The Caesar Flickerman Report
Is everyone in the new 'Hunger Games' movie? Yes.
Every actor is either working on one of three projects at this point: Avengers: Doomsday, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or the new Hunger Games prequel.
The first two are pretty obvious at this point; Marvel is a decades-long phenomenon and Christopher Nolan has the Midas touch, but it’s kind of shocking how loaded the cast is for a one-off prequel following an earlier prequel to a Jennifer Lawrence-starring set of films that started over a decade ago based on a beloved (but gruesome) trilogy.
I’m not here to slander the new Hunger Games book—I finished it in record time and attacked the second half of it like … well, every character in this series—and yet, I can’t stop thinking about what it means for Sunrise on the Reaping to feature a newly-minted Oscar winner in Kieran Culkin, cherished nominees like Jesse Plemons and Ralph Fiennes and major-league names like Elle Fanning, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Maya Hawke and McKenna Grace.
With Hollywood floundering on big-budget ideas, this feels like a return to form, a book adaptation chock-full of stars with little expectation for a sequel.
I think a lot about the advice that Leonardo DiCaprio once shared with Timothée Chalamet, “No hard drugs and no superhero movies,” and that feels extra resonant in this day and age.
These actors don’t have to get locked into a multi-picture deal, slowing down their careers in the way that superhero series, action trilogies and even the initial Hunger Games movies are wont to do. Instead, these award-winning actors get a huge payday, some notoriety that they can pass on to smaller projects and the opportunity to chew the scenery à la Jason Schwartzman in the previous prequel.
The success of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which came out almost a decade after the final Lawrence film, felt like a rejuvenation for the series, as well. The 2023 prequel made $349 million worldwide against a production budget of $100 million, a shocker in a year where blockbusters were still recovering from the pandemic and a less-obsessed moviegoing public.
Rachel Zegler and Tom Blythe, buoyed by Schwartzman, Hunter Schafer, Donald Sutherland, Viola Davis and Josh Rivera, are all big names, but this recent casting bonanza feels like a direct next step after the movie surprised box-office pundits. That last movie turned an adored series into a cash cow, making The Hunger Games movies the 20th-highest-grossing film franchise of all time, at a gross of $3.3 billion worldwide.
The big successes this year are all over the place. There’s the Chinese animated Ne Zha 2, A Minecraft Movie, two Marvel movies, Sinners, Snow White, Dog Man, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (which didn’t even have a domestic release), Mickey 17 and Final Destination: Bloodlines1. This all feels like a step in the right direction from last year’s run, which is basically a mish-mash of numbers and colons.
Sunrise on the Reaping is part of a series, sure, but at least it’s its own story. And, boy, the stars are out to play. It’s also about a bunch of kids murdering each other as part of a rigged Roman Republic-esque faux-democracy. If this is what our actors are gravitating to and excited by as opposed to stale retreads, I think we’re in a pretty good place.
This movie is so damn fun and gross. It’s insane that it topped the domestic box office.