Hunger Games Director Teases Sunrise on the Reaping’s Connection to Other Films

Director Francis Lawrence has a thing for dystopias. His next film is The Long Walk, an adaptation of the bleak Stephen King novel set in a brutal, totalitarian future America. That’s still due in September, but already Lawrence is hard at work on his next movie: The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, the second prequel in the Hunger Games franchise following on 2023’s well-received The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, which Lawrence also helmed.

Lawrence is sort of like the David Yates of the Hunger Games saga. Although Gary Ross directed the original The Hunger Games in 2012, Lawrence took over with the second movie Catching Fire in 2013 before helming the subsequent Mockingjay films. When the saga was revived in 2023 with The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, it seemed like Lawrence was the natural choice to pick up right where he left off. But despite already spending more than a decade bringing Suzanne Collins’ books to the screen, the director tells us that Sunrise on the Reaping is “a book I love and probably also my favorite in the series.”

Set 40 years after The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Sunrise on the Reaping finds Coriolanus Snow (now played by Ralph Fiennes) firmly ensconced as the authoritarian president for life in Panem. This is long after he began his rise to power at the end of the previous novel and film, his soul curdling into corruption and rage while leaving his former lover and District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) to an unknown fate. The central character in this new story is Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada), a defiant tribute who will win the 50th annual Hunger Games in the course of the story, but at a price so terrible that it leaves him a broken man: the drunken, dissolute, but still cunning mentor played in the earlier films by Woody Harrelson.

Whether the movie will elaborate on the destiny of Lucy Gray (which the book toys with in an intentionally oblique way) remains to be seen, but Lawrence says that the connection to the other books in the series will be there.

“[Sunrise] is such a great, tragic, emotional story that works on its own and informs the earlier ones in the series,” says Lawrence about the tale. “It’s informed by them too, it informs the one we just did, and is informed by it as well. It’s really fascinating.”

The previous books and films, while clearly set in a future that is in many ways drastically different from our real, present-day world, have not shied away from using Panem, the Hunger Games, and the totalitarian regime behind them as metaphors for current affairs—whether it’s the way that reality TV and blood sports are used to distract a subjugated populace, or how the wealthy elite revel and live in splendor as long as they proclaim obedience to their leader and his corrosive system. Sunrise on the Reaping continues to mine those ideas, with Lawrence explaining that Collins takes her story cues from events happening in front of us right now.

“Suzanne always writes from the theme and she’s always very, very specific,” says Lawrence. “If she doesn’t have something to say, she really doesn’t write, and some of the philosophies that are in this are also very timely because she’s inspired by what’s happening around us.” The annual reaping itself to select the tributes for the Games—literally snatching young people away from their families, which is normalized by a complicit media in Panem—arguably has its real-life parallel in the way that immigrants are being made to vanish on a daily basis in the U.S.

“This stuff is not secret, it’s in the book,” Lawrence says about Sunrise. “It is about implicit submission and this idea that no matter what kind of regime we live under, why is it that we’re always sort of willing to be ruled by the few? There are also these elements of manipulating people into going along with what you want through the use of propaganda.”

A submissive media, a cowed and sycophantic oligarchy, an unhinged ruler—these have been the hallmarks of autocratic regimes throughout history, and Lawrence suggests that Sunrise on the Reaping might drive that message home with even more intensity than the previous films in the series.

“Just because something has happened a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen again,” he says. “But the faulty logic and how all of those things tie together in a political landscape is very, very relevant. That’s all tied up in what is a very emotional story, but a completely different world from The Long Walk.”

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will be released on Nov. 20, 2026.