Sickle Stuff: ‘Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping’ Teaser Shows Glenn Close as Sinister New Character
Glenn Close gets the Hannibal Lecter treatment in the teaser trailer to The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
Wheeled out onto a stage via a dolly (minus the retraints, though), Close’s character Drusilla Sickle is deposited in front of a microphone to address a crowd waiting to hear which of their children get to fight to the death for the amusement of the wealthy. Close looks very much not herself, sporting an orange wig cut in a severely-banged bob, a yellow dress made from a child’s raincoat with military medals haphazardly applied, a bird for a hat and some patently false teeth.
Image courtesy Lionsgate.
According to the movie’s logline, Sunrise on the Reaping “revisits the world of Panem and follows young Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada) twenty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell.”
And with that, the trailer has the games begin, and for this special edition, twice as many children get to kill each other to please the Panem plutocrats. Young Haymitch (Zada), who in the original Hunger Games movie is played by Woody Harrelson, is a participant along with Lenore Dove Baird, played by Whitney Peak.
Also starring are Elle Fanning as a young Effie Trinket (once Elizabeth Banks), Ralph Fiennes as the younger version of Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland), Kieran Culkin as the more youthful Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), and Jesse Plemons as the younger Plutarch Heavensbee, played by the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Kelvin Harrison Jr., Maya Hawke, Mckenna Grace, Billy Porter, Ben Wang, Lili Taylor, Molly McCann, Iona Bell and Percy Daggs IV are also in the film, which is a sequel to 2023’s The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Francis Lawrence directed from a screenplay adaptation of the Suzanne Collins book by Billy Ray.
Dystopia has proved successful both at the box office and at the booksellers: Songbirds and Snakes, along with the original four Hunger Games movies, have collectively reaped over $3 billion dollars at the box office worldwide. The novel the new film is based on, Sunrise on the Reaping, sold 1.5 million copies in its first week on sale in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
