The Real Reason These YA Novel Movie Adaptations Flopped

For a long stretch, the biggest film adaptations of Young Adult (YA) novels truly dominated the pop culture landscape. Twilight was a worldwide phenomenon, ditto for The Hunger Games and The Fault in our Stars. The trend continues even now with streaming titles like To All the Boys I've Loved Before. In the best cases for these adaptations, fans of the books come out in droves to see what these stories look like performed by flesh-and-blood humans. In the process, movie studios make a lot of money, especially since these films tend to be cheaper to produce than your average superhero flick. Meanwhile, actors like Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Shailene Woodley get their careers kickstarted. 

Of course, no genre is foolproof at the box office, and the realm of the YA novel adaptation is no exception. Just because the most famous examples of YA adaptations were massive sensations, that doesn't mean that's the norm for how these movies perform at the box office. Over the years, many of these titles have tended to struggle at theaters, stopping brand new franchises dead in their tracks. These films have underperformed for a whole slew of reasons, including the lack of a big fanbase for their source material and marketing that tries too hard to chase what's popular. Whatever the reason, these YA adaptations show that it's not as easy as it seems to make the next Twilight-level phenomenon at the box office.

Today, Saoirse Ronan is best known as a multi-Oscar nominee who regularly works with acclaimed auteurs like Greta Gerwig and Wes Anderson. But in 2013, Ronan made a stab at mainstream Hollywood stardom by headlining The Host. An adaptation of a romantic sci-fi novel penned by Stephenie Meyer, The Host was about a girl trapped in a love triangle, similar to the author's previous love story – Twilight. This time, though, body-snatching aliens took over the part of vampires and werewolves. And instead of being pined after by two boys, the lead lady in The Host was overtaken by an emotionless alien. That's not exactly a premise that the target demo of these romantic dramas would want to live out.

Despite inherent problems with the setup of The Host, distributor Open Road Films felt they had the goods here, seeing as they put out a teaser on screenings of The Hunger Games, which was released a whole year before The Host's actual release. However, a long-term marketing campaign is no good if the film you're selling doesn't resonate with audiences. Unfortunately, The Host never had as compelling of characters as Edward or Jacob to work with, nor did its marketing lean into the unique qualities of aliens like the Twilight marketing did with vampires. Grossing only $63.3 million worldwide, The Host never spawned a franchise akin to Twilight, leaving Ronan time to do the kind of hefty dramatic roles that have really defined her career as an actress.

Timing wasn't The 5th Wave's strongest suit. When it arrived, not only had the entire Hunger Games franchise (which The 5th Wave was clearly mimicking) been released, Hunger Games knockoffs had begun to grow stale. Was the world craving another movie starring a teenage protagonist navigating a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Timely or not, The 5th Wave intended to show there was still life in this subgenre with its tale of a girl trying to reunite with her younger brother in the wake of a vicious alien invasion.

The premise was presented in an assortment of bland marketing materials utilizing imagery seemingly lifted from Battle: Los Angeles. Such uninspired marketing failed to captivate viewers. Worse, The 5th Wave wasn't based on a literary phenomenon like Twilight or The Hunger Games. Without either strong marketing or a well-known source material, The 5th Wave would have to work overtime to entice general moviegoers ... and such an audience never came. 

The 5th Wave crashed in its late January 2016 release, grossing only $109 million worldwide on a $38 million budget. That was considerably below any of the YA novel adaptations it was clearly mimicking, and it also came up short when compared to sci-fi action movies in general. In the process, The 5th Wave failed to make a case for there being much interest in further Hunger Games knockoffs. As they say, timing is everything.

It was a cosmic coincidence that Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant managed to come out in the wake of the first Twilight's movies success. After all, not every vampire movie, even ones based on novels aimed at teens, are inherently going to be chasing the success of Bella Swan. in the case of The Vampire's Assistant, it began filming nearly a year before Twilight's November 2008 premiere. Of course, the eventual success of the first Twilight movie certainly played like music to the ears of the producers of The Vampire's Assistant, which was an adaptation of a Darren Shan novel entitled Vampire Blood. Seeing that they had the next teen-oriented bloodsucker movie on the market, it's likely these filmmakers thought that they may have a new franchise on their hands.

In the end, what the producers actually had was a future box office flop. Grossing only $39.2 million worldwide on a $40 million budget, The Vampire's Assistant failed to make any kind of profit, let alone garner any sort of franchise. The issue here was most likely with the tone of its marketing, which tried to straddle the line between comedy and horror but never found a proper balance. It also struggled with the fact that movie vampires were so widely seen as a Twilight-only phenomenon made The Vampire's Assistant seem like (fairly or not) a cash grab.

Wish fulfillment is a big part of what makes so many science fiction movies successful. In the case of I Am Number Four, the film had a major problem in making its sci-fi premise seem like anything remotely desirable to its audience. The film's protagonist, a teenage boy who's actually an alien, didn't get the cool powers that audiences like to imagine themselves with, like flight or telepathy. Instead, he could shoot bright lights from his palms, and that's all the marketing showed. However, that was just one of many issues I Am Number Four had to face. There was also the fact that its lead character was named Number Four, like this was some sort of stealth Codename: Kids Next Door reboot. 

I Am Number Four and its premise of a humanoid alien who falls in love with a human girl in a small Ohio town while being on the run from an alien hunter had shades of Twilight all over it. This extended to how the source material was purchased by DreamWorks SKG shortly after the first Twilight movies release. In hindsight, I Am Number Four's $150 million worldwide gross was actually significantly better than the box office hauls of most other Twilight knockoffs that would follow. However, it was still largely seen as a dud, particularly when compared to the most lucrative YA novel adaptations. Maybe things would've been better if they had just given Number Four a different name?

Prior to release, the film Ender's Game generated controversy for accusations of homophonic comments and behavior on the part of the author of the original book, Orson Scott Card. Such discourse dominated pre-release discussion of the film and led to speculation that it was the primary motivator behind the movie's eventually underwhelming box office grosses. However, there was more going on with Ender's Game than just the remarks of the author. The movie was already in trouble thanks to its large-scale marketing campaign, which made the Gavin Hood-directed film adaptation look less than enticing. 

Though its source material was massively influential in the world of sci-fi literature, the Ender's Game movie was stuck with trailers and posters that made it look derivative of other sci-fi movies. Then there was Lionsgate's puzzling decision of when to release the movie. Ender's Game was scheduled to make its domestic bow a week before Thor: The Dark World and only three weeks before Lionsgate's own Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which limited the film's chances of box office success. In the end, Ender's Game grossed just $125.5 million on a $110 million budget. Card's controversial comments did Ender's Game no favors, particularly in helping to define so much of its pre-release conversation. But looking at the film's release as a whole, it becomes apparent that there were a lot of factors holding this movie back at the box office.