The Box Office Thread

Gravity also had very little competition.

Someday a trilogy or celebrated franchise will end with the whole last chapter...and it'll be glorious. Imagine, all that shit going down all at once, like it should in the end. Instead we have this half-life bullshit.

He means Spider-Man 3.

If the LOTR trilogy was produced today, they would have split the third film.

Not really relevant to my point, but okay. If we're talking "what-ifs", then it would have been the plan from the get go, right after the success of the first film. The thought of "Oscar love" wouldn't have been on their minds at the time of production.

Still wouldn't be their thought process. The thought process, now, in our current state of Hollywood film making, would be "we could potentially make another massive chunk of money. Let's do that." Not "Let's not risk losing out a best picture win." No one could have seriously predicted at the start of it all that a fantasy series could ever possibly win, even with a possible nomination. And again, I doubt it was or would be on their mind in the middle of production.

The Hobbit was expanded into three films. Enough said. It's all speculation, but the Oscars is a minute point. The point of the present discussion is that nowadays when a big franchise gets underway, the studios want to milk it for as long as possible. And if you wanted to view The Hobbit and LOTR as a whole, that's exactly what they eventually did.

Awards are nice, but money talks. If the studio behind The Hunger Games was told they had a good chance to win best picture for Mockingjay, I doubt it would change their mind about splitting the last film.

The difference is that the LOTR movies were filmed simultaneously, so by the time that they realized they had a blockbuster franchise on their hands it might have been too late to turn the third movie into a pair. The Hobbit was different because they already knew the franchise was money in the bank and planned accordingly.

That having been said... in a way something like that actually did happen. When Peter Jackson initially pitched the movie to New Line he had it in mind that the whole trilogy would be split into two movies intead of three. I'm sure he would have loved to have pitched it as a trilogy, but he thought two movies would be an easier sell. When they heard the pitch the New Line executives were so excited that they said "hey, there are three books, so why not three movies? That way we can sell three tickets!" and the rest is history.

What would the titles have been...

I don't know that they had decided on it, but there's a decent chance that they would have done the same thing that Ralph Bakshi had been trying to do and simply call the first film The Lord of the Ring and the second film The Return of the King.

It was a great holiday weekend for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. The movie has now reached $225 million domestically. Every other movie, unfortunately, was mostly ignored.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay has reached $257 million. Opening on Friday is Exodus.