http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/arts/the-hunger-games-like-other-series-splits-its-finale.html 2014-11-12 14:15:29 ‘The Hunger Games,’ Like Other Series, Splits Its Finale The “Hunger Games” franchise, as did the Harry Potter and “Twilight” series, hopes to demonstrate the art in splitting a final chapter into two installments. === A friend is telling you a great story when, halfway in, she suddenly stops. To hear the rest, she tells you, you’ll have to wait. Not a day, à la Scheherazade, or a week, as with a CBS drama. A year. Welcome to the tricky world of penultimate films, those “so close, yet so far” movies that also must serve as a gateway to a franchise finale. Done well, they’re movies worth seeing in their own right, and on their own merits. Done wrong, they can feel a lot like place holders or, worse, like money grabs. The latest penultimate film to hit theaters is “ A yearlong wait has become the industry standard between penultimate and ultimate, a practice that was used for the pre-Thanksgiving releases of the last two “Twilight” episodes, continued through the “Hobbit” and “Hunger Games” series, and may well hold for the final films of the “Divergent” franchise, which are scheduled for release in 2016 and 2017. How do filmmakers take part of a story and make it seem whole, all while building up excitement for a finale that audiences won’t get to see for quite some time? For Francis Lawrence, director of “Mockingjay” Parts 1 and 2, it can be a daunting proposition. “We were all huge fans of ‘Breaking Bad,' ” he said, adding that you can take big chances “with an end of an episode when you only have to make people wait a week.” But “making people wait a year, you have to tread a little more carefully.” One trick is creating a cliffhanger that really doesn’t feel like one, or avoiding that gasp-inducing gambit altogether. “You’re really looking at the overall story,” Mr. Lawrence said. “You know eventually that Katniss and Snow” — the president of Panem — “will have their day, so we’re slowly building to that. You’re keeping their relationship alive and their connection alive. Those are the things that are really important in building up for Part 2.” Cliffhangers can also seem outdated. They hark back to the days of the old radio dramas, and before that, to Dickens and, yes, Scheherazade, even Homer. There’s also the danger of looking too much like episodic TV. “You have to have something, some bridge to the next movie,” said Katherine A. Fowkes, a professor of media and popular culture studies at High Point University in North Carolina and author of “ Long waits aside, the key to making a penultimate film that stands on its own, Mr. Lawrence said, is finding separate dramatic questions for each film. “If you have a question in the beginning of the movie — Will Katniss be able to do something? — and in the end you answer that question, you now have a satisfying story,” he said. “So even if the story continues, the story of this movie has ended.” Knowing just when and where to split the novel in two — or three — is also crucial. “ 'Mockingjay Part 1’ had the risk of being the trickiest of the transitional movies,” said Mr. Lawrence, who also directed “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” the second entry in the series. “We went back and forth on exactly where the split was. There were a few choices, but it was in a very small zone. I’m talking within a scene’s distance from one another.” For other films, like “ Of course, just because a story has a distinct intermission doesn’t make the two halves equal. “Part 1 was the hardest of all five of them for me, because it’s a small story,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “It’s a personal story, it’s not an action story, so you have to treat it as a very different animal.” For Ms. Rosenberg, that meant catering to fan expectations of the novel’s pivotal moments — “Obviously, the wedding had to be glorious,” she said — and playing up conflicts that would eventually resolve themselves in the final film. “The biggest thing we amped up was the wolf pack versus Cullen element,” she said. “It was tough, that first one,” Ms. Rosenberg admitted. “I had more fun writing the action story.” The original novel was also relatively slim, a trait it didn’t share with the 800-page finale of the “ Thanks to overlapping shooting and editing schedules, directors now can gauge reactions to a penultimate film and tweak the finale. When “Mockingjay — Part 1” opens next weekend, the filmmakers, who are currently in postproduction on “Part 2,” will have one eye on social media, just as they did when “Catching Fire” opened as they were five weeks into filming the final two “Hunger Games” films. “It’s not going to drive us into reshoots or anything,” Mr. Lawrence said. “But I think when I get a sense of what people are really picking up on emotionally and thematically, that’ll probably inform some of the decision making on Part 2.” If the goal of penultimate films of fantasy franchises is to get audiences in theaters for the final film — and do decent box office on their own — they’ve done quite well on both counts of late. The finales of the Harry Potter and “Twilight” series set box office records, as did their lead-ins; “The Desolation of Smaug,” which preceded this December’s “Hobbit” series finale, grossed more than $958 million worldwide. With each of the Part 1 films in this elite group earning more than $700 million globally, the bar is already pretty high. If the lead-in does that well, where do you go from there? “When ‘Catching Fire’ came out, I felt really lucky that we did so well,” Mr. Lawrence said. “And it was a great feeling, except that it just raised the bar for this one. So now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that it lives up to people’s expectations after ‘Catching Fire.’ Ideally I’ll have the same problem, where there’s a moment of relief, and then sheer terror about Part 2.”