In the wake of last year’s prequel movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Lionsgate has announced and dated the next installment in the hit movie franchise today.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives in theaters November 20, 2026, an adaptation of the just-announced novel that Suzanne Collins will release next year.
Frequent Hunger Games filmmaker Francis Lawrence is in talks to direct.
Deadline details, “While The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was set 64 years before the events of the original [movies], The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is set 24 years before the Jennifer Lawrence films in the world of Panem, commencing on the morning of the reaping of the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell.”
The website’s report continues, “Those games are an important event in the canon as the victor was Haymitch Abernathy, the only winner from District 12 before Lawrence’ Katniss Everdeen and Josh Hutcherson’s Peeta Mellark’s tie win. Haymitch continues on to become a mentor, a character in the original movies played by Woody Harrelson.”
“Suzanne Collins is a master storyteller and our creative north star,” Lionsgate Motion Picture Group Chair Adam Fogelson said in a statement today. “We couldn’t be more fortunate than to be guided and trusted by a collaborator whose talent and imagination are so consistently brilliant. We know Hunger Games fans worldwide will be spellbound by where Suzanne has focused this next extraordinary story. The Second Quarter Quell is legendary and looms large over the history of the Games, even into the time of Katniss Everdeen a quarter-century later. Like fans around the globe, we are eagerly anticipating this exciting return to Panem.”
The upcoming film will be the sixth installment in the popular movie franchise.
