The Hunger Games Director's Jaw-Dropping Comment on the Biggest Mockingjay Complaint Leaves Fans Shocked

Summary

Director Francis Lawrence regrets splitting The Hunger Games: Mockingjay into two movies.

Lawrence admitted that fans felt exploited and frustrated due to the year-long wait for the finale. However, he now realizes that the decision was seen as disingenuous, despite it allowing for a better adaptation of the book's story.

The director of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay openly shared his response to the most common complaint about the movie franchise's ending. The Hunger Games franchise, based on Suzanne Collins' trilogy of young adult novels, began with the hugely successful The Hunger Games in 2012. The second book, Catching Fire, was adapted into a film in 2013. However, the final book, Mockingjay, was divided into two films - The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015), which garnered criticism from fans for prolonging the resolution of the finale over a year.

Francis Lawrence, who directed Catching Fire, both Mockingjay films, and the upcoming Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, recently expressed his remorse for the decision to split Mockingjay into two movies. "I deeply regret it," he confesses, acknowledging that audiences felt taken advantage of, despite the fact that the decision allowed for a more thorough adaptation of the story. Here is his full statement:

I totally regret it. I totally do. I'm not sure everybody does, but I definitely do. 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.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. But making people wait a year, I think, came across as disingenuous, even though it wasn't. Our intentions were not to be disingenuous.In truth, we got more on the screen out of the book than we would have 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.

Mockingjay Wasn't the First Split-Up Movie Adaptation (Or the Last)

Taking the fan reaction to the split-up Mockingjay release to heart, Francis Lawrence has learned a valuable lesson. As a result, he has opted for a different approach with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a film adaptation of a novel that surpasses Mockingjay by over 100 pages in length. This time, it will be presented as a single movie. However, it's important to note that the decision to divide the conclusion of the Hunger Games movies was not made without considering external factors.

The concept was previously tested with the final installment of the Harry Potter series, The Deathly Hallows, which was released in two parts in 2010 and 2011. This resulted in remarkable box office success, with Part 2 becoming the highest-earning Harry Potter film followed by Part 1 in third place. The Twilight saga followed a similar pattern, with Breaking Dawn: Part 2 emerging as the highest-grossing film in the series.

However, when The Hunger Games: Mockingjay was divided, Part 2 ended up having the lowest box office earnings among the franchise. Nevertheless, this has not deterred studios from transforming J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit into a trilogy or splitting the popular Broadway production Wicked into two upcoming films. While the film industry at large may not have learned the same lesson, Lawrence has certainly taken heed of his box office setback and applied that lesson to the future of the Hunger Games franchise.

Source: PEOPLE