Entertainment Weekly Sunrise on the Reaping Digital Cover & Photoshoot

Joseph Zada, Mckenna Grace, Whitney Peak, Elle Fanning and Glenn Close photographed by Dana Trippe

Entertainment Weekly has given The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping its first major cover-story treatment, and the result may be one of the most striking photoshoots the franchise has ever had.

Rather than simply putting the cast in costume from the movie, EW created an entirely separate visual world for the shoot: flowers, fruit, saturated color, elaborate gowns and surreal Capitol-style glamour surrounding characters whose stories we know are headed somewhere much darker.

It’s beautiful. It’s extravagant. And it’s also a little ominous.

Joseph Zada, Mckenna Grace, Whitney Peak, Elle Fanning and Glenn Close

Paradise & Ruin

Watch the animated EW digital cover on Instagram.

The centerpiece is EW’s animated digital cover, which slowly tracks across Joseph Zada, Mckenna Grace, Whitney Peak, Elle Fanning, and Glenn Close.

The composition looks almost like a classical painting brought to life.

The flowers, jewel tones and romantic styling evoke paradise. But look closer, and the characters gathered inside it represent almost every side of Haymitch’s coming ordeal: the girl he loves, the tribute who becomes one of his closest allies, a Capitol citizen he unexpectedly comes to care about, and the escort who makes the District 12 tributes’ lives miserable.

It’s gorgeous, but we know what’s underneath.

Joseph Zada, Mckenna Grace, Whitney Peak photographed by Dana Trippe for EW

Elle Fanning and Glenn Close photographed by Dana Trippe

 Mckenna Grace photographed by Dana TrippeJoseph Zada photographed by Dana TrippeWhitney Peak photographed by Dana Trippe

Elle Fanning photographed by Dana Trippe
Glenn Close photographed by Dana Trippe

A New Visual Era for Sunrise on the Reaping

The marketing for Sunrise on the Reaping has increasingly embraced color, theatricality and spectacle rather than flattening Panem into dystopian gray. That doesn’t make the story lighter. If anything, the beauty makes the ugliness underneath more disturbing.

Francis Lawrence describes the film’s arena as colorful, psychedelic, and almost Alice in Wonderland-like - gorgeous scenery filled with toxic plants and deadly mutations. Zada sums up the approach simply: “It’s all about the contrast.”

EW’s “Paradise and Ruin” imagery feels like an extension of exactly that idea.

Beautiful enough to hang on the wall.

Devastating once you know what you’re looking at.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives in theaters November 20, 2026.

Photography: Dana Trippe / Entertainment Weekly

Source: Entertainment Weekly’s Sunrise on the Reaping cover story by Shania Russell.