Let the games begin.
Photo: Getty Images
Congratulations to McKenna Grace. She and her fellow Peeta-fan editors will soon have even more content to work with, because Josh Hutcherson and Jennifer Lawrence are returning to the Hunger Games franchise next year. The pair will reprise their roles as Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games prequel film Sunrise on the Reaping, per The Hollywood Reporter, which Lionsgate is scheduled to release on November 20, 2026. Unless director Francis Lawrence has randomly decided that he wants Peeniss to time travel, we’ll likely be getting a flash-forward scene of the couple. In any case, it’ll be the first time we see the girl on fire and the boy with the bread together since 2015’s Mockingjay — Part 2, in which they ended up married with children.
Hutcherson previously told Variety that he went through a phase of wanting nothing to do with Suzanne Collins’s franchise after finishing Mockingjay — Part 2. “I was like, ‘Fuck that,’” he recalled. “I got thrust into a place of notoriety that I never dreamed of, never wanted. It took privacy from me.” But the I Love LA and Five Nights at Freddy’s star eventually grew to appreciate the experience and became enthusiastic about the idea of reuniting with his old co-stars for another Hunger Games film. “I would love to be back on set with Francis, with Jen, with Liam [Hemsworth], with Woody [Harrelson],” he said in November. “It would not take any convincing at all. I’d be there in a heartbeat.” So will fans.
