Forget the writers’ strike or the recent actors’ strike, Hollywood is facing a bigger problem: two-parters. One in two films this year ends abruptly in the middle of a scene, leaving audiences waiting another year or two for the conclusion. It’s a frustrating tactic designed to pull more money out of our pockets.
Forget the writers’ strike or the recent actors’ strike, Hollywood is facing a bigger problem: two-parters. One in two films this year ends abruptly in the middle of a scene, leaving audiences waiting another year or two for the conclusion. It’s a frustrating tactic designed to pull more money out of our pockets.
Fast Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse surprisingly hits the end credits after building into an epic finale, leaving viewers to wait until at least March 2024. This week, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One splits Tom Cruise’s latest adventure into two massive films, unnecessarily dragging it out.
What the hell Hollywood?
Imagine watching Titanic for two hours just to see the credits just before the ship hits the iceberg. Sorry you have to wait another year to see the really good stuff.
I remember the audience’s shocked reaction to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring when it ended with no definitive conclusion. The camera pans up to reveal that Frodo and Sam’s adventure has only just begun. However, The Lord of the Rings saga consisted of three separate novels that came together into one huge story. Peter Jackson condensed a 20+ hour narration down to 10 hours with no problem.
Dead Reckoning is entertaining, but lacks the substance to justify running at almost three hours, let alone another movie. I feel like Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie made a wish list of action scenes and decided it was too much for one movie but not enough for two, so they filled in part one. This is evident in the overly long action sequences and the excess of explanatory dialogue and superfluous character beats that slow down the production.
Likewise, “Across the Spider-Verse” could have cut about 20 minutes short without missing a bar. And regardless of Vin Diesel’s ego, no Fast and Furious movie should be longer than 90 minutes.
This is not a new phenomenon either. “The Hunger Games” and “Harry Potter” each split their final entries into two parts, allowing more scope for action in the second part, but overwhelming the viewer with a convoluted first half overloaded with performances. There are certainly more efficient ways to tell a story. If The Godfather can deliver its expansive narrative in under three hours, the creative team behind Fast X has no excuse not to do the same.
Of course, this tactic likely stems from Hollywood’s attempt to compete with the streaming craze. TV shows are just as guilty of stretching a small story for three or four seasons, sometimes even longer, until the creative source is exhausted. This allows the creators to avoid the disappointing conclusions that moviegoers have had to endure in endless waves of lackluster third episodes for decades. When franchises expand indefinitely, there’s always the prospect of better things to come. Obi-Wan Kenobi might have disappointed, but there’s always a second season to look forward to, right?
Likewise, a two-part film ensures that the first half brings in an enormous amount of money and that viewers eagerly await the finale. Even if the second half doesn’t perform as well as the first, as Hunger Games did, the studio still makes a fortune. The total production cost of Catching Fire Parts 1 and 2 was US$285 million (before marketing and distribution) and the worldwide box office gross was US$1.413 billion. Financially, the tactic makes sense.
However, it lacks artistically.
Would you rather have two decent Dead Reckonings or one incredible Mission: Impossible movie? Quality should take precedence over quantity.
Personally, I value concise storytelling. Some of the greatest movies of all time run in around two hours without sacrificing character, story or action: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, ET, Casablanca, Rear Window, Mad Max: Fury Road, Jurassic Park, aliens , and more. Sure, Raiders could be split into two movies and the first part filled with more action and unnecessary dialogue, but would it improve the movie?
(As an aside, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and Denis Villeneuve are the only directors I trust to deliver a quality blockbuster that lasts over two hours. Others don’t need to apply.)
Hopefully this isn’t the start of a new trend. The program for next summer is packed with sequels like Mufasa, Twisters, Captain America: Brave New World, Furiosa and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and others. While I understand the studio’s desire to make money, the artistic value these IPs can offer is limited before they become obsolete.
As the old saying goes, more is not always better.