Suzanne Collins is releasing a new Hunger Games prequel novel in 2025

The odds are in The Hunger Games fans' favor. The Associated Press reports that Suzanne Collins has a new novel in her dystopian sci-fi series on the way: Sunrise on the Reaping, which will continue to build out her Hunger Games saga in some exciting ways.

Sunrise on the Reaping is another prequel, similar to 2020's The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. This one takes place 24 years before the first Hunger Games novel and begins with the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games. For those keeping track, that's the year that Haymitch Abernathy, Catniss Everdeen's mentor in the original trilogy who was played by Woody Harrelson in the movies, won the Hunger Games.

According to Collins, a large inspiration for this latest book was the work of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. The Hunger Games have always held a lens to sobering societal issues, but this one sounds especially timely.

“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 to the AP. “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.”

Will there be a fifth Hunger Games movie?

Now, most of the time when books are announced, we can joyfully discuss it without thinking too hard about larger franchise concerns. But this is The Hunger Games. After the first four movies, which featured a star-making turn for Jennifer Lawrence as heroine Catniss Everdeen, raked in nearly $3 billion at the box office, Collins' next surprise novel in the series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was picked up by film studio Lionsgate for adaptation before it even hit shelves.

That movie released last year and starred Rachel Zegler as Hunger Games contestant Lucy Gray Baird and Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow, the man who would go on to become the sadistic president of Panem. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes made $337.4 million at the box office on a $100 million budget; while that's quite a bit less than the original Hunger Games movies, it was still more than enough to make the movie a financial success. It seems a foregone conclusion that if Collins is releasing a new Hunger Games book, Lionsgate will probably want to adapt it to film.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves! For now, we can start getting excited that Collins' next book is on the way. Sunrise on the Reaping releases on March 18, 2025 from Scholastic.

Update: Since this article was written several hours ago, Lionsgate has already announced that they'll be moving ahead with a movie adaptation of Sunrise on the Reaping. It's slated to hit theaters on November 20, 2026.

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