Synopsis:

This takes all four Hunger Games films and condenses them into two long films broken at a natural spot in the story. It improves the pacing and the impact of key moments from the books, as well as making it feel less teen-oriented.

Intentions:

When I first watched Hunger Games I had recently read the books and felt like the movies fell flat on the key emotional and relationship elements from the books, namely the bread scene with Peeta (which was portrayed in multiple flashes scattered throughout the film and felt incoherent unless you had read the book), and the scene with Rue in the forest. So one of my main goals was to restore the emphasis those moments deserved, as well as giving the overall story a healthy trim since the narrative seems to drag unnecessarily. In the end I felt the natural break point was a split into two long films rather than a trilogy, so each runs a little under three hours, which is beefy but fits a lot of narrative into that time, so it doesn't feel tedious (the original quadrilogy clocked in at around nine hours so it's about a movie and a half worth of content cut to liven up the narrative). The first film also used a ton of very short cuts, and I've done my best to tone that down where possible since I found it distracting and annoying, and the technique wasn't carried throughout the series.

Change List:

There are a lot of small trims, but these are some of the lengthier cuts EP1 -Get rid of the text at the start explaining the Hunger Games, it's explained in video during selection early in the film -trim some of Katniss home life -tone down the Gale romance stuff throughout the films to remove the angsty teen romance triangle angle +stitch together all the bakery scenes and insert with the first instance -trim down the Hamish drinking to a more manageable level -trim down some of the "look how flamboyant the capital is" stuff, we already get it from the characters/style in the core scenes -cut out a lot of the over-explaining Caesar TV segments sprinkled heavily through the first capital section -cut Snow pontificating -cut the long Caesar interview/introduction of all the characters before the first game -cut overly dramatic fall sequence -cut hallucination sequence to keep narrative in present -trimmed a bunch of nauseating tree canopy shots -recut Rue scene to be less talky and less messy -trim down the telegraphing/talking in a lot of the key fight scenes -trim down the dog scenes to make them seem more real -cut first film credits and second film title card -cut the Katniss ptsd stuff and much of the home life -trim down the capital party a bit -cut more home life stuff -cut weird conversation with Finnick -cut some bullying -trim some of the Caesar interviews EP2 +title card +reinsert part of an earlier retrimmed Snow conversation -cut the monkey attack, seems random and odd narratively and not as interesting as the book -cut the weird Prim/birds scene -cut second film credits and third film pre-title card sequence and title card -cut Katniss returning home -cut Snow threats -cut Katniss dreams -trim some of the failed propo stuff -cut Katniss shooting down a plane -cut more home life with Gale and camera team -trim the air raid drill to be less overly dramatic -cut Finnick doing a propo -trim down the rescue mission to be more tense and less dramatic -cut the ending montage for the third film and dovetail the start of the fourth film -cut a bunch of Peeta recovery stuff -cut Finnick marriage ceremony -cut Commander Paylor's battle plan speech -cut sewermen attack -cut cat lady -trim Katniss hanging around the mansion -recut ending to be less cheesy

Additional Notes:

Trailer available at: http://bestedit.net/cliptrailers/