9 Movies That Were Really Just Feature-Length Adverts In Disguise
6. Big Franchise Finale: Part 1
While adapting a major book series gives you knowledge of where the series is heading ahead of time, it also gives you a definite end. And to an audience, endings are good. Theres high emotion, unmatchable stakes and, finally, payoff. The journeys fun, but the ending will be a franchise's enduring legacy (no matter what Losts fans say on the contrary). For studios who are less interested in being faithful to the material and more bothered with making a fortune, however, it poses a serious issue. Your cash cow has a set number of outings before it stops. Simple solution? Split the last book in two. Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hobbit (to extreme lengths) and The Hunger Games have all succumbed to this, with totally predictable results; we get a first film that blithely sets up the final showdown and second that is just action with no real narrative intrigue (and I doubt the latter, when it arrives over the next two years, will be any different). It's inevitably the Part 1, with no arcs or sense of closure, that suffer most. Always ending on a tease of whats to come, dont let that make you think the preceding two hours were any different; their whole run time is all about getting the audience to come back for the finale. Its part of the rise of quality TV, where continuous, episodic content thrives. In film its a different matter though; if Orson Welles can tell the entire life of Charles Foster Kane in one, self contained two hours, you don't need double to do a short teenage fiction book.
