Two-Part Movies: What Works and What Doesn’t
Two-part movies seem to be popular at the moment, with recent examples of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, and Dune; and later this year with Wicked and Horizon: An American Saga. The risk with two-part movies is that they are difficult to do well and audiences may be growing weary of them.
What follows are my thoughts on what works and what doesn’t when movies are split into parts.
Give me a complete story
Stories are typically comprised of three acts: an opening where the characters and plot are introduced, a middle where the plot and character arcs progress and an end where the plot is resolved. When adapting a single book into two parts, it’s difficult to adhere to the three-act structure, especially in the first part.
In the early 2010s Hollywood split the final book in the Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games franchises into two parts, and I believe that in all of these cases the first part suffered for it. For example, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a downer of a film because by the end the overall mission has only just begun (one Horcrux is destroyed while six remain) and a major character dies.
Dune does a somewhat better job because it divides a book that is the first in its franchise, so the first part gets to spend time introducing the audience to the characters and the world, then get the plot going with some action set pieces and ends with Paul being accepted by the Fremen (though even so the climax feels small relative to the scope of the story).
Don’t make me wait too long
If the story ends on a massive cliffhanger, the audience needs to know how long they have to wait for the resolution. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was one of my favorite films of 2023, but there was a group of 10-year-old kids at my screening who were furious because of the cliffhanger ending. At that time I knew that the next film was supposed to be less than a year away, but unfortunately that date has slipped and we still don’t have a new one. Audiences find this frustrating.
The second half of a film duo needs to be no more than a year following the first installment (especially if “Part 1” is in the title), preferably closer to six months (bonus points for including a trailer for Part 2 at the end of Part 1). Paramount seems to believe that one of the reasons Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One underperformed at the box office is that audiences were turned off by the Part One sub-subtitle, which is why the follow-up will be getting a completely different name.
Part One should have a great ending while setting up Part Two
I actually think that Dead Reckoning works fine as a standalone film because it builds to an action-packed climax while leaving the larger story open for the next movie.
An even better example is Avengers: Endgame which was originally titled Infinity War Part 2, but Kevin Feige wisely decided to drop Part 1 from Infinity War to let the audience know that that that film was a complete story. It is the journey of Thanos who collects all six Infinity Stones and accomplishes his mission, killing half of all life in the universe. The ending to Infinity War isn’t a cliffhanger, it is one in which the heroes are unambiguously defeated. Endgame is the start of a new story which addresses Infinity War’s aftermath and eventually leads to the redemption of the heroes.
The Gold Standard
My favorite two-part movie is Kill Bill. Quentin Tarantino actually meant for it to be released as a single movie, but when it proved to be too long for that, it was cut into Vol 1 and Vol 2.
Vol 1 has its own three-act structure by introducing us to The Bride and her yearning for revenge, sending her on a mission to obtain the instrument of that revenge (the Hattori Hanzō sword), then ends with a battle that is the biggest spectacle in either film. Vol 1 feels like a journey in-and-of-itself even though by the end of it The Bride has only crossed two names off of her “to-do” list. The film ends with a final line which is an excellent tease for the next installment.
Thanks to Tarantino’s penchant for non-linear storytelling, Vol 2 again works as a complete story. It begins with the massacre that is the deed The Bride needs to avenge, then she defeats the next two people on her list while flashing back to the training that gives her the skills that empower her revenge, and ultimately concludes with a showdown with the film’s title character which, unlike the over-the-top action-oriented climax of Vol 1, manages to be both more personal and ultimately more profound. Then as a final coda, The Bride must deal with the emotional consequences of her actions.
These two films strike the perfect balance between standing as stories in their own right as well as serving to enrich a larger story, which I hope serves as a model for future filmmakers looking to divide their projects into parts.
