4. Splitting Films In Two...Or Three...
While it's not the first film to do it, we're really looking at Peter Jackson here, for folding not only once, but twice at studio pressure. His The Hobbit was original announced to be split into two parts, which seemed tolerable given his sublime work on the Lord of the Rings films, but when it was announced that the relatively short novel was being split into
three films, well, it made it very clear what sort of game Jackson was playing. He's tried to explain why, but really, it does cripple our faith in these films, given that he has essentially managed to stretch a novel shorter than any of the Rings books into a film trilogy that is roughly the same size as the Rings films. It makes absolutely no sense. But the trend began with the likes of Harry Potter and then Twilight deciding that viewers should pay twice to see how everything ends for the intrepid heroes. It's clear in both of these cases that it wasn't necessary; Deathly Hallows Pt. 1 was mostly filler, and the final Potter film could easily have been truncated down into a 3-hour epic. Similarly, so much of Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is filler of R-Patz and K-Stew's little honeymoon that they could easily have combined the two films into one gigantic whole, but studios aren't dumb, and they know audiences will pay twice either way. However, it's a very crass, cynical tactic all the same.