NEED TO KNOW
Warning: Spoilers for Sunrise on the Reaping below.
Will Hunger Games fans be seeing Josh Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark again? Never say never.
In a chat with Brit + Co published Friday, Aug. 1, the 32-year-old Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 actor didn’t rule out a potential return to his Peeta character for the upcoming prequel movie The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
But that doesn’t mean he’s heard anything about it — at least, not yet.
“That’d be cool,” said Hutcherson when asked about the casting rumor. “No, I know nothing in that world right now.”
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The actor’s turn as Peeta spanned for all four films in the original series, which kicked off in 2012 and concluded nearly a decade ago, with 2015’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2.
But the character — as well as Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) — appears briefly in the epilogue of Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel Sunrise on the Reaping, which was released in March.
Regardless of Hutcherson’s current or future involvement, though, “Hunger Games is amazing, and I’ve loved it for many years and I will love it forever,” he told Brit + Co.
The young-adult dystopian franchise kicked off with 2012’s The Hunger Games, followed by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) and the two Mockingjay films, released in 2014 and 2015.
A fifth film — The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, based on Collins’ 2019 prequel novel of the same name that follows the 10th Hunger Games, 64 years before Katniss and Peeta’s Games — was released in 2023. It stars Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow (played by Donald Sutherland in the original films) and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird.
Hugh Stewart ; Murray Close/©Lionsgate/Courtesy Everett Collection
The sixth installment in the Hunger Games movie franchise will take viewers to Panem for the 50th annual games, a.k.a. the Second Quarter Quell, where 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy — Katniss and Peeta’s future mentor, played in the original films by Woody Harrelson — must compete.
In April 2025, Lionsgate announced that Joseph Zada had been tapped to play Haymitch, while Whitney Peak will portray his girlfriend, Lenore Dove Baird.
Other cast members that have been announced include a star-studded lineup of actors as younger versions of characters seen in previous movies: Kieran Culkin as Caesar, Elle Fanning as Effie, Jesse Plemons as Plutarch, Jeffrey Wright as Beetee, Maya Hawke as Wiress, Lili Taylor as Mags and Ralph Fiennes as President Snow.
New characters include Drusilla Sickle (Glenn Close), Magno Stift (Billy Porter) and Maysilee Donner (Mckenna Grace), who fights alongside her District 12 co-competitor Haymitch in the Games.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, directed by franchise veteran Francis Lawrence, is slated for a theatrical release on Nov. 20, 2026.
