10 Terrible Third Acts That Ruined Recent Movies
1. The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes
Given that Suzanne Collins' source novel is itself quite polarising, it's fitting that critical and audience responses to the big-screen adaptation of The Hunger Games' prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes have themselves been wildly divisive.
And while there's certainly a lot to like in the movie's first two-thirds, centered around the build-up to and events of the 10th Annual Hunger Games, it all grinds to a tedious halt when the games end and Collins takes her story on a sharp narrative left-turn.
The final near-hour of the movie focuses instead on Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) working as a Peacekeeper as punishment for cheating to help his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), win the Games. What follows is seemingly paradoxically both a leaden slog and a rushed mess.
Far too much time is devoted to what really feels like an epilogue to the more exciting Hunger Games portion of the movie, but at the same time, Corio's final confrontation with Lucy and transformation into the villainous Snow ends up feeling too hurried for its own good.
Bold as it was for director Francis Lawrence to spend so long on the aftermath of the Games, it completely obliterates the movie's rewatch factor, because that final third is an absolute chore to get through.