For years, movie audiences were satisfied with franchise trilogies. Three parts made sense. There was no need for a fourth Godfather or One More Fist Full of Dollars. Then Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two changed the game. Just as Lord Voldemort cleaved his soul to achieve immortality, Warner Brothers and production company Heyday Films decided (out of "creative imperative," insisted co-producer David Heyman) to split the seventh Harry Potter book into two to prolong the series and rake in bigger ticket sales. Box office history was born—twins!
Then the teen vampires of Twilight appeared in a two-film finale: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One and Two. Now even trilogies aren't safe: Last year, Lionsgate announced four movies would be based on the Divergent novel trilogy. Today, witness the trailer for the fourth Hunger Games movie, the second based on the third book of Suzanne Collins's trilogy.
Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part Two is supposedly the final-final film of the series. Its predecessor, the drawn-out Part One, was largely superfluous and almost criminally dull. "Might it have been better if they'd squeezed the whole book into one movie? Probably," wrote Christopher Orr in The Atlantic.
InPart Two, audiences will get to see the cool stuff that never made Part One—the revolt heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) leads against the wicked ancient Rome-on-a-sci-fi-bender Capitol run by President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
"Tonight, we turn our weapons to the Capitol!" says Katniss in the trailer. FINALLY. May the odds be ever in our favor. Let's blow this sucker up. #TeamGale
Correction: In a previous version of this story, the eighth Harry Potter movie was incorrectly identified as a book. There are only seven books.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Gogo Lidz was 19 when her first feature story was published in the Los Angeles Times in 2004. She wrote freelance for ... Read more
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