The Hunger Games in Order: Books and Movies, With Runtimes

The Hunger Games in order of release is five books, from The Hunger Games (2008) to Sunrise on the Reaping (2025), and five films, from The Hunger Games (2012) to The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023). A sixth film, Sunrise on the Reaping, opens on November 20, 2026. In story order, the two prequels come first.

This guide gives both orders for the books and the films, the runtime of every film, the short path for people who only want what Sunrise on the Reaping builds on, and a plan to finish before it opens. Dates come from Scholastic, the series’ publisher, and runtimes from TMDB, The Movie Database, checked on November 5, 2026; the totals are our arithmetic.¹² We make Omniphile, a tracking app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and the last section shows how to keep the books and films together in it.

The Hunger Games books in order

Suzanne Collins has written five Hunger Games novels. In order of publication:¹

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes opens on “the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games,” with an 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow as a mentor, decades before he is Panem’s president.³ Sunrise on the Reaping returns to Panem “24 years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell,” and follows Haymitch Abernathy, the mentor of the original books.⁴

The Hunger Games movies in order

Five films are out, and the sixth adapts the newest book. In order of US release, with each film’s runtime on TMDB:²

Mockingjay is the only book split into two films. Sunrise on the Reaping opens in US and UK theaters on November 20, 2026, exactly 11 years after Mockingjay – Part 2, and Francis Lawrence directs it, as he has every film since Catching Fire.¹⁵ The BBFC, which classifies films in the UK, lists its running time as 158 minutes.⁶

The Hunger Games in timeline order

In the order the story happens, the prequels move to the front:

1. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the book and the 2023 film: the 10th Hunger Games, 64 years before the original story.³²
2. Sunrise on the Reaping, the book and the 2026 film: the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, 24 years before.⁴
3. The Hunger Games, the book and the 2012 film.
4. Catching Fire, the book and the 2013 film, whose Games are also a Quarter Quell.²
5. Mockingjay, the book, and the films Mockingjay – Part 1 and Part 2.

Which order should you watch and read them in?

For a first time through, we’d go in release order. The prequels came out a decade or more after the trilogy, and much of their weight comes from knowing who their main characters become: Snow in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Haymitch in Sunrise on the Reaping.

Timeline order suits a rewatch. Seeing the 10th Games, then the 50th, then the 74th in sequence shows how the Capitol’s Games grew over decades, and it puts the two Quarter Quells, in Sunrise on the Reaping and Catching Fire, a few hours apart.

Books or films first is a matter of taste. If you want to read Sunrise on the Reaping before the film opens, start soon: our pages per day calculator tells you how many pages a day it takes to finish by November 20.

What to watch before Sunrise on the Reaping

You don’t need all five films. To choose a short path, we used a fact you can check: which earlier films feature the characters TMDB lists first in the cast of Sunrise on the Reaping. As of November 5, 2026, the first eight are Haymitch Abernathy, Maysilee Donner, Wiress, President Coriolanus Snow, Plutarch Heavensbee, Effie Trinket, Caesar Flickerman and Drusilla Sickle.²

1. The Hunger Games (2012), 2 h 22 min

   Haymitch as the mentor of District 12, with Effie Trinket, Caesar Flickerman and President Snow: four of the eight.

2. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), 2 h 26 min

   Six of the eight: Haymitch, Effie, Caesar and Snow again, plus Plutarch Heavensbee and Wiress. Its Games are the next Quarter Quell after the one in Sunrise on the Reaping.

Together they take 4 hours 48 minutes, one evening each. Maysilee Donner and Drusilla Sickle appear in none of the earlier films. Each Mockingjay film features five of the eight, and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes features only President Snow, so it is the easiest one to skip if time runs short.

A two-weekend plan before November 20

From November 5 there are two weekends left before Sunrise on the Reaping opens on Friday, November 20. All five films fit into them, in release order:

That leaves the week of November 16 free to catch up on a film you missed, or to read Sunrise on the Reaping first.

How long are all the Hunger Games movies?

The five films released so far run 11 hours 45 minutes in total: 9 hours 8 minutes for the original four and 2 hours 37 minutes for The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.² With Sunrise on the Reaping at about 158 minutes, the six films take 14 hours 23 minutes.⁶ Catching Fire’s 2 hours 26 minutes make it the longest of the original four, and Mockingjay – Part 1, at 2 hours 3 minutes, the shortest film in the series. Theatrical runtimes include the end credits, so a marathon runs a little shorter if you skip them.

Track the books and films in Omniphile

Omniphile is our app for tracking movies, TV shows, books, audiobooks and games in one library, so the novels and the films can sit side by side:

• Queue the films. Mark each one Up Next and it joins the movies queue on Home, which shows the total runtime of everything in it. Add Sunrise on the Reaping too: it waits in the queue’s Upcoming group until it is out, and with Premium, a release alert tells you when it arrives.
• Read the books as readthroughs. Each book gets a readthrough with its own start and finish dates, so a reread never overwrites the first, and as you log pages it tells you how much reading time is left at your pace.
• Keep the series together. Put the books and the films in one collection; its card shows how much of it you have read and watched. Free accounts can keep two collections, and the optional Premium subscription removes the limit.

Omniphile runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, with an Apple Watch app, and is free to download with an optional Premium subscription. On iPhone and iPad, version 2026.11.3 also lets Premium members follow a film’s theatrical, rent-or-buy and streaming dates separately, which helps when you wait for Sunrise on the Reaping to reach your services; the Mac update with that change was still in App Store review on November 5. It has no Android or web version. If you’re catching up on another franchise this season, our MCU watch order before Avengers: Doomsday works the same way, with hours for every path.