As it turns out, the odds weren't in favor of The Hunger Games' final book being broken up into two movies.
Francis Lawrence—the 2013 sequel Catching Fire as well as both parts of Mockingjay—recently confessed that it was the wrong move to split the grand finale of the Suzanne Collins trilogy into two separate films.
"I totally regret it," he told People in an interview published Oct. 13. "I totally do. I'm not sure everybody does, but I definitely do."
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson, the first installment of Mockingjay debuted in theaters November 2014. The second part dropped in November 2015, wrapping up the entire franchise with four movies in total.
While Francis understood the "two halves of Mockingjay had their own separate dramatic questions" that needed to be addressed in separate movies, he acknowledged that having the installments be released a year apart from each other wasn't the best idea.
"What I realized in retrospect—and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics and people at the split—is that I realized it was frustrating," he shared. "And I can understand it."
The director continued, "In an episode of television, if you have a cliffhanger, you have to wait a week or you could just binge it and then you can see the next episode. But making people wait a year, I think, came across as disingenuous, even though it wasn't. Our intentions were not to be disingenuous."
And though dividing the finale meant fans "got more on the screen out of the book," with the combined runtime between Mockingjay - Part 1 and Part 2 being over four hours long, Francis admitted, "I see and understand how it frustrated people."
That's partly why Francis made sure the upcoming The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snake—a prequel based on Suzanne's 2020 book of the same name—remain intact when he was adapting it for the silver screen.
"I would never let them split the book in two," he said. "There was never a real conversation about it."
With a completely new cast that includes Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage and Hunter Schafer, the new film will run two hours and 36 minutes—longer than any previous The Hunger Games movies. Still, it was a compromise he was willing to make.
"It's a long book," Francis noted, "but we got so much s--t for splitting Mockingjay into two—from fans, from critics, from everybody—that I was like, 'No way. I'll just make a longer movie.'"
For more secrets about The Hunger Games saga, keep reading.