Franchises rarely improve with age. They expand, they diversify, they recalibrate for new demographics — but genuine artistic escalation across six films is exceptional enough to be news. That is exactly what first reactions to The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (2026) are describing after its red-carpet premiere at Westfield London on October 28, with critics leaving the screening to declare it not merely a solid addition to the series, but its definitive high point.
Official trailerThe Wrap rounded up the initial wave of responses, with Nikita Francois of The Nerds of Color calling it "easily the best film in the Hunger Games franchise." That kind of superlative, applied the moment critics exit a theatre, typically signals either extraordinary marketing access or a film that has genuinely earned it. Given the breadth and consistency of the verdict, the latter seems far more probable.
The reactions converge on two qualities: tonal severity and political precision. NME gathered responses noting that the film pushes the franchise into "darker, politically relevant territory," with a "strong, renewed focus on propaganda" that critics found particularly resonant. Several described it as brutal in ways the earlier films weren't permitted to be — which makes structural sense when you consider what the story demands.
Sunrise on the Reaping is the sixth entry in Lionsgate's franchise and the second prequel. It is set during the 50th Hunger Games — the Second Quarter Quell — placing it 24 years before Katniss Everdeen's time in the arena, and 40 years after the events of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023). The Quarter Quell's specific cruelty is germane to the drama: each district is required to send twice the usual number of tributes, filling the arena with 48 children rather than 24. Suzanne Collins, whose novel of the same name was published by Scholastic in March 2025, built the story around themes of manipulation, propaganda, and the mechanisms by which a totalitarian system forecloses even private rebellion.
That source material gives the film something the Katniss-era entries rarely had: a protagonist whose psychological trajectory the audience already knows, in the worst possible way. Viewers enter the theatre aware that the boy who survives these Games will become the hollowed-out, sardonic drunk Woody Harrelson inhabited for four films. The dramatic irony is absolute, and it is Joseph Zada's job to make the distance between the beginning and that ending feel earned, specific, and devastating.
By every available account from the premiere, he does. Critic Griffin Schiller described Zada as "a revelation," calling him "so charismatic, lovable, tender, and honest," and compared the film's overall achievement to Andor and Rogue One within the Star Wars universe — prequels that transcended their franchise context to function as standalone works of political drama. Collider's Perri Nemiroff singled Zada out specifically, saying his ability to capture "Haymitch's warmth and charm and then weave that into the rage and heartbreak the Hunger Games sparks is superb." One reviewer put it more simply: "Zada is a star."
The weight behind that last phrase is considerable. Zada is a 21-year-old Australian actor whose profile before this film rested almost entirely on his leading role in Prime Video's We Were Liars (2025). The Haymitch casting, announced in April 2025, required him to step into Harrelson's shadow while simultaneously forging an entirely separate reading of the same character. He is playing a version of Haymitch who does not yet know what he will lose — which means he cannot simply replicate the sardonic damage of the original performance. He has to build from warmth toward catastrophe, which is technically a far more demanding exercise. The premiere reactions suggest he solved it.
The ensemble around him draws early praise as well. Sunrise on the Reaping recasts a roster of familiar characters with new faces: Jesse Plemons as a young Plutarch Heavensbee, Elle Fanning as Effie Trinket, Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman, Maya Hawke as Wiress, Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Beetee, and Glenn Close in an undisclosed role that drew particular attention from Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture, who called the casting among "the best of the year." One reaction described the ensemble as actors who "breathe new life into familiar characters, making them their own, while preserving the qualities that made them so compelling in the first place" — which is the precise tightrope this kind of prequel must walk.
Director Francis Lawrence has now helmed five of the six franchise entries, beginning with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) after Gary Ross exited the series, continuing through both Mockingjay installments and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. His consistency across the franchise makes him an unusual case — a director who has deepened rather than exhausted a property across a decade-plus relationship. Reactions from the premiere credit him specifically, with one noting that Lawrence "beautifully captures the invigorating spark of revolution" while another praised production design that prevents familiar structural beats from going stale.
What distinguishes this early response from standard opening-night enthusiasm is the specificity of the claims. Critics are not simply praising spectacle. They are crediting the film with formal coherence — a "stellar third act" that "pulls the rug out," a thematic focus on "the cost of revolution" that lands with precision, and the particular achievement of bridging the narrative gap between The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and the Katniss trilogy without reducing itself to connective tissue. The descriptor that recurs most pointedly is "devastating," which in franchise cinema is not a liability but a mark of intent honored.
Full critical reviews are embargoed until closer to the theatrical release date of November 20, 2026. That is three weeks for the initial reactions to either calcify into consensus or encounter correction from longer-form assessments. Given the breadth of the premiere response — and the structural advantages of a story built around foreknowledge of tragedy — there is little reason to expect significant revision. The London film scene has had a strong autumn for serious work, as evidenced by Loznitsa's Imperium winning Best Film at the BFI London Film Festival's 70th edition earlier this month, and the audience appetite for politically rigorous cinema appears to be holding.
The structural logic of Sunrise on the Reaping's premise — a world we already know, a character we already mourn, an outcome we cannot stop — has always been its greatest asset and its greatest risk. The risk was that familiarity would blunt impact, that watching a young man walk toward a fate the audience has already seen would generate distance rather than dread. The first people out of that London screening say the opposite happened. If the full critical wave agrees, Lionsgate will have done something genuinely rare: extended a franchise by making its most uncompromising film last.
In that context, it is worth paying attention not just to what critics said about Sunrise on the Reaping, but to what they compared it to. The Andor comparison is not decorative. Andor succeeded precisely because it treated its prequel status as a formal constraint that forced structural invention — the story could not end in triumph, so it had to find meaning in the texture of loss. If Lawrence and Zada have pulled off something similar inside a franchise that began as young-adult blockbuster entertainment, that is not just a good movie. It is a case study in what a franchise can still become when the people running it stop treating inevitability as an obstacle and start treating it as the point.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters and IMAX on November 20, 2026. For a different kind of franchise that refuses easy comfort, see Kynari's look at how Paramount is betting on Red Rising — and why format alone won't save it.
