Three Hunger Games movies are sitting in the American Netflix Top 10 this week, and the newest of them is three years old. There is no mystery behind the surge. The whole franchise arrived on Netflix on July 14, its first day ever on the service, and America is doing its homework before a deadline. That deadline is November 20, when The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters: a prequel about the fiftieth Games, the ones a sixteen-year-old named Haymitch Abernathy survived. If that name mostly makes you think of Woody Harrelson slurring good advice at Katniss, that is exactly the point of the new movie. Forty-Eight Kids and a Second Quarter Quell The facts first. Sunrise on the Reaping adapts Suzanne Collins's 2025 novel, which moved more than 1.5 million English copies in its first week by her publisher's count, and it is set twenty-four years before Katniss volunteers. The occasion is the Second Quarter Quell, the edition of the Games where the Capitol double...
Personal essays on television and film. One viewer's honest thoughts on the stories worth watching — written with care.