Divergent: the Hollywood Blockbuster that Failed Spectacularly
It’s official: the Divergent movies are a poor representation of the books. Moreover, we now know the supposed ending for the franchise won’t be made. That means the Hollywood blockbuster Divergent failed spectacularly.
We all remember the phenomenon Twilight when it hit the movie theaters, and all the sequels that came after that. We were the ones who kept saying, “this is different from the book!” and “I read this, you know these are books, right?”
Then The Hunger Games turned into films. Another huge success that restored our faith in the YA genre. And as we were reading the Divergent series, we couldn’t wait for the upcoming movie Hollywood was talking about.
I really enjoyed the first movie. Very similar to the book, and I absolutely loved the actors chosen for each character. The stressful and kind-of-suffocating vibe of that society was well captured. When the second movie released, I pretty much stayed indifferent to it. I thought they aimed for a more futuristic theme for the film, one I didn’t quite catch on the book Insurgent. Then, with Allegiant, it all went downhill.
Their first mistake was dividing the story into two films. No need for that! Just because Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games deserved two movies to capture the ending of big stories, not all franchises need to be never-ending to make billions of dollars. Besides, it seemed they didn’t do their research right, given the fact that most Divergent fans hated the last book on the series.
Their second mistake: straying from the original plot. When the movie was halfway over, I was already uninterested. I also noticed the intent of making Tris the face of the revolution, like Katniss in The Hunger Games. Except Tris didn’t quite lead a revolution in Divergent. She sacrificed for the greater good, to save everyone else and what she believed in.
I must say I was curious to see what the screenwriters would do about Tris’s anticlimactic death in the final movies. But when I witnessed a whole different approach to it, I was just embarrassed. I had spent my time and money for nothing. Things got worse when the news broke about the fourth film being turned into a TV movie. Here’s your spectacular fail, which culminated in all actors showing their lack of interest in being a part of that initiative.
So here we are, with three movies, the last one a poor portrait of Veronica Roth’s narrative and ending on a cliffhanger. But what I feel most sorry for is the author. Besides infuriating millions of fans with that ending, her story depicted in the movies just might have scared off many potential fans from the books.
