Hollywood loves few things more than seeing what worked for another studio and then trying to capitalize on the bandwagon, and it almost always yields results that can generously be described as inconsistent. Thanks to the success of Harry Potter, The Twilight Saga, and The Hunger Games, the 2000s and 2010s were swamped with YA literary adaptations.
While those three aforementioned franchises combined to earn tens of billions of dollars at the box office, the ratio of hits to misses beyond that was stark to put it lightly. An alarming number of them failed at the first hurdle, and even the scant few that managed to get sequels rarely maintained anything approaching a decent level of critical and commercial success from beginning to end.
With that in mind, a Reddit thread asking why futuristic dystopian stories with sci-fi and/or fantasy elements have died out has a startlingly simple answer; because so many of them crashed and burned spectacularly at the box office. It would be an understatement to say the industry wasted a fortune on the short-lived craze, because the results were nothing short of diabolical.
The Maze Runner did manage to complete a trilogy, and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One was a monster hit, but The Divergent Series was cut off at the knees, while the likes of Ender’s Game, Mortal Engines, The 5th Wave, The Golden Compass, City of Ember, The Giver, The Host, and countless others were completely shunned by paying customers.
Even Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley couldn’t save Chaos Walking, which underlined that the moment had long since passed by the time we entered the 2020s.
