Calling all “Hunger Games” fans! Prepare for a return to Panem. Suzanne Collins is releasing another “Hunger Games” prequel, titled “Sunrise on the Reaping.”
The upcoming prequel, which will be the fifth novel in the bestselling series, is set to come out on March 18, 2025, Scholastic announced.
“Suzanne Collins has done it again, bringing us back to the world of Panem in order to ask us important questions about our own world,” Ellie Berger, president of Scholastic Trade, said in a statement. “‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ is a remarkable book, bringing new complexity, perspective, and revelations to a piece of the Hunger Games story that readers have longed to know more about.”
What will the new ‘Hunger Games’ book be about?
“Sunrise on the Reaping” takes place 24 years before the first “Hunger Games” novel and 40 years after “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”
The novel starts “on the morning of the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell,” according to an official synopsis of the book.
“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,’” Collins said in a statement, per The Associated Press. “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.”
“Sunrise on the Reaping” will be adapted for the screen. The movie is set to release in 2026, Variety announced.
“Suzanne Collins is a master storyteller and our creative north star,” Adam Fogelson, chairman of Lionsgate’s motion picture group, said in a statement, per Variety.
He continued: “We couldn’t be more fortunate than to be guided and trusted by a collaborator whose talent and imagination are so consistently brilliant. 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.”
The popularity of ‘The Hunger Games’
Every “Hunger Games” novel has made it on on The New York Times bestseller list. The first novel, “The Hunger Games,” lived on The New York Times bestseller list for 260 consecutive weeks, per The New York Times. More than 100 million copies of the first four novels in print and digital have been sold worldwide.
Additionally, all four of the previous novels have been adapted for the screen. The first four films adapted from the original trilogy, starring Jennifer Lawrence, raked in more than $1.6 billion at the box office domestically, per Box Office Mojo.
The franchise’s most recent release, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” made over $337 million in the box office worldwide, per Box Office Mojo.
In March 2023, Netflix announced it would release all four of the original “Hunger Games” movies to the streaming platform for a single month. The movies had a brief resurgence. For three consecutive weeks, the dystopian series has lived in Netflix’s top 10 movies list.