The Next 'The Hunger Games' Movie Will Echo Our Current Political Environment

By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 6, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 6, 2024 |

Lionsgate announced this morning plans to bring Suzanne Collins’s upcoming novel, Sunrise on the Reaping to the big screen. The book, set to be released in March 2025, will take readers back to the early days of Panem, 24 years before Katniss Everdeen’s stand against the Capitol.

The prequel will focus on the events surrounding the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell. For those unfamiliar, the Quarter Quells are special editions of the Games held every 25 years, featuring new rules designed to keep the districts in line. The Second Quarter Quell is crucial to Hunger Games lore. It shaped the lives of key characters like Haymitch Abernathy and President Snow.

Lionsgate, the studio behind the previous five films, set a release date set for November 2026. Francis Lawrence directed the previous four films and is in talks to return. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was a bigger hit than Lionsgate was expecting for the Rachel Zegler prequel, and with Collins penning another entry into the series, another movie felt inevitable.

Interestingly, Collins seems to be taking a page out of our current political environment, as she suggested in a statement.

“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. 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.”

In a world flooded with disinformation where one party lives in a separate reality, the film will certainly resonate, assuming the President in 2026 allows a movie that might question government propaganda to be released.