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).