The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping Will Be the Franchise’s Most Brutal Movie Yet Thanks to One Change
Anyone who’s a fan of The Hunger Games knows that one of the franchise’s most beloved and favorite characters is Haymitch (Woody Harrelson). And he never even needed an origin story to become one of the most interesting characters in the entire saga. When Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) meets him, he’s already a broken victor, someone who survived the arena and seems to have decided that the best way to keep living is to stop caring about anything. Those details alone already show a certain level of complexity, and you naturally start wondering about him. And that’s exactly why you find yourself asking: what really happened to him? Suzanne Collins finally decided to answer that question by releasing a new book about the character, which will soon be adapted for the big screen. The thing is that The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is not an easy story to endure.
The premise of the entire franchise is already pretty intense, with war scenes and heartbreaking deaths. But the newest movie seems to raise the bar even further, showing that maybe we never actually understood the history of Panem. In the main trilogy, we saw the revolution through Katniss’s eyes, while the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes showed us how Snow (Tom Blyth) rose to become the president and where so much of his villainy came from. But with Haymitch’s journey, we’ll be facing a historical moment that shaped Katniss’ mentor from the ground up, through trauma after trauma, in a system where seeing any light at the end of the tunnel still seemed almost impossible.
Why The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping Will Be the Franchise’s Most Brutal Movie Yet
The story follows a young Haymitch (Joseph Zada) during the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell. And to mark the competition’s 50th anniversary, which is treated as a major occasion, the Capitol decides to double the number of tributes sent into the arena. So yes, instead of two representatives from each district, four are chosen, putting 48 tributes in the competition instead of 24. And that change is what turns this edition into something far more chaotic than any of the Games the franchise has shown before. Since the protagonist was the winner of his edition, it’s already easy to understand that 47 people were killed.
And just when you think things can’t get any worse, the story finds a way to make them worse. How? Perhaps the most brutal part of all is the fact that there are children in the arena, and some of the most disturbing deaths belong to them. The story includes, for example, a 12-year-old tribute who dies in a particularly shocking way that many readers have repeatedly singled out, while another character dies before even making it to the arena. In fact, Sunrise on the Reaping is not about finding out whether Haymitch becomes the winner, because that’s already a fact. It’s about discovering what the Capitol will do to him (and the other tributes) before he manages to make it to the end. And it’s that process that makes the main trilogy feel like it barely scratched the surface of what the Games truly are.
When it comes to violence, it’s fair to say that the scale changes. We can say that the first three movies were shocking in their own way, especially because audiences were still discovering the story. And when the prequel was released, the tone felt even darker and heavier because the edition Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler) competes in and wins is the 10th, meaning everything is still far more old-fashioned and primitive. The tributes didn’t have to face elaborate challenges — in many cases, all they had to do was pick up a weapon and attack one another. The technology and production of the Games had not yet evolved into the sophisticated spectacle seen in the trilogy, and the result is a much more direct kind of violence. But then Sunrise on the Reaping comes along to show that once Snow (Ralph Fiennes) is president, things can get even worse, even if the Games themselves have already evolved.
In The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the system is still being perfected, while the new movie will show just how far the president is willing to go purely for the nation’s entertainment. No wonder the arena itself is more colorful, with the entire aesthetic designed to hide the most disturbing things happening inside it. As soon as the trailer was released, there were even plenty of comparisons to Midsommar, since the idea is to create a contrast between something that looks visually beautiful and something deeply disturbing underneath. To give an idea, Haymitch’s story includes particularly graphic deaths, including a fight with an axe that ends with exposed entrails and a blow to the skull, as well as someone being devoured down to the skeleton by genetically modified animals. There is also poisoning, dismemberment, explosions, burns, and other attacks.
And speaking of entertainment for the audience, even though everyone already understands that the Games are televised, what the new movie will show is that the broadcasts can be edited. There are hosts, interviews, carefully constructed narratives, and an audience watching teenagers die as if they were following a sporting event, but this story shows that the public doesn’t necessarily have to see what actually happened. Events can be hidden, and the Capitol can choose which moments reach the viewers and which ones simply don’t exist for them. This means that Haymitch isn’t only fighting the other tributes; he’s also fighting against the version of his own story that is created for all of Panem.
The Cruelest Part of Haymitch’s Victory Happens After the Games
After the events of The Hunger Games, Katniss doesn’t yet know that a resistance plan is being built around her. It takes time for her to finally understand that there is a political strategy in motion, one designed to make a revolution happen with her eventually becoming its symbol. She makes history in the first edition she participates in, and when she returns in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, she realizes at the end of the movie that Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has been orchestrating a plan involving several people, including Haymitch. But just imagine what it was like when Haymitch was younger.
This character’s story takes place at a time when the idea of a revolution seemed much, much more distant. He represents a generation that grew up inside the system and learned how to survive it. Unlike what happens years later with Katniss, the Capitol is not a regime on the verge of collapse — it is reality. It is the power controlling the districts, TV, the Games, and the consequences of any kind of attempt at resistance. For Katniss, the system begins to crumble when she becomes the right symbol at the right time, but for Haymitch, the system still seems practically impossible to destroy. So what exactly did he have to survive in order to become the sarcastic, alcoholic, depressed mentor Katniss meets in the first film?
It’s worth pointing out that Sunrise on the Reaping also explores his life outside the arena, including how Snow can act outside the Games if he wants to. Haymitch’s family, his relationships, and the people he loves are not protected just because he wins the Games. What the saga has always shown is that the Capitol can control a person in many different ways. The franchise has already shown plenty of traumatized characters, but in Haymitch’s case, the damage goes much deeper. And for anyone who has already read the book, it’s interesting to see how every detail of his adult personality and behavior makes sense after everything he suffered when he was younger. Maybe, out of all the characters in The Hunger Games, he was the bravest — but also the one who was affected the most.
The new movie is set to be the most brutal of them all, not because of everything mentioned above, but especially because it is about how survival itself can be a form of resistance, while still not being enough to change anything. It’s best to prepare yourself because, as a result, this may be the installment with the least amount of emotional breathing room.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping hits theaters on November 20.
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