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I blame The Lord of the Rings for this, and I’m pointing my finger at J.R.R. Tolkein for this one, because he had the gall to publish one novel in three parts. What was he thinking?! That it’d be too heavy to carry around? (It is.) While we’re at it, maybe I should toss some shade over to one Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time is a whopping eight volumes. Couldn’t that guy get an editor?

OK, I’m only kidding here. But I do want to point out what I think is becoming a silly and unnecessary trend in Hollywood: the multi-volume movie. It really started with Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, which was split into two parts. Of course, I am willing to give Tarantino a pass here; it’s a long movie, yes, but all of those parts are valuable. And Kill Bill Vol. 1 is a starkly different film than Kill Bill Vol. 2, both in aesthetic and tone. Can you imagine them condensed into one shorter film? Hardly.

But because they were successful, people in the movie industry started putting their noggins together. “What if, instead of one kinda long movie,” they said, “we release two kinda long movies?” And thus, we had Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which, I’ll admit, is a sprawling, epic novel that goes in so many places that it’d be impossible to squeeze it all into one three-hour movie. Again, it proved successful. So Hollywood, as is its way, went insane.

Then we had Breaking Dawn, the final film in the Twilight franchise. Like the rest of those books, the final chapter of Stephenie Meyer’s YA vampire series was very long. And because execs knew tweens and teens would pay money to see both parts of it multiple times, they sliced it into two movies. I’m sure it had a lot less to do with protecting the literary dignity of the source material and everything to do with milking the film series for all its worth.

And what did we get next? The Hobbit fiasco. Yes, someone actually thought making a three-part, nine-hour version of a 300-page novel would be a great idea. I mean, it worked for The Lord of the Rings! Except that The Lord of the Rings was originally published as a three-part trilogy, and, for the most part, the three films based on the book worked as stand-alone features (with the final part, The Return of the King, earning an Oscar for Best Picture). The Hobbit films have not been met with such critical and commercial acclaim; in fact, people seem particularly dismissive of the fact that the book is too short for three novels and someone had to come up with some more story just to fill a third movie.

And now we have to sit through not one but two more Hunger Games movies, even though Mockingjay, the novel, is under 400 pages. Doesn’t this seem a little excessive? Films and books are entirely different beasts; great movies have been made from material previously published as books, some to great acclaim: The Shining and Wonder Boys are two movies that immediately come to mind that are different from the books upon which they are based. An adaptation is just that: a retelling of previously published material. If a movie is to be a piece of art, the director should feel confident enough in his or her ability to deliver a good product — and not something that is so blatant a cash-grab like this current trend in blockbuster cinema.

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Photos: Everett Collection