The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping Presales Beat Wicked — $80 Million-Plus Opening on the Cards

Panem is back — and the box office is paying attention. Advance sales for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping are running ahead of Wicked and Michael at the same stage, Deadline reported on November 6, putting the film on course for a North American opening of $80 million or more.

That floor is a big jump from the $60–70 million range of a week earlier, and the strongest advance Lionsgate has seen since the pandemic. Some trackers go higher: Box Office Pro puts the opening at $80–100 million, Box Office Theory forecasts $105 million-plus, and Polymarket prices a 75 per cent chance of a debut above $100 million.

The comparisons explain the excitement: Wicked opened to $112.5 million in November 2024 and Michael to $97.2 million this year, and Sunrise on the Reaping is outpacing both in advance sales. The last entry, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, managed only $44.6 million — the franchise low — and Deadline explicitly retires it as a comparison. This prequel is a far bigger swing, with a reported budget of $170–200 million.

The source material gave the film a head start: Suzanne Collins’s novel sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide in its first week, the biggest debut in the series. Its story — a young Haymitch Abernathy, played by newcomer Joseph Zada, fighting the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, with twice the usual tributes — is the franchise’s most mythologised chapter. Francis Lawrence, director of every Hunger Games film since Catching Fire, returns, with Jesse Plemons, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin and Elle Fanning.

One caution: presales are an early read, not a result. Films with heavily female audiences can be front-loaded, which is why Deadline calls $80 million a floor rather than a forecast — though the same caveat was attached to Wicked, and those presales became a $112.5 million opening. Lionsgate’s problem is the opposite of most studios this Thanksgiving: converting excitement into a result big enough to justify a near-$200 million bet, against Disney’s Hexed and Focker-in-Law in the same frame.

For the global box office, the stakes go beyond one franchise. After a year in which non-English hits like Godzilla Minus Zero and India’s Ramayana have crowded the top of the charts, a $100 million-plus opening would confirm the Thanksgiving corridor still belongs to the big franchise event film. The odds, for now, are in Panem’s favour.

Read our report on Godzilla Minus Zero’s record US opening here: https://filmverse.in/godzilla-minus-zero-32-million-us-opening-record-foreign-language/

Watch the official trailer below:

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theatres and IMAX on November 20, 2026.

Source: Deadline, Box Office Pro, Box Office Theory and Lionsgate. All box-office figures are trade estimates.