Although Stephanie Meyer’s 2013 movie adaptation seemed like it might become a perfect replacement for the Twilight saga, the sci-fi flop instead helped spell the end of a lucrative subgenre. The Twilight saga might not have impressed critics, but the series did become one of the most financially successful franchises of all time. The Twilight movies launched the careers of blockbuster stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, and between the five movies based on author Stephanie Meyer’s four-book YA novel series, the franchise managed to earn a staggering $3.3 billion at the box office.
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As such, it should come as no surprise that studios soon tried to make Meyers’ other bestselling book into their next massive franchise. Just as The Hunger Games movie were starting to take over the world and the Twilight saga was wrapping up, 2013’s The Host brought Meyers’ 2008 sci-fi novel of the same name to life onscreen. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Frances Fisher, and Diane Kruger, The Host told the story of Ronan’s Melanie, a teen who must resist a parasitic alien’s attempts to take over her mind while also trying to stop this alien’s race from permanently taking over the planet.
The Host Was Stephanie Meyer’s Second Major Franchise After The Twilight Saga
While this Invasion of the Body Snatchers-inspired premise had some potential, The Host’s reception was an outright disaster. Running a punishing 125 minutes, The Host earned only $63.3 million at the box office on a budget of $40 million, and critics hated the story’s blend of sci-fi, drama, romance, and thriller elements. Although YA dystopia movies like the Divergent series were huge hits around the same time, The Host was not quite able to cash in on this trend for numerous reasons.
For one thing, The Host might have been a sci-fi movie, but it wasn’t technically a dystopian story. Unlike its competitors, The Maze Runner, Ender’s Game, The Giver, and The Hunger Games, The Host was concerned with aliens taking over the planet rather than the internal divisions of a grim, corrupt future society. Furthermore, even viewed as an alien invasion story, The Host still left a lot to be desired. Possibly as a result of the dystopian genre’s popularity, The Host started its story after much of humanity had been taken over by the parasitic alien “Souls.”
The Host’s Failure Killed The Potential Twilight Replacement Franchise
This meant The Host was stacked with almost endless exposition from the beginning, which left the movie struggling to explain its labyrinthine backstory before the story could really get going. Wisely, the Twilight saga introduced vampires in the first movie, werewolves in the second, more sects of villainous vampires in the third, and a massive global coalition of these supernatural beings in the final outing. This allowed viewers to keep track of the franchise’s lore while also focusing on the love triangle that was the franchise’s true draw.
In contrast, the romance at the centre of The Host’s story couldn’t help but feel like a baffling distraction from the movie’s main storyline, mainly because the battle between humans and “Souls” was already complicated enough without another duelling plot line. As a result, The Host failed to spawn a franchise that could replicate Twilight’s success, despite early discussions of potential sequels before the movie’s release.
