PHOTO BY MURRAY CLOSE / LIONSGATE

As I watched the last hour of “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” I could feel that the whole theater was getting ready to leave.

A few minutes earlier, the crowd had seemed mostly satisfied. Despite the lack of familiar characters in this prequel to the once-popular series, a recognizable formula was carrying “Songbirds and Snakes” to success. We had met some new characters and built to a life-and-death battle royale.

And then … some other stuff happened.

Within its 157 minutes, “Songbirds and Snakes” is divided into three chapters, declared by on-screen title cards. The first chapter introduces us to ambitious but struggling student Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and plucky musician and unwitting fighter Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). The second chapter features the titular Hunger Games. And the third — after the Games have concluded and the attention of the audience has decidedly run out — continues the story for months on end.

Nearly everyone in the theater went to the bathroom during this chapter. Some went twice.

Until that point, “Songbirds and Snakes” is relatively successful. Zegler, a charismatic star who nearly stole the show in the “West Side Story” remake, does the impossible task of living up to longtime franchise star Jennifer Lawrence. Newcomers Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage provide menace and madcap energy. The brutal competition in the second chapter is as compelling as any in the series.

Then, unfortunately, we stick around. The Snow character will become the primary antagonist of the series, played by Donald Sutherland in the other Hunger Games movies. Apparently, novelist Suzanne Collins wanted to pack Snow’s full backstory into this chapter, explaining how he began to evolve into a villain — while still making him the protagonist and hero for most of the story.

The brilliance in Collins’ books was a two-act structure — half the book getting ready for the games, then the games. Throw in a cliffhanger to set up the next chapter and you have a smart yet simple formula for a compelling series of stories. “Songbirds and Snakes” undermines that strength; I’m normally not in favor of splitting a story into multiple films, but I have no idea why this one wasn’t chopped up.

Director Francis Lawrence, who helmed three of the previous Hunger Games films and made them effective (if not exactly memorable), makes “Songbirds and Snakes” move and feel like the previous films; he’s given help by his production design team, who present a sort of retro-futurist style amid the dystopia. Franchise fans looking to revisit this world will get enough to make it worth it. For everyone else: Leave when the “Chapter 3” title card appears.

My Rating: 5/10

“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is now playing in theaters.