The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping ending explained — how Haymitch's story leads to Katniss's father and her mockingjay pin
Haymitch's Games end the way every Hunger Games fan already knows they will, and the last chapters still change how you'll watch Katniss's first reaping.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters November 20, 2026, directed by Francis Lawrence from Suzanne Collins' 2025 novel. It goes back 24 years before Katniss, to the 50th Hunger Games, the second Quarter Quell, when every district had to send twice the usual number of tributes. One of District 12's four is 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada), the man who will one day mentor Katniss with a drink in his hand. The ending below is the book's, which the film adapts.
How Haymitch's Games end
Haymitch doesn't plan to win. He plans to break the arena. With help from Beetee (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Maysilee Donner's token necklace is swapped for an explosive replica, and Haymitch carries it to the arena's edge.
It doesn't work. A force field blocks the blast, and when the last other tribute, Silka, swings her axe at him, it bounces off the field and kills her. Haymitch is knocked out cold and wakes up a victor.
The Capitol then edits the broadcast to erase the rebellion and make him look like he played only for himself. President Snow (Ralph Fiennes) sends him home with three words: "Enjoy your homecoming."
What Snow takes from him
Haymitch finds his house burned and his mother, Willamae, and little brother, Sid, dead.
Then comes Lenore Dove Baird (Whitney Peak), his girlfriend. In the meadow, he gives her a gumdrop, blood-red like the rose Snow wore at the victor's ceremony. It's poisoned. Her last words give the story its title.
"Don't you… let it… rise… on the reaping."
Haymitch kisses her, hoping the poison will take him too. It doesn't, because Snow has been feeding him the antidote. Snow wants him alive and alone.
After that, he pushes away everyone left, drinks himself numb, and becomes the Haymitch of the original films.
Burdock Everdeen, Katniss's father
One of the people Haymitch pushes away is his best friend, Burdock Everdeen (Scot Greenan).
Burdock calls Lenore Dove "cuz." Through his mother, he's part of the Covey, the traveling musicians from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and he has all the family gifts: a remarkable singing voice, a bow, and a hunter's knowledge of plants. The woman he keeps bringing wildflowers to is Asterid March (Grace Ackary), the town beauty who works in her family's apothecary. They will become Katniss and Prim's parents.
The Covey also gave Panem "The Hanging Tree," written by Lucy Gray Baird in Ballad. In Sunrise, the song resurfaces as graffiti in orange paint, "NO CAPITOL, NO HANGING TREE!", which Haymitch realizes Lenore Dove left behind. He takes it as her order to keep fighting.
Burdock passes the song down to his daughter. In Mockingjay, Katniss sings "The Hanging Tree," and it becomes the rebellion's anthem. Burdock doesn't live to hear it: he dies in a mine explosion when Katniss is 11.
Where the mockingjay pin came from
The pin was never meant to be a symbol of anything. Mr. Donner gave his twin daughters a pair of gold pins on their 13th birthday, both made by Tam Amber, the Covey's mandolin player: a mockingjay for Maysilee (Mckenna Grace) and a hummingbird for her sister, Merrilee.
Maysilee refused to wear hers. She considered mockingjays "half mutt," and technically she was right: they're the offspring of the Capitol's jabberjays and wild mockingbirds. She said she'd reconsider if she survived the Games.
She didn't. Maysilee, Haymitch's ally in the arena, whom he called "Sis," was killed in the arena by a flock of candy-pink bird mutts. Haymitch held her hand until the end.
Merrilee lost her hummingbird pin. The mockingjay stayed in the family and went to Merrilee's daughter, Madge Undersee, who gives it to Katniss before the 74th Games. The symbol of the rebellion is a pin its first owner wouldn't wear.
Mckenna Grace made sure the pins made the trip from page to screen.
"I also fought really hard for Marilee and Maysilee's pins – mockingjay and the hummingbird," Grace said.
Plutarch's offer
The last piece arrives on Haymitch's Victory Tour. Plutarch Heavensbee (Jesse Plemons), still a cameraman then, takes him to the one unbugged room in a Justice Building and invites him into the rebellion. What they need, they agree, is someone like Haymitch, only luckier.
Haymitch goes home and mentors District 12's tributes every year, and every one of them dies. Twenty-four years later, the luckier one is reaped in District 12.
The epilogue
Sunrise ends after the war, with Haymitch finally telling Katniss and Peeta about the people he lost.
He first saw Katniss as a small child, when Burdock brought her around. She wore her hair in two braids, just like Louella McCoy, the 13-year-old girl reaped with him for the 50th Games, whom he called his sweetheart. That's why he calls Katniss "sweetheart." The casting team went looking for a Louella who, in Lawrence's words to Entertainment Weekly, "sort of looks like young Katniss," and cast Molly McCann.
The next day, Katniss brings Haymitch a basket of goose eggs, and Peeta builds an incubator. Lenore Dove loved geese, and geese mate for life.
Previously we wrote: COVID buried Birds of Prey. The Gallerist is Cathy Yan's second shot — and Sundance didn't help