After delivering a critical and commercial hit with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, franchise creator and author Suzanne Collins is once again turning back the clock in Panem for another prequel story. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will be released as a novel in 2025, followed by a feature film adaptation in 2026. This story is set to follow the 50th edition of the Hunger Games and a young Haymitch Abernathy.

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Longtime franchise director Francis Lawrence is returning to helm Sunrise on the Reaping, a movie that comes with the difficult challenge of casting a young Haymitch. The character was played in the original Hunger Games films by Woody Harrelson, one of the most unique actors around. How do you even begin trying to find someone to play a younger version of Harrelson?

While speaking to ComicBook about the upcoming 4K release of Constantine, Lawrence admitted that finding a new Haymitch would be a challenge. He does believe, however, that the task isn’t all that different from the one they met with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, when Tom Blythe was cast as a young version of Donald Sutherland’s President Snow.

“Honestly, I think the best way to answer that question is to say, if you look at The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, we had to cast a young version of Donald Sutherland, right? It’s the same challenge,” Lawrence explained. “It’s different characteristics of Donald and Woody, very different people. But you’re like, ‘How am I going to cast a young person who is believably going to become Donald Sutherland? Who’s going to have that sort of intelligence, sophistication, a little irreverence, gravitas, all of that. Who is going to embody and be believable in the fact that he’s going to turn into that guy and become the president of Panem? And it’s the same thing [with Haymitch].”

“It’s a search and you have to dig down and figure out what are the elements that make Woody so interesting, right? And some of it is humor. Some of it is intelligence. Some of it is quirk. Some of it is, there’s a darkness in him that gives him and edge. There’s a mischievousness, right? So there’s all these aspects that make Woody so great, so appealing, so watchable, and such a great actor and so interesting,” the director continued. “And we’re going to have to find somebody that has all of that. It’s not somebody that just looks like him, or is going to study Woody Harrelson and just act like him. When Tom Blythe played Donald Sutherland, he wasn’t doing an impersonation. We had to find somebody that was believable that you could be like, ‘Oh, okay, I see how this guy over 70 years could turn into Donald.’”

The Sunrise on the Reaping novel is set to hit shelves on March 18, 2025. Lawrence’s film adaptation isn’t set to hit theaters until November 20, 2026.