Sure! That version from 1984 now also occupies a comfortable spot with a 6.3/10 rating according to IMDB, while the 2021 movie is longer in runtime and only tackles half of the book, while enjoying a 8.0/10 rating...

So sure, you could have condensed the whole book into a single movie with the same runtime... But it does come at a cost when the books have so much world building to do.

The adaptation so bad the director refused to even put his name on it.

I agree with the series sentiment. But a movie like this also really craves the spectacle of being in a movie theater and the budgets that movies are allowed.

I have yet to see a movie theater show any series, and have also never seen a series shot in imax with dolby atmos. Correct me if I'm wrong.

And since this movie is adapting the book quite faithfully so far, I can safely say that this is the closest thing you could have ended it on with a sense of closure... Ending it earlier would have turned to first movie into a complete fizzle with only a bunch of world building, and ending it later would have opened up much more conflict without resolving it.

In my opinion big theater movie is the only format that does the book justice, a series would have cut it's budget and visual quality too much. And given the limitations of the movie format (such as runtime), I don't see how else you would handle this book, there's just too much world building and material to resolve the movie in any other way.

I'm personally very curious to see how they resolve the second part... Because it does not look like something that's easy to adapt to a movie. And I'm absolutely stoked about how faithful the first movie was.

You can't just split a movie up into a series. Every episode has to have its own structure and should have some progression. Splitting up a book into two movies with their own structure is a lot easier than doing the same with 6 or more episodes.

Just look at the Marvel shows. If they had been movies, maybe two-parters, some could have been pretty good stories. This way there's lots of unnecessary downtime and distractions, without a logical through-line.

There is potential for a future movie. People have been suspecting they'll do a trilogy if not more. There are a lot of books.

The books are just long and substantive, hence Part 1 and Part 2.