10 Simple Fixes That Would've Saved Terrible Recent Movies
6. The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes - Get Rid Of The Entire Final Act
Staying on the subject of bad final acts, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is, simply put, structurally broken. The film seems to reach a natural end-point when its iteration of the Hunger Games concludes, but it then turns out that we're only at the end of act two and there's a whole other section of the movie that goes on for the best part of an hour.
That was already bad enough. Worse still, this final act fails to definitively explain why Coriolanus Snow (here played by Tom Blyth) became the cruel and ruthless leader he was in the original films, where he was played by the late, great Donald Sutherland. Thanks to these structural and narrative issues, this ended up being the worst Hunger Games film to date by a clear mile, with even the divisive Mockingjay Part 2 soaring high above it.
How to fix it, then? Simple - end the story where it felt like it was going to end.
The film's writers could've definitely found a way to conclude the story of Coriolanus and his love interest Lucy (Rachel Zegler) in a shorter timeframe. Yes, this wasn't how things play out in the novel, but the novel has been divisive among fans anyhow, so a bit of deviation wouldn't have hurt in the slightest.