Once poised to take the YA adaption corn from the departing The Hunger Games, things aren’t looking good the franchise. While the original and its sequel, Insurgent, took in an impressive $286 and $297 million respectively at the worldwide box office, the third movie (which like any good YA franchise was only the first part of the final book), Allegiant, crashed and burned with a $179.2 million haul, a hiccup that had a serious knock on effect on the in pre-production Ascendent. Already suffering from losing Insurgent and Allegiant director Robert Schwentke a month before the third movie’s release, production was set to begin this Summer with The Age of Adeline’s Lee Toland Krieger, but now according to Variety, Lionsgate are changing tack and handing the movie over to their television department to finish the story as a t.v. movie, as well as introducing a new cast of characters that could headline a possible t.v. series.
Movie franchises finding new life on t.v. is nothing new, just look at Buff the Vampire Slayer or Netflix’s current Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments (which came about after the first movie’s box office numbers saw production on the sequel scrapped weeks into filming), but to my mind something like this has never happened before. It’s very early stages at the moment, and we don’t even know if Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, and the rest of the cast's contracts will even cover them doing a t.v. movie, especially if a another production arm takes over. Most people chalk the franchise’s decline down to major deviations to the source material, with fans of the original book series not very happy with the story going in very different direction than what they were used to. Will this new development address that and try to retcon the story the movie’s told so far in something more palatable for the fanbase? Either way, this is an interesting turn of events, and I am very interested to see what this means for YA adaptions going forward.
Movie franchises finding new life on t.v. is nothing new, just look at Buff the Vampire Slayer or Netflix’s current Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments (which came about after the first movie’s box office numbers saw production on the sequel scrapped weeks into filming), but to my mind something like this has never happened before. It’s very early stages at the moment, and we don’t even know if Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, and the rest of the cast's contracts will even cover them doing a t.v. movie, especially if a another production arm takes over. Most people chalk the franchise’s decline down to major deviations to the source material, with fans of the original book series not very happy with the story going in very different direction than what they were used to. Will this new development address that and try to retcon the story the movie’s told so far in something more palatable for the fanbase? Either way, this is an interesting turn of events, and I am very interested to see what this means for YA adaptions going forward.
