Suzanne Collins has cooked up another book in her bestselling Hunger Games extended universe, and she’ll be serving it up hot and ready in 2025.
Publisher Scholastic announced Thursday that they’ll release Collins’ new Hunger Games book, Sunrise on the Reaping, on March 18, 2025. The title is already available for pre-order. Fans will be taken right back to Panem’s District 12, but Katniss Everdeen (portrayed in the four-part film adaptation of the original Hunger Games trilogy of books by a bow-wielding Jennifer Lawrence) will be nowhere to be found in the new pages. Instead, Sunrise on the Reaping will focus on the second Quarter Quell, the bloodbath event that Katniss and Peeta’s eventual mentor Haymitch Abernathy (played by Woody Harrelson in the original films) won 24 years before the events of Catching Fire.
If it feels inevitable that Sunrise on the Reaping will get the film treatment, that’s because it is. Lionsgate (which produced the four original films as well as the adaptation of Collins’ President Snow-centric prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) quickly announced that they would release the movie version on November 20, 2026. Following the title convention of the previous films, it will be called The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. For those already planning out their 2026 cinematic social calendar, breathe a sigh of relief: That’s one week before the second part of the two-part Wicked movie musical hits screens. Conflict avoided.
In a press release Thursday, Collins said she looked to philosophy while working on the origin story.
“With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’” she said. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”
Rachel Zegler, who played the lead role in the Songbirds & Snakes movie version, took a victory lap on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday, resurfacing her own archival 2021 tweets pleading for a Haymitch-centric prequel.
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“girls don’t want boys. girls want suzanne collins to release a haymitch abernathy origin trilogy,” she tweeted in January 2021, then Thursday, after the news drop, added, “you’re welcome guys.”
“my tongue is sacred i speak upon what i like,” she added later on the platform.
