The New ‘Hunger Games’ Book Sounds So Pretentious

It’s time once again for Suzanne Collins to cash in on the continued uber-popularity of The Hunger Games, the beloved trilogy that didn’t need to go on, but has done so anyway.

Collins announced Thursday that she would release the fifth book in the franchise, Sunrise on the Reaping, in March 2025. Not only that—although far from surprising—but a film adaptation is already set to follow in November 2026. The book will take place 24 years before The Hunger Games and 40 years before the series’ fourth book, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. (A so-so film adaptation took to theaters last fall.) Beyond that, plot details remain vague, unless you count Collins’ utterly pretentious author’s statement as informative.

“With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’’’ she wrote alongside the book reveal. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

It’s hard to know who the target audience is for The Hunger Games these days, considering it’s nostalgic for millennials and Gen Z alike. But it’s also hard to imagine that any fan’s ears perk up when they see the name “David Hume.” The Scottish philosopher wrote about the concept of “implicit submission” in 1758, so many years before the release of the first Hunger Games book that one shouldn’t bother doing the math. However inspiring Hume was or even remains to be, his relevance to the modern reader is most likely minimal.

All of this is not to suggest that what Collins said is obtuse; it is simply and completely obnoxious. And if that’s the direction she wants to go in with Sunrise on the Reaping, so be it. All we ask is that this finally be the Haymitch Abernathy origin story that we’ve been begging for since the trilogy wrapped in 2010—insofar as we want this perfectly complete story to continue at all, which I’m not sure we really do.

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