Francis Lawrence regrets Mockingjay split

Francis Lawrence regrets splitting 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay' into two movies.

The 52-year-old filmmaker admitted if he had the chance to adapt the book again, he would keep it as a single movie, rather than two films released one year apart.

Speaking to PEOPLE about the movies starring Jennifer Lawrence, he said: "I totally regret it. I totally do. I'm not sure everybody does, but I definitely do.”

'Mockingjay - Part 1' was released in November 2014, with 'Mockingjay - Part 2' in November 2015 and although he said the team agreed the "two halves of Mockingjay had their own separate dramatic questions", Lawrence has come to see that he made a mistake.

He added: "What I saw in retrospect — and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics and people at the split — is that it was frustrating. 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. Our intentions were not to be disingenuous."

However, he believes there was one advantage; he was able to include more of the source material across the two movies.

He said: "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, I see and understand how it frustrated people."