The penultimate Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay Part I, did great business over the weekend, even if its opening box office did "drop off dramatically from its predecessors." In the Mercury's review, Megan Burbank called it "The Empire Strikes Back of The Hunger Games, which is to say that things don't look good for anyone"—and while she meant that things don't look good for the characters, I'll expand that statement to include the audience. Mockingjay pretty much squanders all of the goodwill built up by the great last film, Catching Fire, in that it's pretty hard to walk out of Mockingjay Part I and not feel like a rube. A lot of people paid money to see a Hunger Games movie this weekend, but what they ended up seeing was a super-long, super-boring preview for the next Hunger Games movie.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not against serialization. With the Marvel superhero blockbusters and the Star Wars movies, their serialized nature isn't just part of their roots and source material, it's also a key part of how those movies are conceived (and sometimes why they're conceived). Old-school movie serialization is making a comeback (in part, I suspect, to the increasing similarities between movies and TV), and when done right, it can be super fun and lead to some excellent stories. But Mockingjay Part I doesn't feel like a serialized installment—it feels like a drawn-out cash grab.
Ever since Warner Bros. split Harry Potter's final cinematic installment into two parts to make more money, it's been the trend: Twilight did it too, and the Divergent series and The Avengers 3 are already planning to do the same. (Warner Bros. is currently trying to turn Stephen King's The Stand into four movies.) Your mileage will almost certainly vary with all of these, but just as I found Harry Potter to (rather unexpectedly) benefit from the extra breathing room, I found this first part of Mockingjay to be drawn-out and dull, feeling less like a real movie and more like a collection of scenes that would have been excised in a more rigorous cut. (Something I never thought I'd say: "Less Hunger Games, please!") The problem isn't with the source material: There's enough great stuff in Suzanne Collins' third book to make one hell of a final movie. There isn't, it turns out, enough to make two final movies.
"The next one has to be better, right?" one of my friends said after we walked, dejected and grumpy, out of the Bagdad last night, where a large but almost entirely silent crowd had sat through Mockingjay Part I. "I mean, that's when everything will happen." Well, yeah—that's when everything has to happen, because nothing happened in this one. Hollywood's a business, and when studios see money on the table (like with Harry Potter, like with Twilight, like with Hunger Games, like with the cartoonishly bloated Hobbit movies), it's foolish to think they'll just leave it. And in some cases, it's hard to fault the filmmakers, who, after the studio has decided on a two-parter, then seem stuck. It's then up to them to figure out how to make that work, even if, as in Mockingjay, there's neither a narrative reason nor a logical place for the split. As Mockingjay's Francis Lawrence told The New York Times:
Knowing just when and where to split the novel in two—or three—is also crucial. “Mockingjay Part 1 had the risk of being the trickiest of the transitional movies,” said Mr. Lawrence, who also directed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second entry in the series. “We went back and forth on exactly where the split was. There were a few choices, but it was in a very small zone. I’m talking within a scene’s distance from one another.” (Via.)
Mockingjay Part I, it turns out, ends on a pretty underwhelming moment—one that hardly makes you excited to see the next installment. (Weirdly, Catching Fire had a better cliffhanger than Mockingjay.) Some stories just don't work when they're split in two, separated by a year, and then doled out at $10 or $15 each. If there are one or two more disappointing fake-outs like Mockingjay, it's easy to imagine that audiences will stop showing up to first parts. Or second parts. Or both parts.
