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I’m not that avid of a movie goer, so I really don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other as far as assessing the value of two-part movies.
Hanna Flint/BBC News
A ticket to the cinema has typically guaranteed a viewing experience including a beginning, a middle and an end – all contained within one film. In recent years, however, cinematic storytelling has become a game of two halves with Hollywood serving up a string of two-part movies. These include Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic Dune, whose second instalment hits screens today; Zach Snyder's own space opera Rebel Moon, with Part One: A Child of Fire released on Netflix last December and Part Two: The Scargiver out in April; and Jon M Chu's upcoming two-part adaptation of hit stage musical Wicked, itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire's Wizard of Oz prequel novel of the same name.
Two-part films are not new, but there are certainly a lot of them these days. So why is that? The bottom line is the obvious answer, with major studios keen to squeeze as much commercial juice out of their intellectual property purchases. "If you have something you know people are excited to see and that you believe you will profit on, it makes sense to try to make twice as much net profit by dividing it into two parts," as Franklin Leonard, film executive and founder of the annual screenplay survey The Black List, puts it to BBC Culture. [...]
Audiences, who subscribed to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its superheroes for 10 years, were rewarded with a two-part conclusion to its so-called First Phase, with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Originally titled Infinity War – Parts One and Part Two, they successfully use the cliffhanger of the Avengers losing the battle against Big Bad Thanos at the end of Infinity War, to entice fans back to see if they could ultimately win the war in Endgame. "It did exceptionally well and made everybody chomp at the bit to see the next one," recalls Lucy V Hay, screenwriter and script editor. "Everybody was desperate to see Endgame."
George Lucas previously used this sort of storytelling model to acclaim for the second and third Star Wars films in the original trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi: again, the narrative flowed directly from one to the other, with a cliffhanger in the middle to ensure audiences returned. However other trilogy franchises, like The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean, have also used a two-parter approach for their second and third installments (shooting them back-to-back in both cases) but with much more mixed critical results.
One observation is that it could only be a good storytelling method with action-packed movies. I can’t imagine that a romantic comedy or a serious drama really need the treatment of a two-part story as movie.
Secondly, every part of the movie(s): the cinematography, the narrative, the characters, the costumes had better be on point.
Not much more to add with this but I do remember being in the theatre watching The Empire Strikes Back when this happened.
Every mouth was agape. Some were covered, some were uncovered. All of us were coming back to see part two of that.
OTOH, I loved part one of The Matrix and went to see part two. I didn't see the need for a second part and I never have seen part three.
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From belinda ridgewood:
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