The odds are in favor of Hunger Games fans today, as an all-new trailer for the prequel movie, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, has arrived online. The movie chronicles the 50th Annual Hunger Games, which introduced Panem to legendary District 12 Tribute Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada), who would one day become a valuable ally to Katniss Everdeen and Peta Mellark. He'd also end up looking a lot like Woody Harrelson.

Once again evoking vibes somewhere between Midsommar and Thor: Ragnarok, this is the only bright glimmer in an otherwise dark tale that will leave broken hearts and bodies all over the place. Director Francis Lawrence once again returns as the gamesmaster of proceedings, joined by some truly inspired casting choices giving their takes on fan-favorite heroes and villains.

Ralph Fiennes is proving he can once again be a smug, punchable villain as President Snow, while Elle Fanning is giving all smiles as her iteration of Effie Trinket. Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman is proving he'll deliver and might take the title of favorite version of the character after Stanley Tucci.

Naturally, there's also some eye-watering game action as Zada runs for his life alongside other Tributes. McKenna Grace, Molly McCann, and The Long Walk scene-stealer, Ben Wang, play District 12 Tributes Maysilee Donner, Louella McCoy, and Wyatt Callow respectively. The whole thing is giving me serious original movie vibes, and I cannot wait to see if it's a return to form for the hit franchise.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives in theaters on November 20. Keep up to date on every upcoming movie in 2026 with our guide.

I have shifted from a position of 'really? A third-person action D&D game?' to cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. Partially because of a really solid showing at Gamescom, actually leveraging the prospect of playing a spellcaster with a bunch of interesting interactions and some swanky-looking combat.

My optimism continues to grow after an interview with IGN, in which general manager Dominic Guay tells the site that the game will be getting rid of traditional quest markers—there's a compass you can turn off, but that's about it: "We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint."

While I'm not always opposed to a waypoint—it really depends on the kind of game—I can say that a surplus of hand-holding is always irritating. Developer Invoke Studios has lucked into a topical time to talk about this stuff, too, since such obnoxious waypointery has made us feel a lot better about not getting the PS5 exclusive Wolverine anytime soon.

Guay continues that "the core team on this game have worked on other open world games before and we've done the, let's say, the heavy-handed guiding approach before. What ends up happening at some point—and it's normal—a lot of players will just [blindly follow] the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity because you're like, well, why even bother? And so we didn't want to go there. We wanted the player to explore."

Instead of typical quests, the game revolves around "Mysteries", which sound like a sort of light immersive sim way of going about things. Like asking for rumours in a D&D game, players can bumble around town chatting to NPCs to accrue clues and information—creating the illusion of stumbling across something organically.

"Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them … You can chance upon that Mystery from a completely different place, and then it'll lead you toward that settlement, and you'll know before coming in there's something fishy going on here. So then you'll approach that settlement differently than in this case where you learn it from within."

Not all of these mysteries are so straightforward—but this all sounds pretty solid to me. What'll really make this system good is whether Invoke Studios can pull it off in a way that feels natural. Creating the illusion that I'm some super-smart warlock detective is neat on paper, but if every beggar I bump into starts talking about a sinister basement, I might feel just as coddled as I am with big glowing map markers and prompts. Or yellow paint. At least we aren't doing yellow paint again.