A decade ago, audiences were enamoured with the “young adult dystopian” genre of films, something that can be pinpointed to the wild success of The Hunger Games film trilogy. But the genre died almost as quickly as it came, and a lot of than can be attributed to what was intended to be that series’ successor, the Divergent series, starting with 2015’s Insurgent adaptation.
Speaking of things getting ruined, the GOAT team talk about everything that’s been cancelled due to coronavirus on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
The signs were there early on that the Divergent series wasn’t going to be the successful young adult dystopian adaptation to follow The Hunger Games. While the first Hunger Games film earned nearly $700 million USD each, the first Divergent film raked in “only” $288 million USD. That gulf widened even more when each series’ respective second films, Catching Fire and Insurgent came out, earning over $865 million USD and $297 million USD respectively.
Despite the Divergent series not being the blockbuster success Lionsgate (the studio behind the adaptations) was hoping for, Insurgent did juuuust well enough that the studio pushed on with the ol’ “split the final book into two movies” thing anyway in a big gamble it hoped would pay off, literally.
As history would tell us, it didn’t as the third Divergent film, Allegiant, flopped hard upon its 2016 release and the planned fourth film was scrapped in favour of a cheaper TV series project, which last also later scrapped.
So why did Insurgent and the Divergent series end up becoming the nail in the coffin in the young adult dystopian genre of film adaptations instead of the successor to the similarly-themed Hunger Games? Well it can be boiled down to two simple things: they sucked and people got over them really quickly.
While The Hunger Games novels were somewhat decent (though not without their problems), the Divergent novels were a god-awful mess that read like fanfiction, and those problems were exacerbated when Lionsgate fast-tracked adaptations of the trilogy.
When The Hunger Games brought the whole young adult dystopian to the cinema, it was seen as something fresh. But rather than build upon all the established tropes and ingredients, the Divergent series (and every other young adult dystopian film) basically did the exact same thing, just poorly.
From the contrived plot points and grim futuristic settings right down to the cringey love triangles featuring actors that looked discerningly similar to one another, it was like Lionsgate photocopied Hunger Games and stuck a Divergent label on it. One just needs to compare the Rotten Tomatoes scores of The Hunger Games films and the Diverent series to see the wide gulf in quality.
As The Hunger Games film adaptations were drawing to a close, it overlapped the beginning of the Divergent series. Throw in other smaller-scale yet similar films like Ender’s Game, The Maze Runner, The Giver and The 5th Wave, and the result is an oversaturated market where every single film looked and played exactly the same. Audiences can only handle so many dystopian futures featuring young, good-looking and mostly-white people before they get bored.
This would’ve been offset somewhat had the Divergent series – or any of those aforementioned non-Hunger Games films – been any good. But as audiences found out, not only did they all suck, none of them brought anything new to the table.
When you combine all those aforementioned factors, it was inevitable that the young adult dystopian film bubble was going to pop at some point. Insurgent just happened to be the horrendous, derivative straw that broke the camel’s back.
Had Hollywood stopped to take a breath, looked at the warning signs after the release of Insurgent, and actually spent more time working on the films, perhaps the young adult dystopian film genre would be in a healthier place.
But as it stands, the Divergent series proved to be one attempted franchise too far and that subset of YA films was shuffled off this mortal coil as quickly as it came, not unlike all those dead teens in the first Hunger Games actually.
Always be in the loop with our snackable podcast breaking the biggest story of the day. Subscribe to It’s Been A Big Day For… on your favourite podcast app.