It’s time to return back to the world of Panem… and it looks like it will be as heartbreaking as ever.
On Thursday, Lionsgate released the first teaser trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, exactly one year out from the movie’s release date. The film adapts Suzanne Collins’ second Hunger Games prequel novel of the same name, which was released earlier this year and quickly took the world by storm.
Sunrise on the Reaping chronicles the journey of a young Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada) during the 50th Hunger Games, which are made “special” within the dystopian world of Panem by selecting twice as many tributes. And just based on this first trailer, there is so much to unpack.
We get the first look at younger versions of a number of characters from the main Hunger Games stories, a game of casting announcements that had the Internet completely mesmerized earlier this spring. There’s Effie Trinket (Elle Fanning), Plutarch Heavensbee (Jesse Plemons), and of course the franchise’s problematic central villain, Coriolanus Snow (Ralph Finnes).
There are also glimpses of Haymitch’s world: his family, and his girlfriend back home, Lenore Dove (Whitney Peak)… all of which would lead me to venture into spoiler territory if I talked about them any further. But there’s one aspect of the Sunrise on the Reaping trailer that has my emotions swelling: the aesthetic choices the film is making for its version of Panem.
Oh, this is going to be heartbreaking…
Like I said up top, Haymitch’s story is set in a pretty interesting spot in Panem’s timeline. It’s decades after Snow’s heel turn towards villainy during the 10th Hunger Games in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and roughly twenty-five years before Katniss Everdeen’s story starts in earnest in the main series.
The aesthetics of those two previous points in time make sense, to a degree. Katniss’ world is extremely desaturated and grey and miserable, after decades of totalitarian rule have made colors and freedom feel like a distant memory. Even the first Hunger Games she participates in only uses colors as accents, with the rest of the arena being a nondescript woods.
Meanwhile, the world of young Snow seemed to cling to the pre-war world of theatrics and colors and creature comforts. Things were still on the verge of getting bad, but you could see how each character chose to embrace or ignore that inevitability.
Sunrise on the Reaping, by virtue of being set between the two, could have taken its costume and set design in so many different places. But the choice to make it an almost-psychedelic ’70s is unexpected… and brilliant. The disco and hippie influence can be shown throughout the trailer’s glimpses of the arena and the tributes: both the white ponchos the Capitol gives them, and their street clothes underneath. Even some of the non-tribute characters seem to have ’70s inspired choices to their wardrobe, between Effie’s colorful ensemble and Plutarch’s haircut.
It might not have been what some readers envisioned while reading Sunrise on the Reaping, but it manages to reflect so much about this world without actually saying a word. It creates a colorful backdrop for the absolute brutality of the games to happen on, and it reflects where Panem and a lot of its characters were at during this point in time: beginning to wake up to the idea that revolution might actually be possible. It’s a detail that is so inspired… and that makes me all the more excited for Sunrise on the Reaping to break my heart all over again.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will be released exclusively in theaters on November 20, 2026.
(featured image: Lionsgate)
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