Slide 25 of this week’s PowerPoint talked about how popular culture can be seen as a “mirror” highlighting key aspects about our society’s characteristics. It also spurred the question of if the dystopian genre had fallen out of favor, and what its quick “uprising” in popularity said about how young people saw the world.
Rewinding back to 2012, not only had I read all the “Hunger
Games” books, but as an angsty pre-teen girl, I was the story’s target demographic.
Therefore, I feel particularly qualified to speak on a potential answer to the question.
With the release of the third and fourth Hunger Games movies,
there was a palpable drop in interest. Yes, the movie trailers continued to
play on YouTube, but there was an absence of that brewing excitement in
classrooms that was so evident with the first two movies. This is reflected in
the box office numbers that I have linked below, with the second movie performing
slightly better than the first. The third movie saw a profound drop of almost
$100 million in box office revenue, with the 2015 release of the fourth movie
doing even worse.
My theory as to the dystopian genre’s fall from grace is directly
correlated to the perception of its growing target audience.
There is a sense that Divergent was the killing blow to the dystopian
genre. Below, I have linked Sarah Z’s in-depth analysis on this. In short, the
series was picked up simply because it rode “The Hunger Games'" coattails, and
studios saw the potential for profit. The story itself skins bare the skeleton of the
genre, playing out seemingly mandatory tropes like placing people into
categories, having a protagonist that defies the rules, and having a generally
oppressive dictatorship without much of an ideology.
As the dystopian pre-teen audience grew up, not only could they see the almost formulaic quality emerging in the newer movies, but young adulthood stopped the stories from being escapism. They instead began to feel more like a page from a real news paper, and the political upheaval quickly following the genre’s demise is further proof of that.
My hypothesis is that popular discussion threads like “a boring dystopia” (2016) became established in response to the genre glamorizing dystopia. The thread regularly points out the dystopian reality in how our society functions. A popular topic is the numerous ways in which people get negatively impacted by America’s healthcare industry.
Anecdotally I remember many young people being upset at the hypocrisy of real-life companies creating make-up lines themed after the showy, but oppressive “Capital” regime in the Hunger Games story.
Do you think that it was mere genre fatigue that caused the dystopian
series to go the way of the dodo or was it a combination of its initial
audience growing up amid a newly polarized political landscape?
Sarah Z YouTube Channel Link: “The Rise and Fall of Teen
Dystopias” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxGGWn3gWA
Hunger Games Box Office Numbers: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Hunger-Games#tab=summary
“A boring dystopia” article: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/z1v9yh/hospitals_around_the_us_are_closing_pediatric/
In response to your question I do not believe that the failure of the dystopian based movies was from the growing up of the audience. Often times when people watch movies from their childhood it's seen as nostalgic. There are films such as Starwars, Lord of the Rings, and Back to the Future that turn popular into classics. When these films first came out it was the trend of their times but they were so well loved and valued that people no matter their age come back to them. The fall of the dystopian age was part of the mass push of book to movie adaptations. In the early 2000's a major part of the film industries were focused on young adult books. From the Twilight Saga, Hunger Games, and Maze Runner. This excluded many people from wanting to watch the films solely because they didn't read the books and people were looked down on because of their "illiteracy". Thus creating a drop in trend and sales for these films.
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