Why it failed succeeded
While “Divergent” lands roughly on the same level of quality as other failed attempts to get YA franchises to take off, its extra effort didn’t go unrewarded. Despite its blandness, its minor attempts to subvert the expectation of YA films and present itself as a standard sci-fi action flick managed to help it sell to a wider audience; the fanbase of the series ensured that the film broke even but an influx of curious viewers served to push it over into profitability.
Factoring in the regular success of “The Hunger Games,” the box office profit of “Divergent” may finally answer the question of how to make these properties financially effective for the future using a certain lacking tactic that has become something of an underlying theme across several of these films.
The recent release of “Mockingjay Part 1,” “The Hunger Games” has cemented its current dominance of YA cinema until its conclusion in November 2015 and it’s not particularly difficult to see why.
Suzanne Colins' story of rebellion against a corrupt government that satirizes the effect of media on the uninformed populace joins the ranks of "Harry Potter" by actually trailblazing within its territory. It tackled fiction that hadn’t been touched by YA films and did it with the sharp execution expected of an original film rather than an adaptation to be sold on the back of its name alone. While not without its own flaws and borrowing a premise explored by other films before, it nonetheless functioned as a genuinely entertaining sci-fi action blockbuster in its own right before even taking the idea of a sequel into consideration.
Simply focusing on making a strong film that can stand independently may sound simple enough but I have spent a great majority of the last month watching film after film completely ignore that goal.
It's worth noting that while I ultimately ended up focusing on about 5 films, I only managed to narrow it down to those 5 after sitting through at least 10 of them. I was lucky to even get these because the other 5 that I watched were even less memorable than what I've featured.
Of course, YA movies are not exclusively guilty of this.
Similarly to the "The Amazing Spider-Man" franchise that I tackled earlier this year and lesser superhero films before it, the YA novels are a hot item and to the misfortune of several fanbases, Hollywood's mission to chase dollar signs will create a lot of casualties in the form of good stories getting thrown under the bus with slapdash execution for money.
Ironically, this model which is reliant on striking coal while it's hot may prove to be the undoing, as filling up the genre with cheap imitations will only make it less desirable in the long run.
I wish that I could say that there was a solution to this but problems caused by commercialism tend to resolve themselves for better or worse.
Casual moviegoers seem to have rarely rewarded the sort of mediocrity that this list of films encompasses but I would simply like to advise them to ask for just a little bit more as I was moved to upon my viewing of "Transformers: Age of Extinction" roughly 2 months ago.
For the fans of these novels, I will say this; our tastes in storytelling tropes may vary and our views of satisfying entertainment may differ but I would not dare insult a regular consumer of novels composed of approximately 400 pages or more, in an era where getting people to read books is becoming a herculean task, stupid. Clearly you know what you like, have a passion for it and enjoy the opportunity to see is come together on the big screen. While several of you may be satisfied with these results however, as somebody that has closely studied storytelling across multiple forms of media, film included, you deserve better.
Never did I come across an outright terrible concept in any of the films that I watched despite how forgettable most of them were.
No matter how strong or weak the source materials are, a bad book does not have to make a terrible film.We often write off the flaws of many of these movies as trappings of the genre but I simply don’t buy that.
Suzanne Colins' story of rebellion against a corrupt government that satirizes the effect of media on the uninformed populace joins the ranks of "Harry Potter" by actually trailblazing within its territory. It tackled fiction that hadn’t been touched by YA films and did it with the sharp execution expected of an original film rather than an adaptation to be sold on the back of its name alone. While not without its own flaws and borrowing a premise explored by other films before, it nonetheless functioned as a genuinely entertaining sci-fi action blockbuster in its own right before even taking the idea of a sequel into consideration.
Simply focusing on making a strong film that can stand independently may sound simple enough but I have spent a great majority of the last month watching film after film completely ignore that goal.
It's worth noting that while I ultimately ended up focusing on about 5 films, I only managed to narrow it down to those 5 after sitting through at least 10 of them. I was lucky to even get these because the other 5 that I watched were even less memorable than what I've featured.
Of course, YA movies are not exclusively guilty of this.
Similarly to the "The Amazing Spider-Man" franchise that I tackled earlier this year and lesser superhero films before it, the YA novels are a hot item and to the misfortune of several fanbases, Hollywood's mission to chase dollar signs will create a lot of casualties in the form of good stories getting thrown under the bus with slapdash execution for money.
Ironically, this model which is reliant on striking coal while it's hot may prove to be the undoing, as filling up the genre with cheap imitations will only make it less desirable in the long run.
I wish that I could say that there was a solution to this but problems caused by commercialism tend to resolve themselves for better or worse.
Casual moviegoers seem to have rarely rewarded the sort of mediocrity that this list of films encompasses but I would simply like to advise them to ask for just a little bit more as I was moved to upon my viewing of "Transformers: Age of Extinction" roughly 2 months ago.
For the fans of these novels, I will say this; our tastes in storytelling tropes may vary and our views of satisfying entertainment may differ but I would not dare insult a regular consumer of novels composed of approximately 400 pages or more, in an era where getting people to read books is becoming a herculean task, stupid. Clearly you know what you like, have a passion for it and enjoy the opportunity to see is come together on the big screen. While several of you may be satisfied with these results however, as somebody that has closely studied storytelling across multiple forms of media, film included, you deserve better.
Never did I come across an outright terrible concept in any of the films that I watched despite how forgettable most of them were.
No matter how strong or weak the source materials are, a bad book does not have to make a terrible film.We often write off the flaws of many of these movies as trappings of the genre but I simply don’t buy that.
There is almost nothing across the last 2 “Hunger Games” films that felt out of place in service to the genre and John Hughes made a career out of cutting through teenage pettiness to reveal the humanity of hormone addled young adults that are still maturing, 30 years ago.
YA films can be better and don’t have an excuse not to be. If the best film of the genre to not carry the “Hunger Games” banner was a romantic drama about kids with cancer that was genuinely decent, it seems kind of wrong to be praising “Divergent” just for not doing things that would have hurt its own endgame, despite closing on sequel bait regardless.
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