The Kidd here...
Following the trend of extending the franchise as long as you can while milking your fan base out of double the admission price for the ending, Lionsgate has announced that it's dividing Suzanne Collins' THE HUNGER GAMES trilogy finale, MOCKINGJAY, into two films, complete with release dates for the split final chapter stretching the series all the way to 2015.
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1 will arrive in theatres on November 21, 2014, with THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 2 following just a shade under a year later on November 20, 2015.
I haven't gotten this far into reading the books, but, in talking with some of my friends who have, MOCKINGJAY is pretty well regarded as the weakest book in the series and not a very good ending. I've been told it might work as two separate films, because of how MOCKINGJAY is structured on the page, but this just reeks of "Well, HARRY POTTER and TWILIGHT did it, so why can't we?"
Wouldn't you rather have an earlier part of an established series split into two films to get all that good stuff in and not necessarily the finale? I actually think THE HUNGER GAMES itself, the first book, would have been better served being made into two films, so it wouldn't have felt as rushed as it did.
-Billy Donnelly
"The Infamous Billy The Kidd"
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