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Bruce Hall: As I mentioned prior to this, I feel less and less interested in each installment, but that's just me. I read all three books and couldn't put them down, so it's not that I have a problem with the material. I just feel that the films lack vibrancy. They are competent approximations, and they look very much the way I imagined that universe looking as I read the books.

Box office aside - the films just don't grab me. I always seem to leave the theater thinking I could easily have waited for it to show up on Netflix.

I can't be alone in this.

Max Braden: I do think the franchise has lost a bit of its market share in the young-adult/post-war sci-fi genre. Movies like Divergent, The Giver, and The Maze Runner (all released this year), though not nearly as strong in box office, have demonstrated that The Hunger Games isn't the new hot thing anymore. You also have the problem with Mockingjay 1 of selling a mid-series story: it won't contain the strong hook of the first movie or the strong closing of the last movie in the series. In that sense I could say yes, the franchise is slipping a bit, but I also think this is a natural occurrence for a property spread out over more than three movies and that is so popular that it creates its own imitators. Slipping, but not suffering.

David Mumpower: I am the polar opposite of Bruce in that I loooooove this franchise. Even so, I do believe that The Hunger Games has slipped a bit. I don't mean a lot by any stretch, but it's going to finish significantly behind the last two films in terms of domestic gross. Part of that is because of the split films concept, and part of it is simple franchise fatigue from having three movies in 32 months.

I suspect that the primary issue is that the word is out on the darkness of Mockingjay the novel, though. A few years ago, we chronicled how all of the various war films struggled. Make no mistake on the point. Mockingjay is as bleak as any of them. My brother, who has not read the books, looked like he needed a therapy session in coping with loss after he watched the film. Even Christopher Nolan thinks Mockingjay Part 1 is kind of dark. That's a tough sell, and it does damage the brand. The scary thought is that Mockingjay Part 2 is even worse unless Lionsgate has sagely changed the ending of the story.

Tim Briody: This is by virtually every account the weakest of the three books and now it's divided in half as any successful franchise wants to do now. The franchise isn't really slipping (and since it's only got one more movie in it it's not that it matters), it's a victim of die-hard fans knowing that Part 1 is all set up, it's a year until Part 2 and the whole "last book is two movies" bit is getting really old now.

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