Hunger Games Director Admits He 'Totally Regrets' Splitting Mockingjay Into 2 Parts (Exclusive)

Looking back, director Francis Lawrence understands the mixed reactions at dividing the final Hunger Games book into two films.

Lawrence returns for the upcoming origin story The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes after directing 2013's Catching Fire and the two Mockingjay movies.

The director (no relation to star Jennifer Lawrence, who played protagonist Katniss Everdeen) tells PEOPLE he wouldn't split the book into two if he had a redo.

"I totally regret it. I totally do. I'm not sure everybody does, but I definitely do," he says.

It was in July 2012 that it was confirmed author Suzanne Collins's trilogy-concluder would be adapted across two movies. Mockingjay - Part 1 arrived in theaters in November 2014, and Mockingjay - Part 2 in November 2015.

While Lawrence says the team agreed the "two halves of Mockingjay had their own separate dramatic questions" and, therefore, complete arcs, he gets why some fans were upset about the wait between films.

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"What I realized in retrospect — and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics and people at the split — is that I realized it was frustrating," says Lawrence. "And I can understand it."

"In an episode of television, if you have a cliffhanger, you have to wait a week or you could just binge it and then you can see the next episode. But making people wait a year, I think, came across as disingenuous, even though it wasn't," he adds. "Our intentions were not to be disingenuous."

Lawrence notes that on the plus side, they were able to adapt more from the book across two films.

"In truth, we got more on the screen out of the book than we would've in any of the other movies because you're getting close to four hours of screen time for the final book. But," he says, "I see and understand how it frustrated people."

Harry Potter had started the trend, declaring in 2008 that the final book, Deathly Hallows, would get the two-film treatment. Following suit from there was Twilight's Breaking Dawn duo and Divergent's Allegiant — though the big screen never saw that second part come to fruition.

And it hasn't fully disappeared: Denis Villeneuve is squeezing multiple Dune movies from one book, Peter Jackson managed three movies from a single Hobbit book, and the upcoming Wicked movie adaptation will be two films.

Coming soon is The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a prequel in the Hunger Games universe that's based on Collins's book published in 2020. It stars a completely new cast, but much of the same crew is behind the camera.

The decision to only make one movie from the book was always the intention, says Lawrence. Even if it meant making the longest Hunger Games movie yet. (Its runtime is 2 hours and 36 minutes.)

"I would never let them split the book in two," says Lawrence. "There was never a real conversation about it. It's a long book, but we got so much s--- for splitting Mockingjay into two — from fans, from critics, from everybody — that I was like, 'No way. I'll just make a longer movie.' "

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is in theaters Nov. 17.