This column on the split of a future Hunger Games film adaptation is spoiler free.

Ever since it was announced that there would be four Hunger Games films, there has been much speculation as to where that fourth film should come from. None of the books are long enough to demand a spilt.

The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay are 374, 391, and 390 pages long, respectively. These books are far shorter than Deathly Hallows, which was 759 pages, and Breaking Dawn, which was 768 pages (all page counts are the American versions). The only real length comparison (to my knowledge) would be to The Hobbit, a book that is 351 pages long. But even with The Hobbit, opinions differ on whether it should have been split.

Regardless of whether or not any of The Hunger Games books should be split into a two-part movie, there will be a split.

For anyone without knowledge of the action in the series, it would seem likely that Mockingjay would be the book to split. It’s the final book in the series, and there is precedent from the Harry Potter and Twilight series to split the final book. However, fans of the series just can’t seem to see how Mockingjay can be split. If there’s a slow part of the series, the first half of Mockingjay is it. While it isn’t actionless, it’s purely setup for the conclusion of the series. As an individual movie, it would be very slow.

Fans have proposed a much more radical idea: instead of breaking up Mockingjay into two films, why not split Catching Fire instead? Yes, it would be groundbreaking to split the middle book in the series, but Catching Fire has two distinct halves, so it would be easy to split. Turning Catching Fire into two makes much more sense than splitting Mockinjay.

This won’t happen.

Let’s say that Lionsgate did decide to split Catching Fire because it made storytelling sense. Naturally, both of those films would do exceedingly well at the box office, as The Hunger Games is clearly becoming the next huge thing. Being that the Catching Fire split had done well and brought in a huge amount of money for Lionsgate, can you think of anything that would keep Lionsgate from splitting Mockingjay, as well? It would be foolish of them as a business to do anything but split Mockingjay , as it would be sure to bring in an enormous profit.

Yes, some may argue that Catching Fire should be the book that’s split into two films, and it wouldn’t shock me if it was, but there’s no way Mockingjay won’t be split.