The Demise of the Teen Dystopian Movie.

Dystopian
        adjective
Relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

It’s the early 2010s, Tumblr is still a thing, the deepwater horizon oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s Twilight mania, the Iraq war is coming to a close, Harry Potter ended, Osama bin Laden is dead, Twitter is on the rise, then there’s the Boston marathon bombing, and the iPad was released, there was the viral ebola epidemic in Africa, Robert Pattinson was awarded sexiest man- again, Beyonce is pregnant, Steve Jobs dies, 50 Shades of Grey is published, James Bond was officially back in the form of Daniel Craig, and girls and guys everywhere are reading books, but not just any books, teen/young adult dystopian novels. These books were selling tens of millions of copies and people just couldn’t get enough of it.

The Hunger Games, released in 2012, was box office gold grossing $685 million worldwide with only a budget of $78 million making megastars out of Jennifer Lawrence and her co-star Liam Hemsworth. This was Lionsgates most profitable film ever. Soon enough every social media feed was flooded with girls wearing Hot Topic Mocking Jay pins, girls fangirling over Dylan O’Brien (I was probably one of them) and people seeing which faction they were a part of from the Divergent books. An entire genre exploded in popularity but then died a quick death after really only 3 years on our cinema screens. Around 2016-ish the genre ceased to exist, instead contemporary social issue books seemingly filled the niche whole left behind. It all feels like a distant dream, with nothing left but the sparse few fan-made merchandise sitting online collecting dust reminding us all about it.What happened to this genre? Teen dystopian novels still get published, but they’re not the cultural juggernaut they used to be. Where is the dystopian renaissance?



What was it about YA dystopia that captivated so many young teens back then?

In order to understand what gave way to the rise in the early 2010s YA dystopia craze, we first have to look at the genre itself. The 2010s wasn’t the first time we had such a large rise in dystopia as a literary genre, there was in fact a large boom in the post-war era, particularly coming out of the 1950s and 1960s, but the most foundational and iconic came sparse in the 1930s and 1940s with the likes of 1984, Animal Farm or Brave New World which tackled the ideas of a harmful authoritarian state control coming from a rise in fascism. This popularity boomed in the post-war years, as the instability of a number of global governments mixed with the after effects of the second world war was the perfect concoction for books that not only reflected on the politics of that time but also on the horrors or rather ‘worst-case scenarios’ of fascism and war, especially in relation to weapons of mass destruction. Here we get the likes of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Lord of the Flies and governments/institutions banning books. This was the decade of Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968) and A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/ Blade Runner(Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Logans Run(Michael Anderson, 1976) . Writers took everyone’s post-war anxieties and took them to their worst extremes. However dystopian novels were not geared to the teen/young-adult that they are now, instead dystopia was left for the adults.

The 1970s and 1980s didn’t see a large shift in the dystopian demographic, with its 70s dystopia taking on a more feminist and environmentalist approach as these movements grew in the mainstream. Here we’d find The Handmaid’s Tale or The Sheep Look Up where the books focus on the fears of corporatism and global degradation, exploitation on a global scale and utilitarianism. There were books focused to a younger demographic in relation to dystopian literature but it wasn’t the main or focused demographic. However this all shifts in the 1980s and 1990s as a trend in marketing books more to young readers isn’t yet so bound up in YA dystopia, but more books in general. The young adult in literature was only coined in the 1960s, so this was a new market that needed to be explored. However, the niche sub-genre of the dystopian books marketed to 12 to 18 year old readers were becoming more prevalent as themes of nuclear anxieties and fallout emerged in the 1980s. Released in 1993 The Giver trilogy focuses on the themes of pain, memory and the dangers of totalitarianism and does so through the perspective of a young protagonist. The Giver was a huge success, selling over 12 million copies and winning a Newbury award. And so we saw a rise in a possible marketing niche, supply and demand. However the 2014 adaptation of The Giver was utter rubbish. When you’re a kid, identity is rather confusing and now there was an entire sub-genre of books that focused on teen anxieties and placed them in heightened settings where they could be fought. In 2008, this little old book The Hunger Games was published and the world of YA dystopia was changed forever.



Hunger Games

If you’ve been living under a rock somewhere for the past decade, inspired by Koshuntakemi’s 1999 novel Battle Royale, The Hunger Games revolved around a post-apocalyptic version of North America run by an evil white dictator where the continent was divided into a number of separated districts each with their own production specialities and the wealthy capital where all the evil wealthy and fashionable lived. Every year as a form of maintaining control over its people and also punishing them for an attempted rebellion 75 years ago the capital forces two young random tributes from each district to fight to the death in a competition adeptly named The Hunger Games all while being televised to the public like some twisted version of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. The soaring popularity of The Hunger Games(Gary Ross, 2012)

The box office:

The Hunger Games (2012, Gary Ross) : $685- $700 million grossed

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013, Francis Lawrence): $865 million grossed

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014, Francis Lawrence): $755 million grossed

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015, Francis Lawrence): $658 million grossed



After The Hunger Games:

After its success, the film was bound to have its fare share of imitators. So with The Hunger Game’s books done, it was time for a wave of other dystopian YA novels to take its place. Some say they may be trend chasing or rather created through greed by other studios to cash in on the success, others put it down to the fact that once something is finished people go out to find something similar. It’s the same with Twilight, as a surge of paranormal romance novels and films tried to take its place or rather compete after its popularity. This follow-the-leader archetype is going to be rushed and rather sloppy and put out to catch whatever excitement is left behind as they try to capitalise on the success of the current polar movement. One dystopian novel and movie series to ride the coattails of The Hunger Games is none other than Divergent. Divergent follows the story of a dangerous dystopian city known as Chicago, society is separated into 5 different factions based on basic human traits:

Abnegation (being nice?)
Candor (honesty)
Amity (old McDonald had a farm)
Erudite (smart people but mean people)
Dauntless (people who like parkour)

After going through a test at 16 to see which faction you belong to you must pledge to be part of that faction for life. But Tris isn’t like other girls, she’s a divergent a.k.a someone with more than one personality trait. However, divergents are hunted down by the government because they go outside the faction system and so they cannot be controlled. The Divergent series was wildly popular, the books sold over 32 million copies with 3 movies made because of their box office success. This was one of the only other dystopian YA series to be anywhere close to the same success of The Hunger Games, which is really incredible because the Divergent series is terrible. Everything about the book and the film feels so designed to be popular as it hits so many of the basic tropes that it's hard not to see it as a concerted effort to pander to the fans of the genre. However the final book of the series was the most unpopular scoring a 2.5 on Amazon due to, *spoiler alert* Tris dying in the end due to some stupid self-sacrifice stint. Through this backlash the studio decided to split the movie in two parts with Allegiant and Ascendent because if it worked for Twilight, Harry Potter and sort of for The Hunger Games then it would definitely work here too. By this point the movie multi-pack trend had started to die and the book that they were drawing out into two parts was the most unpopular out of all of them. These split-part films were poorly padded as they were elongated, due to even more cash grab as studios wanted to keep a popular franchise around for another year. This even happened for The Hunger Game’s last instalment which overall grossed less than any of the previous movies. The popularity of the Divergent series waned as the studio changed pivotal parts of the book when adapting it to the screen angering fans and when the trailer dropped for Allegiant showing just as many inaccuracies and differences, fans weren’t motivated to see it and so they didn’t. When the film was released ins 2016 it opened up at number two in the box office beaten out by none other than Zootopia. Allegiant only made $179.2 million with a $110-142 million budget. Allegiant probably lost Lionsgate $50 million, so the decision for the final movie was changed to a made-for-tv-movie that would lead into a spin-off television series, but this never happened, leaving the Divergent series unfinished. When Alligent failed it didn’t just kill the Divergent series, but also YA dystopia as a whole.



The Death:

Genre’s rise and fall and loose popularity and maybe gain momentum again. YA dystopia was always a bubble just waiting to burst so it could be replaced by something else as there was a dramatic shift and change around 2015 and 2016. There’s been no resurgence like there has been for other sagas and series like Harry Potter that has a west end show or Twilight with an alternative-perspective novel Midnight Sun. The release of The Hunger Games prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes appeared and then disappeared. However, the popular YA dystopian novel and film usually surround themselves with white characters, I know that in The Hunger Games there are a fair few people of colour that help Katniss out only to be killed off to make Katniss feel bad. These individual centric films about white brunette teenage girls creates a problem with the stories of the very cool sexy teenagers who somehow manage to sexily take down the government and defeat systemic injustice. But it comes down to governments hating that individual person, and that person only. In 2015 and 2016 the reason the genre nosedives is due to the fact that the consciousness of systemic problems was growing larger in society with the BLM movement. Suddenly it's not so nice to see their reality shown through a fun fictional white lens. In the YA dystopian’s place sits Marvel with its hundreds of different franchise movies relating to comic books that bring along already a fanbase that want to see some modernisation and change to the source material, as well as action series like Fast and Furious with its thousands of films that aren’t restricted by a book. Of course these aren’t entirely just geared towards young adults but these are the biggest franchises I can think of that have replaced the YA dystopia.

Other dystopian movies (if you’re interested):
Enders Game (2013, Gavin Hood)

The Maze Runner (2014, Wes Ball)

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trail (2015, Wes Ball)

Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018, Wes Ball)

I Am Number Four (2011, D.J. Caruso)

The 5th Wave (2016, J Blakeson)

The Darkest Minds (2018, Jennifer Yuh Nelson)

The Host (2013, Andrew Niccol)

In Time (2011, Andrew Niccol)

Equals (2015, Drake Doremus)

Chaos Walking (2021, Doug Liman)

Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg)

The Island (2005, Michael Bay)

by Isabel Hodges, April 2023.

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