What do Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, and J.K. Rowling all have in common? In addition to being authors who have been financially successful in selling books to a young adult audience, these women have also taken a leaf from Dickens’ book and have released their stories in multiple parts. While each of the novels were released one by one, when Collins, Meyer, and Rowling have sold the rights to their books for movies, the last movies in each series have been released in two parts. For example The Hunger Games most recent movie Mockingjay Part II came out this past year, while Breaking Dawn Part II and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II came out a few years ago. There are many different advantages to having a blockbuster work split in two. The first is that you would have two movies, which means that people purchase twice the amount of tickets they normally would for one story. Another advantage is that screenwriters can fit in twice the amount of material that the would normally be able to because of the time limits. The audience can get four hours of a story without sitting through four entire hours of a movie. While this means that twice the amount of money would probably have to be spent for production purposes , every time that a part of a movie comes out, the audience gets extremely excited and goes out to purchase things like Halloween costumes, posters, toys, and all sorts of other items.
Having releases in multiple parts keeps the reader on the hook. Nothing keeps them wanting more than a good cliffhanger. However, even though most of the audience has probably read the entire series beforehand, these people are probably most likely to go out and purchase things as fanatics of the series.