Although the Divergent series premiered 12 years ago today, the franchise never finished the superb story of its source series thanks to box office disappointments. After the blockbuster success of author Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, Hollywood inevitably went on the hunt for other YA dystopian sci-fi books that could be adapted into lucrative movies. Among these were The Maze Runner franchise, The 5th Wave, Ender’s Game, The Giver, and 2013’s The Host.
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While these movies varied in terms of quality, few of them were as successful as 2014’s Divergent. Based on the 2011 novel of the same name by author Veronica Roth, Divergent was set in a future where humanity has been split into five factions based on their personality traits. These five factions, Abnegation, Dauntless, Erudite, Amity, and Candor, demand conformity to their defining characteristics, which spells trouble for the novel’s heroine, Beatrice “Tris” Prior, when she discovers she is a “Divergent.” As their name implies, “Divergents” blend various traits instead of embodying only one.
Divergent Premiered On March 18, 2014
Related on March 18, 2014, Divergent was a huge hit with audiences despite failing to impress critics. The movie starred Shailene Woodley as Tris and Theo James as her love interest, Four, while Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz, Ansel Elgort, and Maggie Q played supporting roles. Kate Winslet was the original movie’s villain, Jeanine Matthews, and her performance was singled out for praise alongside Woodley’s central turn. However, critics felt that Divergent’s action sequences couldn’t live up to the high bar set by The Hunger Games movie adaptations.
Despite middling reviews, the first movie in the series earned $288 million at the box office on a budget of only $85 million. Since there are three books in the original novel trilogy, Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, readers naturally assumed that the successful first movie would spawn sequels that went on to adapt these novels. Indeed, that was how things panned out at first, until the teen YA dystopia craze died down and took the franchise with it.
2015’s first sequel, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, was an even bigger commercial success than its predecessor, making $297 million. However, with a budget of $110 million, the sequel was also a markedly more expensive endeavour, and this soon proved a problem for the series. The Divergent Series: Insurgent was viewed as an improvement on the original movie by critics, but its sequel, 2016’s Allegiant, wasn’t so lucky. Despite a starry cast including Jeff Daniels, Naomi Watts, and Octavia Spencer, this sequel cost over $110 million and made only $179 million at the box office.
The Divergent Franchise Was Never Officially Finished
Allegiant‘s disastrous commercial reception, coupled with almost universally negative reviews, was the death knell for the many movie adaptations of teen YA dystopian novels that had proven popular in the wake of The Hunger Games franchise’s success. Divergent and Allegiant were released exactly a year apart after Divergent, but Allegiant flopped so hard that the franchise’s planned final entry was changed from a theatrical movie to a Starz TV movie. This planned movie would have been followed by a spinoff series, but the concluding chapter of the Divergent series was eventually scrapped entirely years later after a lengthy stint in Development Hell.
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