In France, TMC revives the first Hunger Games while Prime Video allows you to know where to watch the saga at any time. The franchise is awakening: Suzanne Collins will publish a new novel on March 18, 2025; Francis Lawrence is preparing the prequel Sunrise on the Reaping announced for November 20, 2026; London will host a stage version in the fall of 2025. Why this excitement, and what does it reveal about the market and our collective memory?
A sequence of events rekindling the flame
The flame hadn’t gone out; it was smoldering. TMC reopens the door to Panem by broadcasting Hunger Games) from 2012 in the evening. Meanwhile, the saga is available in France for streaming on Prime Video, where you can find the first feature film adapted from Suzanne Collins‘s novel. The franchise includes five feature films (Hunger Games, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, 2023). This dual signal, free television and SVOD, is no coincidence. It accompanies a rise in momentum stretching from 2025 to 2026. On the calendar, two milestones structure the revival: the publication of a new novel announced for March 18, 2025, followed by a prequel in cinemas, Sunrise on the Reaping, expected on November 20, 2026. The British stage will not be left out, with a theatrical creation at the West End in the fall of 2025. The districts are speaking again, and France is getting used to it.
The puzzle of official announcements
The timing has been clarified thanks to verifiable announcements. The publisher Scholastic confirmed the release of Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins on March 18, 2025, a return twenty-four years before the events of the first volume, on the morning of the Reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, the famous Second Quarter Quell. Lionsgate quickly launched the film production. Indeed, they set the worldwide release of the film for November 20, 2026. Additionally, director Francis Lawrence, known for the sequels, has been called back to the helm. Finally, London will host The Hunger Games: On Stage in the fall of 2025 at the Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre, announcing a transition from the arena to the stage. In France, TMC plays the role of a catalyst with a prime-time rebroadcast and the resonance of national exposure, while Prime Video captures the audience that immediately extends the viewing.
In this array of confirmations, the strategy is clear. Publishing prepares the ground, the stage reactivates the imagination, cinema capitalizes on impatience, television triggers memory, and platforms ensure permanence. The architecture, simple, proves to be remarkably effective: broadcast, maintain, relaunch.
Active nostalgia, memory of the 2010s
2012 was the year of the breakthrough. Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Liam Hemsworth gave faces to Katniss Everdeen, Peeta, and Gale, while Elizabeth Banks established the artifice and smiling cruelty of Effie Trinket. France discovered a young adult dystopia that rejected cynicism and claimed an emotion at the level of adolescence. The parable held by its simplicity: a centralized power takes bodies to cement its domination and disguises violence as spectacle. Twelve years later, the architecture of the fable hasn’t changed. It’s the perspective that has matured. The media ecosystem has completed its shift, the attention economy has become the norm, platforms reign. The rereading is necessary, and nostalgia is activated.
This is not passive nostalgia. It converts into practices: rewatching, sharing, commenting, buying, preordering. It reinstalls generational narratives and recomposes communities. At the time, many teenagers discovered in Katniss Everdeen a heroine without emphasis, dense, resistant to discourses that surpass her. Today, these viewers are adults. They work, pay for a streaming subscription, buy hardcover books, and purchase tickets for event productions. The industry has understood the availability of this cohort and orchestrates the return with precision.
A young adult cycle reinventing itself
The YA cycle has experienced successive waves, from Harry Potter to Twilight, then Hunger Games, which consolidated the dystopian vein. The 2020s have shifted the center of gravity: the triumph of series, the maturity of platforms, occasional resurgences in cinema. The new novel by Suzanne Collins comes at an apparently untimely moment. That’s precisely its strength. It doesn’t promise a repetition. However, it envisions a return to the origin and a questioning of the writing of history. Moreover, it questions its possible falsification. In Sunrise on the Reaping, the author returns to the ritual of the Reaping, a moment of political liturgy where the community hands over its children to the spectacle of power. The issue is not pyrotechnics; it is the grammar of consent.
This literary pivot explains the editorial appetite. French booksellers know the power of cycle returns. The banner of a new release drives the sale of previous volumes. The backlist becomes a resource again. Municipal libraries record new reservations. Book clubs reform. Memory becomes socialized. Open television, by offering the film at a broad listening hour, restores common scenes. The platform allows for immediate continuation of viewing. It also allows for detailing sequences and replaying musical scores. Additionally, it offers the possibility of quoting lines. It’s a complete circulation between media.
The France effect: television, SVOD, bookstores
The French specificity lies in a rather unique articulation. Free-to-air channels retain a popular impact. A rebroadcast on TMC opens audience windows that algorithms alone do not guarantee. Prime Video, on the other hand, offers continuous accessibility and international visibility. Between the two, the bookstore stitches together the act of rewatching and the desire to reread. You enter through the screen, leave with a book, and inscribe yourself in the long time of sagas.
The power of shelves should not be underestimated. Backlist sales irrigate publishers’ accounts and give everyone, authors and distributors alike, latitude. A new volume by Suzanne Collins reads like an invitation to rediscover the entire series, while the prospect of a film in 2026 provides a common horizon for readers and viewers. Advertising no longer has to invent a motif. It only has to connect what is already there.
On stage, the geography changes
The move to the West End says something else. The Hunger Games: On Stage promises a scenography designed for a specific location at Canary Wharf. The stage imposes choreography, proximity, the energy of a collective. It removes editing and cutting. It restores the dry cruelty of the rules. It’s another way to experience Panem. For the French public, London is within train reach. The journey adds a story to the story. You travel to witness an unprecedented version of an already known world. The circulation of the myth becomes tangible.
This translation reminds us how much the saga speaks to the present. It has been read as a critique of political spectacle, then as a fable about the making of narratives. The theater reinforces this second axis. The word returns to the forefront. The Reaping is no longer just an image. It’s a voice announcing names and a silence that falls.
In cinema, the angle of the prequel
The next film, Sunrise on the Reaping, is set twenty-four years before the appearance of Katniss and follows the Fiftieth Hunger Games. Director Francis Lawrence, already at work on Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay, knows the strengths of the universe and its shadowy areas. The question is not to revive a past success but to shift the perspective. An effective prequel doesn’t explain everything. It opens paths, illuminates motivations, proposes new folds to an audience that thought it knew everything. The anticipation in France is organized around a clear calendar: reading in spring 2025, theater in the fall, cinema in November 2026. The narrative crosses its tempos.
An industrial strategy without secrets
Lionsgate and Color Force hide nothing of their intentions. The studio orchestrates a return in stages, each medium serving as a springboard for the other. From free-to-air exposure to availability on Prime Video, the entire setup transforms nostalgia into economic value. There is no magic formula. There are simple gestures. Platforms ensure availability. Free channels offer memory. Bookstores provide materiality. Cinema closes the loop and reopens it.
France is a country where reading remains a structuring practice. Moreover, generalist television retains a decisive influence. Thus, it provides an ideal observation ground. One can see how a franchise recomposes itself without fanfare, with the precision of clockwork. Word of mouth takes over from massive campaigns. Communities reform, discreet and tenacious. At the end of the road, there are theaters where one sits for a story that begins again.
The heart of the matter: what Hunger Games still tells
The saga has lost none of its charge. It speaks of domination and consent, spectacle and blindness, ages where one learns to speak up. It reminds us that stories are weapons. It speaks of the fatigue of bodies and the obstinacy of voices. In France, this discourse resonates with a media landscape where there is debate about overexposure and attention bubbles. Against this backdrop, Hunger Games imposes its rhythm. Slow, arrhythmic, insistent.
Programming a film from 2012 is not trivial. It happens at a time when a new book is published. Moreover, a prequel is in preparation. There is an intelligence of cycles. Some viewers discover. Others return. All redraw the contours of a world where the districts continually question the Capitol. It’s the quiet strength of a phenomenon that doesn’t seek to dominate the news. It prefers to inhabit it.
A continuous thread towards November 2026
There is no thunderous return. There is a firm and patient resumption. Hunger Games offers itself again to France, on free-to-air, online, in bookstores, on stage, then in theaters. Nostalgia finds concrete supports. It transforms into circulation and purchases. It becomes an active phenomenon once more. On the horizon, the date of November 2026 draws attention. For French readers, Prime Video and TMC are the entry points, while Suzanne Collins, Francis Lawrence, and Lionsgate chart the course of Sunrise on the Reaping towards the West End and theaters. In the meantime, the saga will have strengthened its ties, awakened its communities, and found its voice again. The world watches. The country listens. From Prime Video to TMC evenings, from the novel of March 18, 2025 to the London stage in the fall of 2025, to the film of November 20, 2026, the thread is taut.