The Hunger Games Returns: Haymitch Abernathy Was Human Before He Was Drunk
You know that feeling when a trailer activates memories of books you read ten years ago and suddenly you have sixteen opinions about them? Sunrise on the Reaping, the new Hunger Games prequel, just dropped its first trailer and it has me spiraling.
Quick context for the uninitiated: Sunrise on the Reaping (Suzanne Collins, 2025) tells the story of the 50th Hunger Games — the Second Quarter Quell, the event where the number of tributes doubled. The protagonist is Haymitch Abernathy, the drunken, saboteur mentor we know from the original trilogy. Joseph Zada plays him in the film, directed by Francis Lawrence (who directed the previous installments), with a cast that includes Ralph Fiennes as a younger President Snow, Glenn Close, and — pay attention — Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman. Release date: November 20, 2026.
But what interests me about the trailer isn't the spectacle (though it's there). It's that Haymitch is the center. Because Haymitch, in the original books, was the archetype of the secondary character who carries all the pain: the survivor who survived but doesn't know quite what to do with that. Now we have his origin story — a narrative operation that should fail more often than it does. The mythologization of a character's past can destroy them. Sometimes it works.
Collins has spent years building the Panem universe backwards: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes gave us Snow's origin. Now it's Haymitch's turn. There's something almost Borgesian about that — returning to the beginning not to clarify but to complicate. Who was he before he knew that victory was just another trap?
If you need an introduction or a re-introduction to the dystopian genre Collins draws from, the genre has older entry points: 1984 by George Orwell is where much of the language of control and manipulated memory found its modern literary form. Panem owes a considerable debt to Oceania.
