The YA Bridge To Nowhere

On a lark, my partner and I watched 2014's Divergent and 2015's Insurgent, not out of a particular interest but because both of us needed to watch something that wouldn't prove challenging after we'd had a taxing day and were mentally exhausted by it, and that these films were available on Tubi made it all the easier.

Relating to this 'Young Adult' era of cinema in the 2000s and 2010s, I don't have that much of a strong relation to it. I did read Harry Potter as a child, but my interested waned as the movies became darker and edgier -- Twilight, both the movie and the book, were sensations at my school, and I vividly remember all of us watching the first Catherine Hardwicke-directed entry whilst trapped on a bus ride from Springfield back to the Chicagoland suburbs, the DVD projected into the tiny fullscreen displays that were flipped down in front of our chairs. I liked that movie then and I still do now -- stylistically, it does well at embodying that era of 2000s Evanescence-colored angst, the post-internet but pre-smartphone age -- and after that, I had little to no relation to releases like The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc., not because of a conscious choice, but I was reading through stacks of Greek philosophy and Russian literature and that didn't leave room for much engagement with early 2010s pop culture.

2014's Divergent and its sequel didn't exactly surprise me -- the stories are about what you'd expect, the casts are fine -- but in my mental arrangement of where we've come from and where we're at right now in the contemporary American cinema, I think that these YA films might prove underrated as historical artefacts of the transition and shareholder-fication of Hollywood during the 2010s.

These YA films are largely based off of serialized book series, so the material for sequels is already there. Coupled with that is the immaturity of the audience, who do not in general possess the critical discernment to really tell whether a film is genuinely good or bad, and might not even care. The result is a great situation for CEOs and producers: a ready-made trilogy (at the least), one where you can mass-produce sequels on a yearly basis and catch the audience before they're disinterested, and a largely young cast of unknowns who you don't have to pay that much money for: cheap, quick, and 'good'? Well...

I look at the release dates for these movies and I don't think it can be understated how quickly they flooded the market in the wake of Harry Potter:

• Twilight: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

• The Hunger Games: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015

• The Maze Runner: 2014, 2015, 2018

• Divergent: 2014, 2015, 2016

And then the trend ended, around 2018-2019, except for a few scattered attempts here and there. Why?

You could chalk it up to changing tastes. Yet the YA industry in book publishing is bigger today than it ever has been -- why are there no movies based on Sarah J. Maas series, of which there are several? The audience has switched their taste from post-apocalyptic to 'romantasy', but it's basically still the same thing, action and drama with a love triangle, usually written in first-person present tense prose that would translate easily to the screen.

Instead, the studios are rebooting Harry Potter as a... shudders ... TV show. And even in a world where you can't get something greenlit unless it's a part of some intellectual property, there's seemingly no appetite to tap back into this ready-made market, despite Game of Thrones showing the appetite for media about dragons and sex.

I don't ask this because I'm invested in them doing so -- frankly, I don't care either way what they do -- but my conclusions as to why YA has still not bounced-back are two-fold:

1. The comic book/nostalgia industrial complex out-competed them.

The studios don't just want money-makers, they want the MAXIMUM money-makers, and I think hitting a double on most of these YA projects wasn't enough for CEOs and their dark masters. The MCU made it so unless your movie made $700,000-$1 billion every single time, it was considered a 'failure', and the production bloat is not to be underestimated -- these YA movies were never 'small', but they were close enough to the middle-tier of film budgets to get muscled-out by the behemoth $300 million mega-ensembles about capes. And on another side, there was the nostalgia-mining moment we are still in, the Disney live-action remake death-train, the legacy sequels of Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Halloween, Terminator, I could go on for an hour listing them. It is easier to reheat the old goods than it is to try and create (or adapt) something that hasn't been seen before, even if it is formulaic -- even as the YA films are homogeneous unto themselves, they weren't frictionless enough for the appetites of the studios, who wanted the grey goo on tap to not only entertain, but to make audiences trapped in the cycle of seeing the same few things arranged in different arrays over and over again.

2. The growing deafness and indifference to anything that young people are involved with.

The Hollywood system is pushing itself into irrelevancy because it refuses to embrace anything outside of the tried-and-tested, and this risk-averse attitude means that not only are no chances given to directors and other artists, but no chances are taken on unproven ideas, and the definition of 'unproven' is growing more marginal by the day. I usually go to my local Barnes & Noble at least once a month, and I am surprised by how busy it is, how it really is a place where there is an active cultivation of different types of readers, and how popular these YA-type books remain, but not just that, fantasy and science fiction in general are HUGE, I see so many stacks and tables of new releases with new ideas, and I'm sure it's not all great, but it is way beyond what I remember things being like in the early 2010s, where there was a small fantasy/SF section in the back of every store but it wasn't that big of a deal. I see people buying these books by the armload, stuff that they can hardly carry, and I think about how many classic Hollywood picture were adaptations of hit plays or bestsellers -- there's no reason we can't have that exact thing today, even in vulgar capitalistic terms you can't deny that the market is there.

But you don't see any of that on TV or film. Every release has become so high budget, so high concept, that to do an adaptation is considered too unreliable, much less telling original stories -- so it doesn't end-up mattering if these romantasy books are best-sellers or not, the studios are too slow and too cautious to bother adapting them in the first place, their ability to project outwards and contemplate what their audiences might want as atrophied, and now they're focused on giving them only what has been tried and tested, regardless of whether or not it's wanted -- the aesthetic conservatism of such a system is unsustainable.

I never thought I'd have that much to say about these YA films, and truth be told, I find the idea of them more interesting than any single instance -- when the history of the Hollywood industry is written, I think these series will be seen as a transition point, one foot in the era of literate monoculture and the other in the world of intellectual property, neither fish nor fowl.