An increasingly growing trend in Hollywood, and the film industry in general, is the steady rise of splitting films into multiple parts. We have seen massive franchises such as Harry Potter, The Hobbit and The Hunger Games adhere to this practice but is it a good thing? Is it a creative tool to give the filmmaker more time to flesh out characters and plot? Or is it a cheap money-grabbing scheme from the suits?
If we were to argue that splitting films in multiple parts is a creative decision, then we would have to consider the source material that the director/producers are deriving from. Big franchise films these days probably clock an average of 2 hours running time, which in regards to the format, is still considered a large proportionate of time. So, your first big problem when adapting a novel such as The Deathly Hallows is being able to fit all of its plot and character development into a snug 2 hour slot in a way that doesn’t totally slaughter the pacing of the film. The simple answer is what we got, a 2 part finale to the Harry Potter franchise.
But that doesn’t solve all of your problems. When you are adapting a novel into two parts, you would naturally cover the first half of the novel in the first film and so on for the second part, except a novel doesn’t usually give you a fitting, suitably exciting conclusion to its first half – instead focusing on setting up characters and plot points, stuff that will pay off in the actual conclusion of the book. My biggest problem with Mockingjay Part One was that it was fucking boring for the most part, ladled with a forcibly exciting finale that wasn’t even written in the book. Basically, when adapting one novel into 2 films, your part one is going to suffer drastically from being all build up with no immediate pay off.
So, how would the multi-part films fare when they aren’t being adapted from set stories and books? You only need to look as far as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a film originally scheduled for a single four hour theatrical release that was split into 2 parts released within weeks of one another. Being an original creation, I feel that neither film suffers from the multiple release format with Tarantino able to give each film their separate identity, whilst fundamentally telling the same story. Importantly, the first film has its own narrative structure that doesn’t feel forced or hackneyed with the big build up to her showdown Crazy 88 and O-Ren.
The big problems that come when adapting a novel into multiple films is when that novel isn’t actually very long and the filmmaker starts to pad with unnecessary scenes that repeat what we have already seen or are there just to pander to a director. I genuinely enjoy The Hobbit films but I can’t help feel that there is way too much padding and splitting a book as short as The Hobbit into three films was never a good idea – there is probably enough plot for 2 movies that would include a nice link back to Lord of the Rings but with three films we get un-needed cameos from Saruman and a back story for Legolas that we neither asked for or wanted.
I do appreciate the need to adapt certain stories into multiple films, with their scope and length too much for one film to handle, but I feel that it’s becoming the norm for these franchises to automatically assume that it is necessary to split the story up so much creating a fractured and awkward movie experience. Seriously, Mockingjay does NOT need 2 parts – that is 2 hours of my life I ain’tgetting back.
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