Lots of ink has already been spilled over two simple truths in modern media. First is the fact that movies are really, really long nowadays. Like, “so long we think they should have an obligatory intermission” long. Second is the fact that studios can’t seem to stop looking at these massive piles of material and thinking, “Hmm, this should really be two movies. That’ll fix it!” Working for a site that has recently critiqued both of these practices, this writer would like to humbly propose a bold new strategy to end these conversations and maybe fix modern cinema once and for all in the process: why not just edit the damn movie!
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Sure, this may be a bit of a personal hangup, but it’s also a gripe that’s been widely applied to some of the year’s most highly regarded films like Killers Of The Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, and even John Wick: Chapter 4, which, while shorter than the other two, still clocks in at a whopping two hours and 49 minutes. That’s only four minutes longer than the upcoming Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, which probably could have left at least one new tribute or original series easter egg on the cutting room floor. But that has never been director Francis Lawrence’s style.
Earlier this month, Lawrence—who was also behind the camera for all four original Hunger Games films—finally admitted that splitting the trilogy’s final novel Mockingjay into two parts was a pretty dumb idea. Not just because, in his words, “making people wait a year [for part 2] came across as disingenuous,” but also because, in the words of A.A. Dowd writing for The A.V. Club back in 2014, it left the first installment “suffer[ing] from an unavoidable sense of anticlimax.”
Still, despite what he called “the kind of wrath of fans, critics, and people at the split,” Lawrence almost didn’t learn his lesson. “There was, like, one second where I thought, Do we do two movies?” he said of conceptualizing the upcoming prequel in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I decided, no, we’re not going down that road again.”
That was the right decision. But one has to wonder, when you’re juggling enough material to reasonably power two whole blockbusters, if it’s really the right call to just smush it all into one instead. Our spidey senses say probably not, but hey, we’ll see how it all pans out when the film premieres in theaters on November 17.