Comment by cestith

A recent example is the Wicked movie musical. It’s not a film and its sequel. It’s two parts of the stage musical produced as a film and cut in half, released a year apart.

The alternative is the 1980s version of Dune, which tried to fit a massive novel into a single mass-market film runtime. It was fantastic, but people who hadn’t read the novel were left very short on story. The newer movies I’ve heard are much better in this regard, and it’s understandable because the runtime of the combined films is longer. The Dune 2000 (AKA SciFi Presents Frank Herbert’s Dune) miniseries was even better in some ways than the original film, largely for the same reasons.

Ender’s Game deserved to be at least two parts, because even the main character got no real character development. You barely learn Val exists, there’s really no Peter, and you barely meet Bean or Petra. There’s no Alai, Achilles, Fly, or Crazy Tom. There’s no zero-G battles at Battle School. The computer game is never even mentioned but is integral to the book. I don’t think it’s even mentioned in the film that Ender is a third child and why that’s important. It could have been a much better film in two or three parts.