How to build a great YA dystopia (adaptation)
What The Hunger Games and other franchise hits of the 2010s lost and found in translation
The new Netflix film Uglies is set in the future, but in many ways it feels like a throwback to the past. Based on the first book in the dystopian YA series by Scott Westerfeld, Uglies ticks all the boxes that drew so many fans to franchise adaptations like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent in the 2010s. It has a spunky protagonist, a love triangle, a mad scientist, rival factions, and thinly veiled social commentary. It’s a formula, sure, but one that connected with both book readers and moviegoers on a massive scale. Until it didn’t.
The Hunger Games is often credited with popularizing dystopian YA as a subgenre in publishing, and while it influenced lots of others, it wasn’t the first of its kind. In fact, all four installments of the Uglies series—Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras—were published before The Hunger Games came out in 2008. By the time Lionsgate got around to turning Suzanne Collins’ bestseller into a blockbuster film in 2012, there was a rich vein of published works waiting to be mined by enterprising filmmakers. And boy did they tap into it. Between 2012 and 2018 Hollywood produced 17 films based on books in this category. There were so many of them Saturday Night Live even parodied the trend. After being bombarded with formulaic narrative arcs and the same grungy steel and concrete aesthetic over and over again, audiences lost interest and box-office totals fell sharply. Within a few years, the genre was all but dead—on screen and on bookshelves.
Most PopularWith that many films in such a short span of time, some were bound to be more successful than others. So, what did the ones that worked get right? What does it take to make a good (or even great) YA dystopia adaptation?
Conventions set expectations
Tropes exist for a reason. It’s comforting to know going into a book or movie that there are a few things you can count on. The main character, often a teenage girl, might make friends easily but anyone who’s read a dystopian YA book knows not to get too attached. It’s spelled out explicitly in the rules of The Hunger Games—it’s a fight to the death with only one winner (or it’s supposed to be). And no matter how likable they are, there’s got to be at least one annoying person who immediately dislikes the hero and tries to kill them at some point. In the Divergent series it’s Peter, who leads a gang of Dauntless initiates to attack Tris in the first book. Anti-authoritarian themes are always popular, and increasingly timely. The regime is often led by or assisted by a mad scientist with either a super dramatic name like Plutarch Heavensbee (the Hunger Games series) or a completely boring one like Ava Paige (the Maze Runner series).
Related ContentA protagonist worth rooting for
The most successful franchises are the ones that can attract a cross-generational following. That starts with relatable young adult characters. They’re determined but not obstinate, spunky but not in a cloying way. When we meet Katniss Everdeen in the first Hunger Games book she’s just trying to take care of her mother and her sister in their impoverished district. In Divergent, Tris wants to find a place where she belongs. The Maze Runner‘s Thomas arrives in The Glade without any memories, so we learn everything about the world at the same time he does. None of these characters set out to overthrow a totalitarian regime; they’re thrust into a position where they have no other choice. They aren’t Chosen Ones in the sense of being prophesied saviors—Katniss is explicitly not chosen at the Reaping, she volunteers to take her sister’s place—but they do have what it takes to become rebels and heroes. Katniss goes on to win the Hunger Games and become a symbol of the revolution. Tris finds herself in the middle of a war between factions. And Thomas escapes the maze, only to become the subject of more experiments. Their journeys from ordinary nobodies to leaders are aspirational.
Knowing when to be faithful, and when to deviate
The art of adaptation is in deciding what needs to be included and what can be discarded. There is such a thing as sticking too closely to the source material when making any kind of adaptation. The Hunger Games may seem to jump off the page when you’re reading it, but translating it into live action requires certain compromises. There are scenes, like the Cornucopia or Rue’s death, that couldn’t be cut or significantly altered without changing the entire story (or pissing off a lot of fans). Other changes are more easily made. For one thing, like a majority of dystopian YA books, The Hunger Games is written in first person. In the film we get to see scenes outside the games while they’re actually going on, something that wasn’t possible to witness from Katniss’ point of view.
Audiences understand the differences between mediums, but straying too far from the source material can be disastrous. Fans of James Dashner’s original Maze Runner books were willing to put up with some changes to the timing of certain plot points and things like the solution to the maze puzzle (a number code versus a word code) in director Wes Ball’s first film adaptation. They didn’t change that didn’t change the outcome of the story too much. The second film, however, goes off in a completely different direction. Although Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials was a mild disappointment critically and financially, it still outperformed its successor, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, one of the last dystopian YA adaptations of this era.
Room to breathe
Hollywood shoveled out so many similar films in such a short time it burned out an entire genre in less than a decade. In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea to release a Hunger Games movie every year for four years or split Mockingjay, the final book and weakest of the trilogy, into two parts. Allowing time between installments could have nurtured a healthy appetite for the genre instead of killing it through overindulgence. Now the studios seem to be getting ready for a dystopia renaissance: Last year we got the prequel film The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes, and there’s yet another prequel on the way based on an upcoming book about a young Haymitch Abernathy. Universal has also announced a reboot of The Maze Runner, with Wes Ball once again at the helm. Other dystopian YA adaptations in the works include Neal Shusterman’s Scythe and Unwind, Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, and Marie Lu’s Legend. There’s potential for any of these to be breakout hits, but the last decade has shown that a steadier, more thoughtful approach is more likely to reignite interest and sustain these kinds of stories.
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