I was in my theatre seat, in the final stretch of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. I'd already devoted eight hours of my life to watching Katniss and her comrades make their way to a showdown in Panem. Now I would learn everything: Would she kill President Snow? Would she choose Peeta or Gale? How did she squeeze in time for wardrobe fittings? We were at the climactic push and I was insane with … boredom. I just wanted everyone to hurry up and die.
I'm pretty sure this is not what the filmmakers intended. But Mockingjay – Part 2 is a victim of its own bloat, the latest movie to come down with the Hollywood disease of sequelitis. It is the practice – all too prevalent now – of splitting what otherwise would be a perfectly fine motion picture into two sluggish, overbearing, barely watchable ones.
The Harry Potter franchise did it in 2010 when it chopped the seventh and final book of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two movies. The Twilight franchise did the same a year later, snapping its fourth instalment, Breaking Dawn, in half, resulting in five films instead of four.
The monstrously large and complicated Lord of the Rings trilogy resisted doing this; it hewed to the three source novels. But then the same filmmakers turned around and pumped The Hobbit full of hot air, stretching what had been one thin story into three films so full of longueurs you could have read the book aloud in less than their eight-hour run time. I can only dimly recall the first Hobbit – the memory is a haze of pain – but I do remember the entire enterprise stopping cold for endless minutes while dwarfs sang a dirge (with verses!). I recall turning to my friend Teri and mouthing the words "I am dying" several times.
Marvel recently announced that it, too, has succumbed to sequelitis – it's chopping its next Avengers film, Avengers: Infinity War, in two, to be released in 2018 and 2019. "The films will be the 18th and 22nd main instalments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as the sixth and 10th in Phase Three," reads Marvel's website. If you can understand that sentence, 1) kudos to you, 2) please don't try to explain it to me, and 3) it tells you why sequelitis is prevailing: There's a lot of lucre in it.
Let's look at the numbers. The first Hunger Games film earned $408-million (all figuresU.S.). The second topped that with $425-million. The third dropped to $337-million. But the finale is expected to do better. The Hobbit's three parts made, collectively, $820-million – almost certainly more than a single film would have earned. The first three Twilight films made $790-million; the last two made $573-million.
So numerous are the dollars, you could argue that studios would be fools not to split their franchise finales, to milk them for all they're worth. They're proven commodities in a risky business. If the audience has hung on this long, they'll hang on a little longer.
But there's a hitch. For each of the aforementioned sequels, their studios had to spend more to earn less. The first Twilight film cost $37-million to make. The second cost $50-million; the third $68-million. The fourth jumped to $110-million, the fifth to $120-million. And that's without the massive marketing costs. The Hunger Games suffered similar diminishing returns: The first one cost $78-million; the second, $130-million.
I can almost hear Hollywood saying, "See, it's not just a craven cash grab – we're giving the fans more time with their beloved characters, even if it costs us a bit more." Well, that may have been true when Quentin Tarantino split Kill Bill into two volumes in 2003 and 2004. Though I believe that everything is made better with judicious cutting, his story's spilling into two came from a creative overflow, not a stretching.
But for most of these split finales, the two halves aren't filled with more. They're filled with less – less story, less suspense, less artistry, less character development. The penultimate films of each franchise are especially bereft. They're not self-sufficient, stand-alone movies – they are shapeless instalments that shamelessly pick their audiences' pockets.
Split finales betray their franchises' artistry. The first Hunger Games is crowded with good stuff – it introduces a world, establishes characters, and leaps from suspense to anger to sorrow. The second one furthers the story, yet comes to a satisfying conclusion that can stand alone. The third and fourth instalments, by contrast, are dull, plagued by long stretches in which little happens. Instead of suspense, we get repetition. Instead of gasping for breath, we're twiddling our thumbs.
Not only are there more flaws, which would have been excised from a leaner story – we have way more time to notice them. Moments that should be meaningful are so slack they turn risible. The escapes become ridiculous instead of exciting. Why, for example, would Panem litter itself with elaborate, unwieldy booby traps that the rebels can circumvent with a scanner that looks like it came from Radio Shack? Why not just bomb Katniss and Co. to smithereens?
Rather than giving us more of what we adore, split finales betray everything we once responded to. When a beloved franchise concludes and we spill into the lobby, we should be sad to see it end – not relieved that it's finally over.
Johanna Schneller