10 Dumb Mistakes That Ruined Once Great Franchises

10. Splitting The Final Book In Two - The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games was the closest thing a franchise can be to the fire emoji; instantly understood, widely used and the right level of establishment cool.

Then they split the final book, Mockingjay, in two. Fair play, this had worked wonders with Harry Potter, the previous cross-generation teen fiction craze, but all respect to Katniss, she ain't no Boy Who Lived. And even if she was, Francis Lawrence's approach to the split repeated the same mistakes as David Yates, only worse; he claimed it was to better tell the story, only to insert so much extraneous action that the actually important plot turns had to be rushed through at the last minute with no time to let the emotion sit.

This single choice, more than any other issue - turning something so unique and zany into an Aliens riff, the questionable handling of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death - is what's hurt The Hunger Games' legacy. The reception to both parts of Mockingjay was considerably muted, and by the time Part 2 came around the amount of people coming out to see the actual movie was considerably down.

It fared a little better than Divergent, however, whose first instalment of book three proved so lacklustre the final part was downgraded to a TV movie, with none of the key actors wanting to return.