The Very Brief Rise and Fall of the Young Adult Cinematic Dystopia

Uglies stars Joey King as Tally Youngblood, a young woman living in a distant future where everyone is considered an “ugly” until their 16th birthday. After that, the government provides the “pretty” operation to teens, transforming them into the societal standard of beauty, and sending them to live a struggle-free new life. But all is not as it seems, not in a young adult dystopia. Uglies is based on a 2005 novel by Scott Westerfeld, one that was a huge deal in the YA world at the time and helped to pave the way for the category’s dystopian fiction trend. The film adaptation was in pre-production for almost two decades, and now, in the year of 2024, it cannot help but feel like a relic of the very recent past as it finally sees the light of day as a Netflix Original. As the kids obsess over TikTok and romantasy is the genre of choice, Uglies seems like a leftover from a cinematic trend that never truly took off in the first place.

While Uglies technically predates The Hunger Games, it’s fair to say that it was Suzanne Collins’ novels that fully kickstarted the YA dystopian trend. The first book was published in 2008, the same year that the Twilight series came to an end with Breaking Dawn, and it felt like a passing of the baton for the changing trends of teen fiction. We moved from paranormal romance, worlds of magic and age-appropriate sensuality, to crumbling societies and scrappy but special underdogs fighting the system. The Hunger Games felt like a much-needed shot of energy at a time when the bestseller lists were dominated by wannabe Twilights. Here was a series about a fascist government forcing children to murder one another to entertain the privileged and keep the masses in their place. It was a scathing indictment of the 24-hour news cycle and reality TV, a high-stakes drama where nobody was safe, and it was a total bummer. Of course Hollywood had to get its hands on it.

The Hunger Games quadrilogy is easily the peak of the dystopian YA movie trend. It was the best source material with adaptations that lived up to those lofty expectations (although that strange trend of the era to split the final story into two films was a bad idea and it’s good that we stopped doing that). The stakes were high and its depictions of the horrors of this fascistic system were palpable even with the limitations of a PG-13 rating. It didn’t feel like anything else on the big screen at that time, and it was also a huge effing bummer. It shouldn’t have worked and yet it became the 20th highest-grossing film series of all time (just behind Twilight) with over $3.3 billion to its name. 

As the publishing world went, so followed Hollywood. After The Hunger Games came Divergent, based on the novels by Veronica Roth, which were huge bestsellers but never as critically acclaimed as Collins’ work. They were soon turned into a franchise, headlined by Shailene Woodley. The post-Hunger Games dystopian YA works were defined less by their confrontations with political strife and more with the idea of being sorted into a type. Divergent was set in a future where teens are allotted into a different faction dictated by their personality traits (but also they just pick their own faction, so it’s sort of meaningless). 

The whole thing plays out like a slightly more deadly summer camp, both on page and on screen. It falls into the trap that would come to define the failures of this trend: confusing being put into a little club with the tyranny of fascism. The controlling of emotions that made Brave New World, one of the defining texts of modern dystopian fiction, so unnerving feels like child’s play here. The stakes felt frivolous, and the films couldn’t spin them into anything as palpably real as what The Hunger Games pulled off. The franchise saw diminishing returns with each new film and ended up incomplete due to box office disappointment. 

While the details changed with each dystopian YA movie, the basic foundations remained the same. The Maze Runner, based on James Dashner’s series, had an interesting setting but was otherwise derivative of its genre siblings. The 5th Wave benefitted from having a more sci-fi-esque worldbuilding involving alien invasion, as well as some decent tension, but left most of its intriguing mythology on the page. The Darkest Minds felt like a straight-up X-Men rip-off with none of the heart. Fox made a pilot for a planned TV show based on Delirium, a series about a world where love is classified as a disease, but it was never picked up (presumably because its concept was extremely silly in practice, where it could at least feel evocative and symbolic in novel form). Even throwbacks, like the adaptation of the classic award-winning Lois Lowry novel The Giver, a novel that long predates this dystopian YA trend, felt inert and lazy (but at least it had Meryl Streep).

By the time The Hunger Games came to an end, audiences’ interest in dystopian YA cinema dried up in record speed. Everything that followed The Hunger Games just felt like a rushed copy, even if they weren’t when they were novels. The resilience and trauma of Katniss Everdeen was remolded into bland stoicism with other stories. Collins’ tight worldbuilding and political depth were diluted into tropes and factions where readers were encouraged to align themselves with one for marketing purposes. (Imagine asking Hunger Games readers which district they’d like to murder children for.) They all made their hellish futures seem kind of cool. Join a faction, wield a weapon, get some tattoos and take down some bad guys. Just ignore the politics behind the curtain.

Moreover, they just didn’t get the point. The Hunger Games isn’t about one plucky hero saving the day and changing the system. It’s about how the flimsy but effective theatrics of fascism require an iron grip to be enforced and how crucial communal rebellion is to topple it. Katniss is an inspiration, yes, but she isn’t the sole power against the Capitol. So many of her genre descendants are about a lone leader who kicks ass and takes names (in the Divergent series, the whole thing ends with a straight-up Christ allegory, both cheap and insulting).

It’s no surprise that the last story standing in this brief genre fad is The Hunger Games. The prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was a major hit in both book and film form. An adaptation of the next prequel in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping, which will focus on the character of Haymitch Abernathy, is already in production. Collins has never watered down her intense political themes, which become only more prescient with each passing year. What made the original trilogy so powerful remains so because of her specificity and refusal to downplay the trauma such a system would inspire. It’s not cool to be forced to fight for your survival, to be a propagandistic weapon for a regime that would slaughter you without a second thought. There’s no glory in becoming a dehumanized spectacle for fascistic control. That might not be as palatable for some publishers or studio heads as joining a cool group and fighting a cackling villain, but there’s a reason we remember The Hunger Games and not its wannabe YA offspring.

Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.