The Last installment of the Divergent series will go directly to t.v.
Good article that has something to say about the trend occurring today in the YA genre post Harry Potter, Hunger Games and Twilight.
“Ascendant” won’t be coming to a theater near you. The final installment in the “Divergent” film series, starring Shailene Woodley as yet another lovelorn rebel fighting totalitarianism (and her hormones), is heading straight to television. The YA dystopian flick will reportedly premiere as a TV movie—with the hopes of spinning it off into a series.
This may spell trouble behind the scenes. When asked about the film’s new distribution plan at Comic-Con, Woodley said she was on a plane when the news broke and was shocked. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter speculates that many actors from the once-popular series—including Naomi Watts, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Theo James and Jeff Daniels—may skip out on the finale should it be TV-bound. In order to sign them for a television movie, their contracts (which are exclusively bound to theatrical releases) would have to be renegotiated. Elgort and Teller, who starred in “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Whiplash,” respectively, are much bigger stars than they were when the series debuted. They’re likely to ask for too much money.
The humbling of “Ascendant” mirrors the fate of the YA genre as a whole, which has been experiencing diminishing returns in recent years. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” kicked off the craze of adapting young adult books into potential film franchises in 2001 when it debuted to a then-record $90 million, unthinkable at the time. (In 2016, it almost feels quaint.) The genre, however, hit its peak in 2013, when “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” took in $424 million in the U.S., the best-ever sum for a film based on a young adult bestseller.
“Catching Fire,” directed by Francis Lawrence, was both a smashing success and a harbinger of doom. Like a bad magician at a roadside carnival, Lionsgate decided to saw the last two movies in half. The trick had worked well for “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” and makes sense from a financial perspective: By doubling your movies, you theoretically double your profits. Instead, the distributor ended up with two flailing, bloody stumps. “Mockingjay—Part 1” tapped out with $90 million less at the global box office than its predecessor. “Part 2,” which debuted at the end of the YA craze, finished with another $100 million less than that.
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/24/the_fall_of_divergent_the_final_film_will_bow_on_tv_heres_why_it_matters/?source=newsletter
