A Disappointing Hollywood Trend

Breaking Dawn Part II premiered this weekend and while I did not and will not see it, I know that plenty of young girls did as it made over 140 million at the box office. None of the Twilight movies have received good critical response, but all have made an absorbent amount of money. But I’m not here to simply bash Twilight; it’s the “Part II” that I have a problem with.
The Harry Potter franchise was the first to split its final installment into two parts. The reasoning was that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was simply too big of a book to ever fit into a single two-plus hour film. Whether or not that is true is questionable, (not much really happens in Deathly Hallows Part I if you ask me) but the trend it has started in Hollywood is a disappointing one. With the incredible success of the two Hallows films more studios are starting to follow the same path. Now if you can sit there and honestly tell me that Breaking Dawn really deserves to be two movies I’d love to hear the argument. But the real reason (as shocking as it is) is simply monetary. It’s actually genius from a marketing standpoint. “Wait. Instead of making hundreds of millions off of one terrible movie, let’s just double our profits and make two even worse films.” However, Twilight is not the only culprit here; even Academy Award winning director Peter Jackson has bought into this new trend.
Jackson, having already directed all three of the Lord of the Rings films was the obvious choice to direct the prequel to the saga, The Hobbit. While there is no denying that The Hobbit is a classic piece of fictional literature, it is understandably much shorter than the entire Lord of the Rings saga, as it is just one book as opposed to three. The Lord of the Rings was three books, which equaled three movies, makes sense right? The Hobbit is one book, so it should be one movie right? Wrong. The Hobbit has already been split into three movies. You’re kidding right? Three movies. The Hobbit’s original edition is only three-hundred and ten pages, that’s less than any of the individual books of the Lord of the Rings series. How can three movies really be justified from such little source text? The answer once again is money. While this can be expected from Twilight it is disappointing to see a great filmmaker such as Jackson sell out to such a trend.
This trend is also not going away any time soon. The third Hunger Games book, Mocking-Jay is already scheduled to be two films. And with the success of the Deathly Hallows and Breaking Dawn films coupled with the almost assured success of all three (makes me angry having to type it again) Hobbit movies, expect more and more books to be split into multiple movies, meaning more and more expensive movie tickets to purchase.