Now, the Final Chapter. O.K., Half of It.
‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1,’ Is the Latest Penultimate Franchise Film
A
friend is telling you a great story when, halfway in, she suddenly
stops. To hear the rest, she tells you, you’ll have to wait. Not a day, à
la Scheherazade, or a week, as with a CBS drama. A year.
Welcome
to the tricky world of penultimate films, those “so close, yet so far”
movies that also must serve as a gateway to a franchise finale. Done
well, they’re movies worth seeing in their own right, and on their own
merits. Done wrong, they can feel a lot like place holders or, worse,
like money grabs.
The latest penultimate film to hit theaters is “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1,”
which opens Nov. 21. Like others of its ilk — think of “Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
and “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1” — the newest installment
in the story of Katniss Everdeen and the rebellion against federation
rule in Panem was based on a single, hugely popular book, then split in
two (or, in the case of “The Hobbit,” three).
A
yearlong wait has become the industry standard between penultimate and
ultimate, a practice that was used for the pre-Thanksgiving releases of
the last two “Twilight” episodes, continued through the “Hobbit” and
“Hunger Games” series, and may well hold for the final films of the
“Divergent” franchise, which are scheduled for release in 2016 and 2017.
How
do filmmakers take part of a story and make it seem whole, all while
building up excitement for a finale that audiences won’t get to see for
quite some time?
For
Francis Lawrence, director of “Mockingjay” Parts 1 and 2, it can be a
daunting proposition. “We were all huge fans of ‘Breaking Bad,' ” he
said, adding that you can take big chances “with an end of an episode
when you only have to make people wait a week.” But “making people wait a
year, you have to tread a little more carefully.”
One
trick is creating a cliffhanger that really doesn’t feel like one, or
avoiding that gasp-inducing gambit altogether. “You’re really looking at
the overall story,” Mr. Lawrence said. “You know eventually that
Katniss and Snow” — the president of Panem — “will have their day, so
we’re slowly building to that. You’re keeping their relationship alive
and their connection alive. Those are the things that are really
important in building up for Part 2.”
Cliffhangers
can also seem outdated. They hark back to the days of the old radio
dramas, and before that, to Dickens and, yes, Scheherazade, even Homer.
There’s also the danger of looking too much like episodic TV.
“You
have to have something, some bridge to the next movie,” said Katherine
A. Fowkes, a professor of media and popular culture studies at High
Point University in North Carolina and author of “The Fantasy Film,”
about that revitalized genre and its history. “But I do think that
movies are always trying to distinguish themselves from traditional
television, and so they don’t want to seem like: O.K., you’re waiting
for the next episode.”
Long
waits aside, the key to making a penultimate film that stands on its
own, Mr. Lawrence said, is finding separate dramatic questions for each
film. “If you have a question in the beginning of the movie — Will
Katniss be able to do something? — and in the end you answer that
question, you now have a satisfying story,” he said. “So even if the
story continues, the story of this movie has ended.”
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.”
For other films, like “Breaking Dawn — Part 1”
(2011), the split was largely built into the source novel, about the
human Bella, her vampire love, Edward, and the escalating feud between
the werewolves and the Cullen family of bloodsuckers. “There were really
two different stories in the book,” said Melissa Rosenberg, the
screenwriter of all five “Twilight” films. “The first one was about
Bella’s pregnancy and survival as a human, and the second one was about
her life as a vampire. So the book really lent itself to being divided.”
Of
course, just because a story has a distinct intermission doesn’t make
the two halves equal. “Part 1 was the hardest of all five of them for
me, because it’s a small story,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “It’s a personal
story, it’s not an action story, so you have to treat it as a very
different animal.”
For
Ms. Rosenberg, that meant catering to fan expectations of the novel’s
pivotal moments — “Obviously, the wedding had to be glorious,” she said —
and playing up conflicts that would eventually resolve themselves in
the final film. “The biggest thing we amped up was the wolf pack versus
Cullen element,” she said.
“It was tough, that first one,” Ms. Rosenberg admitted. “I had more fun writing the action story.”
The original novel was also relatively slim, a trait it didn’t share with the 800-page finale of the “Harry Potter”
series. Having an abundance of source material is generally considered a
good thing for penultimate films, and goes a long way in assuaging fan
concerns that splitting the story is little more than a way for studios
to double their profits. “That was a big, fat, dense book, and I think a
lot of fans of the book were very worried that they would have to cut
out huge parts of it if they made a movie out of it,” Ms. Fowkes said.
“So in that case, people were probably like: ‘Yeah, that’s fine. We’ll
wait for the second one, and it’ll be worth waiting for.' ”
Thanks
to overlapping shooting and editing schedules, directors now can gauge
reactions to a penultimate film and tweak the finale. When “Mockingjay —
Part 1” opens next weekend, the filmmakers, who are currently in
postproduction on “Part 2,” will have one eye on social media, just as
they did when “Catching Fire” opened as they were five weeks into
filming the final two “Hunger Games” films. “It’s not going to drive us
into reshoots or anything,” Mr. Lawrence said. “But I think when I get a
sense of what people are really picking up on emotionally and
thematically, that’ll probably inform some of the decision making on
Part 2.”
If
the goal of penultimate films of fantasy franchises is to get audiences
in theaters for the final film — and do decent box office on their own —
they’ve done quite well on both counts of late. The finales of the
Harry Potter and “Twilight” series set box office records, as did their
lead-ins; “The Desolation of Smaug,” which preceded this December’s
“Hobbit” series finale, grossed more than $958 million worldwide.
With
each of the Part 1 films in this elite group earning more than $700
million globally, the bar is already pretty high. If the lead-in does
that well, where do you go from there?
“When
‘Catching Fire’ came out, I felt really lucky that we did so well,” Mr.
Lawrence said. “And it was a great feeling, except that it just raised
the bar for this one. So now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping
that it lives up to people’s expectations after ‘Catching Fire.’ Ideally
I’ll have the same problem, where there’s a moment of relief, and then
sheer terror about Part 2.”
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