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Posted in: Lionsgate, Movies | Tagged: lionsgate, the hunger games, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes
The Hunger Games Director Regrets Splitting Mockingjay Into Two Films
The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes director Francis Lawrence says he regrets splitting Mockingjay into two films.
When The Hunger Games first came out, it was the second piece of the massive YA trident that was taking over popular culture in the early 2000s. It was the one that people felt slightly less guilty liking because it wasn't Twilight, and the standards were really that low at the time. However, because The Hunger Games differed from Twilight in many ways, it was similar in others as well. It had a central love triangle that really didn't need to be there and didn't add much to the story; it made an entire generation of men and "not like other girls" girls dogpile on other women for the sin of liking a thing that they didn't like, and the final film was split into two movies. However, unlike The Deathly Hallows or even Breaking Dawn, Mockingjay never felt like a book that really needed to be split into two, and of the three, it felt the most like a blatant cash grab on the part of Lionsgate. How, ahead of the release of The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes and its being directed by franchise mainstay Francis Lawrence, he admitted to People recently that he regrets splitting the film into two and understands why fans were so frustrated.
"I totally regret it. I totally do. I'm not sure everybody does, but I definitely do," he says. "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."
Lawrence compared it to a cliffhanger that is left with an episode of television, where even if there is a cliffhanger, you usually only have to wait a week for the new episode to appear, or you binge the entire season in one go. However, movies need more time by design, and they need time to finish The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. He says, however, it wasn't disingenuous even if that was what everything thought at the time.
"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," he adds. "Our intentions were not to be disingenuous."
There were some benefits in that the extended runtime from both films meant that Lawrence and his team didn't need to cut anything from Mockingjay, and that kind of freedom to not cut large sections of the book is something that most book-to-film adaptations. He explained it: "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." The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes is one book into one movie, but that doesn't mean this world is closed forever, though it does sound like everyone involved is more than willing to concede that they should wait for Suzanne Collins rather than try their own thing.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes – Summary, Cast List, Release Date
Experience the story of The Hunger Games — 64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute and decades before Coriolanus Snow became the tyrannical President of Panem.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes follows a young Coriolanus (Tom Blyth) who is the last hope for his failing lineage, the once-proud Snow family that has fallen from grace in a post-war Capitol. With his livelihood threatened, Snow is reluctantly assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from the impoverished District 12. But after Lucy Gray's charm captivates the audience of Panem, Snow sees an opportunity to shift their fates. With everything he has worked for hanging in the balance, Snow unites with Lucy Gray to turn the odds in their favor. Battling his instincts for both good and evil, Snow sets out on a race against time to survive and reveal if he will ultimately become a songbird or a snake.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes is directed by Francis Lawrence and stars Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage, Hunter Schafer, Josh Andrés Rivera, Jason Schwartzman, and Viola Davis. It is based on a novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins and a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt. It will be released on November 17th.
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