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DIVERGENT Expectations

The first trailer for the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s YA novel Divergent debuted at MYV’s Video Music Awards last night.

Unfortunately, it arrives just as another YA adaptation is being called a flop. City of Bones, which opened this weekend, was called a “disappointment” by  many sources, including the Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, filmmakers say a sequel is still in the works.

This is viewed as a trend, since the adaptation of Beautiful Creatues, released in the spring, was also considered a box office failure.

Bloomberg Business Week quotes YA marketing consultant MaryLeigh Bliss of YPulse, who says that these movies didn’t connect because they are based on books that don’t have “an organized and impassioned fandom that could match something like Harry Potter or Twilight” or a large crossover audience. She expects the second Hunger Games film, opening in November, to do well, but doesn’t hold out much hope for Divergent, coming in March, or The Maze Runner which arrives in February.

The trailer is below:

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2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music

This entry was posted on Monday, August 26th, 2013 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Books & Movies, Childrens and YA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “DIVERGENT Expectations”

  1. Brock Martin Says:
    August 27th, 2013 at 4:18 pm

    While I agree that some of the recent teen books to movies have had disappointing box office numbers, there is something about the Divergent series that has a bit more of a Hunger Games-esque backing among readers (and therefore it may gain the needed push to something beyond the feeling it’s just yet another teen book-to-movie). The timing for Divergent is better, too; both Beautiful Creatures and the Mortal Instruments series were down-trending by the time the movies came out, while our reserves for Allegiant are quite high. We shall see!

  2. Melissa Says:
    August 29th, 2013 at 4:53 pm

    I think another thing that makes a difference is having that adult fan-base, too. HG & Twilight both have support from much larger/wider audiences. Mortal Instruments & Beautiful Creatures were more specific to teens. (From my observations…)

  3. Kristine Says:
    August 31st, 2013 at 11:12 am

    I agree with both of you. The few teens I get in my (very tiny) library have loved Divergent and haven’t touched either of the other series.

    Plus, as an adult reader of YA, I love the Divergent series but have never read Beautiful Creatures or Mortal Instruments (and still can’t get myself to). Plus many of my friends are the same, except a few have read the MI series and hated what she did to it.