You must have not heard: due to the length of the third movie, Peter Jackson has decided to split Hobbit 3 into three films.

Damn, the pacing was already bad enough. Will we get to experience the equivalent of Les Miserables on Cinemas?
Hey now guys, do it properly. Otherwise Candlejack is gon

Cliff-hangers are great when used efficiently and sparingly. Just like sequels and remakes though, they're overused as a gimmick by Hollywood to inject drama and interest into what are often drama-less and uninteresting stories.

They can also be a bad side effect of editing to try and cover up story problems. Some writers and directors just have a hard time flowing through a solid 3 arc storyline, and end up chopping the plot up into dramatic breaks to try and find a better way towards the climax and conclusion.

Only cliffhanger I remember liking and being excited to see the 2nd half of is the star trek the next generation episode: the best of both worlds.

Sorry for skipping the debate and just answering the initial post, but it makes people's emotional investment feel cheap. It can also feel like they're being hooked intentionally for monetary gain and that the providers are selling out their artistic integrity. Not necessarily, but for instance: Microsoft announces Halo 4, Microsoft puts Halo 4 on 360, Halo 4 is first in new trilogy, next entrants will be on Xbox One invariably, Microsoft feels really bright.

Ya see what I mean? The emotional investment for no payoff is something supposedly fairly exclusive to Americans, if they watched a movie for 2.5 hours, they want payoff, and they don't like waiting a year or more for it to come.
This post has the right idea.

They are a cheap tactic trying to trick you into watching the commercials. Like some TV quiz show where the contestant will find out whether he got the last 1mil question correct... right after these commercials!

I'm amazed that it took three pages for the first Sly reference to pop up.

Actually, it predates commercials by quite a bit. It was a staple of early cinema serials to get people to come the next week to see the show.

TV series cliffhangers are somewhat different than movie/computer game ones in that they're comprised of many episodes and some unresolved plot threads are almost expected to occur from one episode to the next (assuming that the series contains an ongoing story to begin with - many don't).

With movies and computer games, each "episode" is typically much bigger and much more involved. Cliffhanger endings can work as long as the story arc within each movie or game has been properly resolved; bad cliffhangers typically cut things off in the middle of a storyline - which, again, is fine for a TV series but leaves a movie/game feeling (at best) unfinished.

A somewhat older example of good cliffhanger endings in a computer game series were the last Ultima trilogy. Notwithstanding the questionable gameplay quality of Ultima 8 and Ultima 9, the individual plot arcs within each (Ultima 7; Ultima 7 part 2; Ultima 8, and Ultima 9) were essentially self-contained and came to a proper resolution by the end; the cliffhanger moment that followed pointed to an entirely new story arc beginning with the next installment, one that was informed by the previous game(s) in the trilogy, but still self-contained.

...and one more stupid funny before I call it a night.

I read the title as "Why do people hate Cliff Racers?" and was thinking who doesn't hate Cliff Racers.

But even if Samurai Jack series was revived the series wouldn't be the same without "Mako" around to voice Aku

Nowadays I dislike cliffhangers because it means we're stuck waiting forever to continue the story of an awesome show like Justified.

But I'll take most cliffhangers over opportunistic sequels...

May he rest in peace.

Because the only redeeming quality to a book/movie you started reading/watching and realized is bad is that it has a proper ending. People don't hate cliffhangers as an abstract notion, they hate them in bad works.