Haymitch before Sunrise on the Reaping: what to remember (everything from the trilogy and nothing from the prequel)

On November 20, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters, and chances are a lot of people will arrive having read the trilogy years ago, because the first book came out in 2008 and eighteen years have gone by since then (for some, more than half of their reading life). This time the protagonist is Haymitch Abernathy, District 12's drunken mentor, but young, and the film adapts the novel Suzanne Collins published in 2025. This guide is for arriving with Haymitch fresh in your mind: who he was in the three books, what we were told about his past and which names are worth keeping handy.

A warning before we go on, because it's the house rule: there are SPOILERS here for the three books of the original trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay), ending included. About Sunrise on the Reaping there's nothing beyond what its official synopsis says. And anyone who hasn't read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the other prequel, can carry on without worry, because it isn't touched here.

There's an idea that shows up every time a prequel comes out: that it can't be spoiled, because we already know how it ends. That's partly true (Haymitch wins his Games, and anyone who has read the first pages of the series knows it). But what matters in a prequel isn't the ending, it's the things the trilogy had already told us about that past, sometimes in a single sentence, which the new book tells slowly. So what you need to remember isn't who wins. It's what we already knew, and what price we knew had been paid.

In the first book, Haymitch is District 12's only living victor, and so, for sheer lack of options, he's the mentor to Katniss and Peeta. We meet him at the reaping, drunk, hugging Effie Trinket and falling off the stage in front of the whole district. He lives in the Victors' Village, drinks all the time and is still the one who best understands how you survive those Games. Underneath the drunk there's a strategist, and a good one.

In Catching Fire the first big piece of his past appears. For the Quarter Quell of the 75th Games, the tributes are drawn from the living victors, the name that comes out is Haymitch's and Peeta volunteers in his place. To prepare, Katniss and Peeta watch the tapes of the victors' Games, and among them are Haymitch's: the 50th, the second Quarter Quell, with twice as many tributes (forty-eight instead of twenty-four) and him at sixteen.

Two facts come out of that tape that weigh the most for the film. The first is Maysilee Donner, one of the District 12 girls in those Games, who was his ally and died attacked by Capitol birds, with Haymitch at her side. The mockingjay pin that Madge, her niece, gives Katniss before the first Games was hers, so the symbol of the whole rebellion came from that arena. The second is how he won. In the final duel with the girl from District 1, she throws an axe at him, Haymitch ducks, the force field surrounding the arena sends it back and the axe kills her.

He won by using the arena against the Capitol. And in Panem that has a price. Later in the trilogy, Haymitch tells Katniss that within two weeks of his victory Snow had his mother, his younger brother and his girlfriend killed, as punishment for the force field trick. In the three books she has no name (she's just “the girl”), and that's enough to understand why the Haymitch we met drinks the way he drinks and why he has no one. How many of you had that in mind, and for how many had it faded among so many tributes?

At the end of Catching Fire we find out he had been playing another game the whole book. Together with Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Head Gamemaker, he was part of the rebels' plan to get Katniss out of the arena, and Peeta is left in the Capitol's hands, when Haymitch had promised her he would save him (Katniss takes a good while to forgive him, and I understand her). In Mockingjay, now in District 13, they make him quit drinking. And in the epilogue we leave him back in 12, raising geese (and drinking again, that didn't change), which is one of those details you don't expect a series this harsh to give anyone.

The names worth keeping handy for the theater are few. Snow, who was already president twenty-four years before Katniss; Effie and Plutarch, who also appear in the announced cast, played by Elle Fanning and Jesse Plemons; and Maysilee, who is the one that will matter most. Young Haymitch is Joseph Zada (the adult in the films was Woody Harrelson), and Francis Lawrence directs again, the same director as every film since Catching Fire.

We're not going to say anything about how Sunrise on the Reaping tells it, nor about how closely it resembles what Haymitch told Katniss twenty-five years later (that, I think, is the whole point of the book, and we're not taking it away from anyone). The novel starts on the day of the reaping for those 50th Games, twenty-four years before Katniss's, and whatever happens from there on is its own.

For anyone reading it right now to make it to the premiere, Kai LoreSafe, the tool I built, does this same thing at the exact point where you are, so read this with the bias of the person who made it. You tell it you've already read the trilogy, and what those three books tell becomes safe context; what's in the prequel only comes in as you move forward.

There's one question I can't settle, and I'll leave it to those who have already read the book (no spoilers, please). Is it better to read it before seeing the film, or to arrive at the theater with just the trilogy and let the film surprise you? And for everyone else: what did you remember least about Haymitch?

See you next time. Mauro Z.