middle-aged President Snow, Glenn Close as District 12 chaperone Drusilla Sickle, Kieran Culkin as a young Caesar Flickerman and Elle Fanning as a young Effie Trinket.
The film arrives in a franchise that has already sold itself on scale as much as spectacle. Across five films, The Hunger Games has grossed more than $3.4 billion worldwide, and the series’ last prequel, 2023’s Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, brought in $349 million globally. That earlier film set the stage for this one, which is built from Suzanne Collins’ novel Sunrise on the Reaping, a book that sold 1.5 million copies in its first week last year.
There is still a gap between the teaser and the finished movie, and that is where the franchise’s next test lives. Sunrise on the Reaping is not just another return to Panem; it has to make the 50th Hunger Games feel like more than a familiar ritual, even with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson returning later as Katniss and Peeta in the broader story universe. The answer will come in theaters on November 20, 2026, when The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens.
