Lionsgate four Hunger Games movies
Ka-thunk! That’s the sound of Hollywood’s axe falling on yet another film and splitting it into two separate but equally lucrative parts. Lionsgate has yet to comment on the rumors that the studio is planning on making four movies out the three novels in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, but if they do end up going for a tetralogy, it would hardly be surprising. It seems you can’t be a blockbuster franchise these days if you’re not being halved and halved into a cinematic version of Zeno’s paradox. Two Harry Potter 7’s, two Breaking Dawns, two Hobbits (Hobbitses?) — we’re probably only a few years away from a three minute-long Pirates of the Caribbean 5: Part 1: Volume 2: Act I: Some Scene in a Cave. In most of these other cases, the split makes some degree of sense, and I even thought that the latest Harry Potter actually benefited from some extra breathing room. But the question is whether it’s even possible to scare up a bonus movie from Collins’ relatively short books without totally disrupting the flow of the narrative. To get all Biblical on you guys, will it be a fishes-and-loaves scenario or a Solomon’s baby? And where would you even begin to draw the dividing line?
EW’s Karen Valby suggests it could go right after SPOILER ALERT the shocking announcement of the Quarter Quell. I agree that would definitely make a slam-bang cliffhanger, but it would also make the series’ second movie pretty uneventful. Little action, no climax, just lots of waving on the Victory Tour, and, crucially, no Hunger Games. That’s a pretty big risk to take after only one movie. For my part, I’m guessing Lionsgate will probably aim to expand the story of the rebellion against the Capitol and choose to chop up Mockingjay, which has action scenes to spare. That will give them enough time to see how the earlier films do box office-wise, and will also follow in the tradition of splitting up the final entry.
