"The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping" Opens November 20, Tracking at $55–65 Million With the Weekend to Itself

The most valuable thing about The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is its date. Lionsgate opens the prequel on Friday, November 20 — the frame before Thanksgiving, "a crucial long weekend in the moviegoing calendar," as Boxoffice Pro puts it — with no other wide release against it and five clear days before the next event title arrives.

Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast has the film opening at $55 million to $65 million domestically, ahead of its predecessor, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The same service notes the late-autumn market it inherits is slow: through October and early November, only The Cat in the Hat and the Godzilla film are likely to have opened anywhere near the $50 million mark. A clear runway is worth money, and this film has one.

Regal and Cinemark are saving their IMAX screens for this film

The film also picked up an advantage from somebody else's argument. Netflix's The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth wanted premium screens for a two-week IMAX run starting November 25. Regal and Cinemark declined — and said, on the record, that they would instead hold their IMAX houses for Sunrise on the Reaping through its second weekend, which is Thanksgiving. Premium screens over the holiday frame are the scarcest real estate in exhibition. Two of the three biggest chains in America just publicly assigned theirs to this film. Our Cliff Booth piece in this batch has the full booking story.

What the film has to prove

The franchise question is real, and it's about prequels. Sunrise on the Reaping is the second consecutive Hunger Games film set decades before Katniss — Haymitch Abernathy's story this time, built from Suzanne Collins's 2025 novel. Songbirds and Snakes showed the prequel route can work commercially; this one tests whether it can work twice, and whether the audience that grew up with the original films now brings its own families. The soundtrack is part of the push: the companion album arrives November 13, a week ahead of the film, with contributions reported from Ella Langley and Kacey Musgraves.

By Sunday night, the number that matters isn't just the opening total. It's the Saturday hold and the Thanksgiving-week trajectory — whether this plays as an event for the original audience or as the start of a second franchise life. The forecast range says the industry expects the former at minimum. The weekend will grade it.