2018 looks to be a maze of YA offerings
As long as there are teenagers there will be young-adult books, and the popular literary genre hasn’t fallen out of favor with Hollywood.
The Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games movies, as well as stand-alones like The Fault in Our Stars, stoked the flames of YA fandom but also created adaptations that had a broader audience than just kids. On Friday, another novel-to-film series began a last run in theaters as
Maze Runner: The Death Cure wraps up a dystopian epic of teen heroes. But more YA movies and franchises are on the way. Here’s a guide to those coming this year: Every Day (in theaters Feb. 23)
Angourie Rice stars as a 16-year-old girl who falls in love with a wandering soul who wakes up in a different body and lives a different life daily in the adaptation of David Levithan’s 2012 romance. A Wrinkle in Time (March 9)
Director Ava DuVernay takes Madeline L’Engle’s classic 1962 sci-fi novel to the big screen with Storm Reid as a 13-year-old girl who ventures through time, space and multiple dimensions to save her scientist father (Chris Pine).
Love, Simon (March 16)
In director Greg Berlanti’s adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s 2015 coming-of-age tale Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agen
da, Nick Robinson is the closeted gay title character whose high school life is complicated by the potential reveal of a secret online correspondence. Ready Player One (March 30)
Steven Spielberg puts his signature touch on author Ernie Cline’s 2011 genre mash-up: There’s plenty of nostalgia for children of the 1980s but a core story for younger audiences that revolves around an Ohio kid (Tye Sheridan) who escapes his dystopian reality by immersing himself in a wondrous virtual one. The House of Tomorrow (April 20)
Futurism meets rebellious youth in this cinematic take on Peter Bognanni’s 2010 book about a 16-year-old orphan (Asa Butterfield) raised under a dome by his oddball grandma (Ellen Burstyn). He decides to form a punk band with a heart transplant recipient (Alex Wolff ). The Darkest Minds (Sept. 14)
Alexandra Bracken’s sci-fi book series in which a mysterious disease kills 98% of the world’s children and leaves the rest with superpowers, gets the cinematic touch from director Jennifer Yuh Nelson. Amandla Stenberg stars as a girl who escapes a government camp and joins a group of other youngsters on the lam.
Boy Erased (Sept. 28)
In actor/director Joel Edgerton’s adaptation of Garrard Conley’s memoir, Lucas Hedges stars as the son of a small-town Baptist minister (Russell Crowe). When he’s outed as gay, he’s forced by his dad and mom (Nicole Kidman) to have conversion therapy.
Mortal Engines (Dec. 14)
The post-apocalyptic world of Philip Reeve’s novels in which gigantic moving metropolises consume smaller towns for resources centers on the teaming of a low-class British historian (Robert Sheehan) and a fugitive assassin (Hera Hilmar).
Ophelia (2018)
Based on the 2006 Lisa Klein YA novel, director Claire McCarthy’ s female-empowerment spin on Shakespeare’ s
Hamlet premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival. It centers on the title character (Daisy Ridley), her gig as lady-in-waiting for Queen Gertude (Naomi Watts) and Ophelia’s blossoming love for the infamous Danish prince (George MacKay).