Allegiance to YA movies wavering
Repetitive plots lose appeal with audiences that can ‘smell inauthenticity a mile away’
Back in the heyday of the Twilight saga and the early hubbub of the Hunger Games films, movie fans were allegiant to the young-adult genre that took their beloved bestselling novels and put them on the big screen. But things have taken a, well, divergent path since then.
In January, The 5th Wave launched a potential sci-fi series with teen heroine Cassie (played by Chloe Grace Moretz), but only gathered a tepid $34 million (U.S.) total at the box office. The Divergent Series: Allegiant arrives Friday as the third movie in its quadrilogy starring Shailene Woodley as the heroine Tris, but it hasn’t been the next big thing yet — neither the hauls of 2014’s Divergent ($151 million) or 2015’s Insurgent ($130.2 million) could match even the opening weekend of 2012’s The Hunger Games ($152.5 million).
Factor in last year’s John Green adaptation Paper Towns ($32 million total) compared with 2014’s The Fault in Our Stars ($124.9 million), and the kids aren’t all right with their cinema fare.
“Hollywood tries to pigeonhole or chase a certain audience to capitalize on what they think is a trend or a fad, (but) it doesn’t always work,” says com Score senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
It’s apparent there’s a lot of repetition, especially with the Divergent movies, says Mike Ryan, senior writer at the entertainment site Uproxx. “After The Hunger Games, audiences have now seen the ‘dystopian future can be saved by one very special person’ story. A lot of the offshoots feel derivative.”
Also not helping: splitting the third books in the series in half — for the Divergent series, that means Alle- giant this year and Ascendant in 2017. Even The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 underperformed last fall “because people caught on they are paying twice for an inferior and diluted product,” Ryan adds.
That hasn’t stopped studios from optioning teen-friendly novels such as Pierce Brown’s Red Rising sci-fi book series, Samantha Shannon’s supernaturally tinged The Bone Season and Sabaa Tahir’s fantasy An Ember in the Ashes. Coming later this year is Tim Burton’s adaptation of Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Sept. 30), plus Let It Snow ( Dec. 9), based on a short-story collection by Green and others.
One way to right the YA genre is to find out kids’ wants and interests rather than just having “a guy in a back room like, ‘This’ll be a big movie!’ ” Dergarabedian says. “Maybe go to social media and get innovative with how you’re developing projects that are aimed at that very fickle, very hard-to-pin-down audience.”
Getting older actors involved also helps broaden the fan base, he says: Hunger Games gave Julianne Moore and Donald Sutherland major roles, and the Divergent movies have added Octavia Spencer and, with Allegiant, Jeff Daniels. However, Dergarabedian says, “it has to come from a genuine place in order to resonate with an audience that can smell inauthenticity a mile away.”
Or it could be easy as finding a new wrinkle that gets people talking, according to Jeff Bock, box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations.
“The dystopia thing is done,” he says. “It’s going to take something that’s fresh, and maybe it comes from a brand-new author on Amazon trying to sell it themselves right now.”