12 Years Later an Underrated Dystopian Sci-Fi Just Became a Major Hit For HBO Max

August 5, 2026, 12:00pm

Movie franchises rarely get a second life once their theatrical run ends, especially in the crowded young adult dystopian genre that dominated the 2010s. Still, audiences apparently cannot resist a story about adults experimenting on young people, separating them from society, and forcing them to fight through an elaborate system for everyone’s supposed benefit. While many of those franchises faded after their final installments, one has quietly refused to disappear. Nearly every time it lands on a major streaming service, viewers rediscover it and send it back into the platform’s most-watched titles. That is happening again now, raising the possibility that Hollywood may have underestimated just how much life remains in one of the era’s biggest dystopian adventures. In an era when studios increasingly use streaming performance to measure whether audiences still care about older franchises, one familiar YA property continues proving it has never really gone away.

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According to FlixPatrol, The Maze Runner is currently the No. 6 movie worldwide on HBO Max, continuing a trend that has followed the film for years. Nearly every time Wes Ball’s adaptation of James Dashner’s bestselling novel lands on a major streaming platform, it climbs into the service’s Top 10. Whether it’s Netflix, Hulu, or now HBO Max, The Maze Runner continues finding new viewers more than a decade after its theatrical release while longtime fans keep returning to the Glade. That consistency has become one of the franchise’s defining traits. While plenty of former box office hits enjoy a brief streaming resurgence, The Maze Runner seems to repeat the cycle every time it becomes easily available. At a time when Hollywood is constantly searching for recognizable IP with built-in audiences, The Maze Runner keeps performing and it’s worth taking notice of.

The Maze Runner Keeps Finding New Audiences

Part of The Maze Runner‘s staying power also comes from its cast. Looking back more than a decade later, the film has quietly become one of those movies that’s fun to revisit simply because of how many familiar faces audiences recognize today. Dylan O’Brien has grown into one of Hollywood’s most dependable leading men, Will Poulter has become a fixture in everything from prestige dramas to Marvel blockbusters, Kaya Scodelario went on to lead Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Netflix’s The Gentlemen, while Thomas Brodie-Sangster introduced himself to an entirely new generation through The Queen’s Gambit. Rewatching The Maze Runner today comes with an added layer of fun as viewers point at the screen, Leonardo DiCaprio meme style, realizing just how many future stars were running through the Glade before they became household names. The film also occupies an interesting place in blockbuster history, helping establish Wes Ball as a major studio director before he went on to helm Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and the in production Legend of Zelda. More than ten years later, The Maze Runner has quietly become one of the YA genre’s most reliable streaming performers.

Maybe the Future Isn’t Another Movie

If The Maze Runner is going to return, however, another film may not be the most exciting possibility. Hollywood has increasingly embraced prestige television as the ideal way to revisit beloved young adult novels, giving adaptations the room to tell stories that theatrical releases often had to compress. HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series and Disney’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians demonstrate that audiences are eager to revisit familiar worlds when they’re given the space to breathe rather than being squeezed into two-hour runtimes. James Dashner’s novels feel particularly well-suited to that same approach. A serialized adaptation could spend more time exploring life inside the Glade before the larger mysteries unfold, develop the relationships between Thomas, Teresa, Newt, and the other Gladers in greater depth, and build out the mythology surrounding WCKD without rushing through key moments. Instead of remaking the movies, a television series could offer fans the definitive adaptation of the books while introducing the franchise to an entirely new generation.

Whether that happens remains to be seen, but The Maze Runner keeps sending Hollywood the same message every time it arrives on another streaming platform. Audiences haven’t forgotten the franchise. If anything, they’re reminding studios that one of the biggest YA worlds of the last decade may have always been better suited for television than the big screen. The industry has already shown a willingness to revisit beloved book series in long-form television, and The Maze Runner feels increasingly like another candidate waiting for that opportunity. Its continued streaming success suggests there is still a substantial audience ready to return to the Glade. The only remaining question is whether Hollywood sees those streaming numbers as a nostalgic curiosity, or as evidence that one of the biggest YA franchises of the 2010s deserves a second life in an entirely new format.