On Separate Blu-ray Disc:

As with Catching Fire and Mockingjay–Part 1, Mockingjay–Part 2 includes an informative audio commentary by director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson, who once again talk through the enormity of the production process and how the film came together. Their discussion is lively and engaging and packed with detail that fans of the series will appreciate.

Also in keeping with the previous Hunger Games discs, this one has a massive making-of documentary. Under the title Pawns No More: The Making of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay–Part 2, it is composed of eight separate featurettes, which together run nearly two and a half hours. All of the featurettes include extensive behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with almost every major figure from the cast and crew. “Walking Through Fire: Concluding the Saga” focuses on the film’s narrative and how the final installment draws together all of the series’ pertinent themes; “Real or Not Real” focuses on the film’s visual design, beginning with the actual design process and anaimatics and then how the world of the film was brought to life in terms of physical locations, created sets, and practical and digital effects; “High-Value Targets” looks at the always impressive cast assembled for the film, while “From Head to Toe” shows us how they were made up into their unique characters through make-up and costuming; “Navigating the Minefield” explores the extensive physical location work (usually augmented with huge blue and green screens) in and around Atlanta, Paris (which provided both a chateau and housing projects), and Berlin (which provided abandoned military barracks that were turned into the bombed-out Capitol); “Collateral Damage” gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the film’s stunts and special effects; “Tightening the Noose” surveys the extensive post-production process; and, finally, “A Different World” offers reflections on the series and its popularity and impact.

“The Hunger Games: A Photographic Journey” is a fascinating interview with on-set photographer Murray Close, whose career began with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). He talks about what it’s like working as a photographer on the sets of some of Hollywood’s biggest films (in addition to all of the Hunger Games films, he has worked on Tim Burton’s Batman, several Spielberg films including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Jurassic Park, and several entries in the X-Men and Harry Potter franchises), as well as the differences between film and digital and how he works with the film’s cinematographer to capture both publicity stills and behind-the-scenes images. “Cinna’s Sketchbook: Secrets of the Mockingjay Armor” is an interview with costume designers Bart Mueller and Kurt Swanson about the design book, briefly glimpsed in the movie, that Cinna created for Katniss’s Mockingjay armor and their work on that costume, while “Panem on Display: The Hunger Games: The Exhibition” is a very brief look at the elaborate, multimedia Hunger Games exhibition that opened in 2015 at San Francisco’s Palace of the Fine Arts and the reaction of the film’s cast and crew to experiencing it. And, finally, the disc includes Jet to the Set, a 41-minute television special that aired on CBS prior to the film’s release. Hosted with much fanfare by Entertainment Tonight’s Carly Steel and Hot in Hollywood’s Laurie Feltheimer, it is a kind of behind-the-scenes travelogue that takes you to the film’s primary locations throughout Atlanta, including The Victor’s Training Center, President Snow’s Mansion, and the 75th Hunger Games Cornucopia, as well as the various places throughout the city where the stars dined and shopped while they weren’t working on the film.

Now, on to the “Bonus Features” disc, which houses several hours worth of new supplementary material covering various aspects of the first three films in the series. The vast majority of this material is new to the boxset, although some of it is repeated from earlier Blu-ray releases. From the list above, you can see that there is a lot of stuff here, so I will restrict myself to hitting a few of the highlights of what is new and notable for each film.

For The Hunger Games, “Tribute Video Diaries” is an interesting 17-minute featurette in which seven of the young actors who played tributes in the film recorded video diaries of their experiences during the promotional push between the time when they wrapped filming and the movie’s premiere, while “Stunts of The Hunger Games” shows both rehearsals and behind-the-scenes footage during some of the bigger stunt sequences. And, for fans of Victorian Era-meets-’80s New Wave, there is the 18-minute featurette “Capitol Couture: The Styles of Panem,” which gives a fairly in-depth look at the film’s radical costume designs for the Capital denizens. There are also new featurettes about the weapons in the film, the design of the food we see the characters eating on screen, and visual effects—pretty much every facet of the film’s production is covered in some form or fashion. Probably the biggest new inclusion here, though, are 12 never-before-seen deleted scenes, which together run about 21 minutes. Most of these are direct extensions of scenes already in the film (for example, we see exactly what nightmare Prim was waking from at the beginning) or longer versions of existing scenes, which suggests that most of the footage was cut to trim the running time and help pacing, rather than discard subplots.

There are also quite a few new supplements for Catching Fire, several of which are definitely worth watching, although most of them are pretty short and don’t go much beneath the surface (remember that there is a 2+-hour making of documentary on the main disc, so that’s not much of a criticism). Of particular interest is the 13-minute featurette “One Vision: A Faithful Adaptation,” in which director Francis Lawrence, producers Nina Jacobson and John Kilik, Scholastic publisher David Levithan, and members of the cast, discuss how hard they worked to stay true to Suzanne Collins’s novel in their adaptation (interestingly, none of the actual screenwriters are interviewed ...). If you combine the 3-minute “The Look of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” and the 6-minute “Bringing Panem to Life” featurettes, you will have a pretty good exploration of the how the film’s look was put together via costume and production design and visual effects. There is also a never-before-seen deleted scene, but given that it is less than 40 seconds long and never made it past the greenscreen stage, there isn’t much to see there. Fans of Coldplay will appreciate the inclusion of their “Atlas” music video, though.

And, finally, we arrive at the new material for Mockingjay–Part 1, which is the lightest of the three. There are a handful of new featurettes, including “Utilitarian Chic,” a good 14-minute look the film’s production design and special effects, and “Combat Zone,” a 12-minute featurette that explores the larger war that becomes the subject of the final two films in the series.