The Hunger Games: Mockingjay director “regrets” splitting movie into two parts
By Ashley Hurst
The Hunger Games series was one of the most popular movie franchises of the 2010s. Based on books by Suzanne Collins, the Battle Royale-style movies follow Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she is put to the ultimate test: dropped in an arena and made to battle it out against people from other districts, the last person standing wins.
Despite being based on a trilogy of books, there are actually four Hunger Games movies. The final book, Mockingjay, was split into two films — Mockingjay – Part 1 and Mockingjay – Part 2 — released in 2014 and 2015. The idea of splitting final movies (for a bit of extra profit, no doubt) was very much a product of the time. Look no further than the two final Harry Potter movies, which were based on one book.
In the instance of The Hunger Games, splitting the final movie into two parts never felt like a good decision. There was nowhere near enough source material to merit almost four hours of movie. There were times when the final films felt dragged out and unbalanced. Part I lacked action, while Part II was oversaturated with content.
The Hunger Games director wishes he hadn’t split the final movie in two
“I totally regret it. I totally do. I’m not sure everybody does, but I definitely do,” director Francis Lawrence admitted to People. “In truth, we got more on the screen out of the book than we would’ve in any of the other movies because you’re getting close to four hours of screen time for the final book. But, I see and understand how it frustrated people.”
"What I realized in retrospect — and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics and people at the split — is that I realized it was frustrating, And I can understand it."
Forcing fans to wait an entire year for the conclusion didn’t build the kind of hype the team expected. Instead, it came across as insincere, like they were stringing fans along when they didn’t need to. “In an episode of television, if you have a cliffhanger, you have to wait a week or you could just binge it and then you can see the next episode,” Lawrence said. “But making people wait a year, I think, came across as disingenuous, even though it wasn’t. Our intentions were not to be disingenuous.”
Francis Lawrence has since returned to The Hunger Games universe to direct the prequel movie The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, about the rise of the tyrannical Coriolanus Snow. The prequel has had a mixed reception from critics so far. It hits theaters on November 17.
Next. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods is a witty, gripping page turner. dark
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