With Divergent in development, Lionsgate and Summit both saw another Hunger Games in the making, to the extent that they boosted the budget of the first instalment from $40m to $85m during production. The mini-major was just about to have its own massive success with The Hunger Games, which turned Lionsgate into a force to be reckoned with – we’ve covered how the film transformed the studio’s fortunes in a previous episode of the Film Stories podcast, which you can listen to below: Summit picked up the option to film Roth’s first instalment back in 2011, after the success of Twilight but before the studio was acquired by Lionsgate.

A fourth, titled Ascendant was meant to follow in summer 2017, but despite the third film, Allegiant, representing a series-low for both reviews and box office, there’s a seemingly simple but bizarre reason why the planned finale fell apart – Summit and Lionsgate decided to turn it into a TV series without asking any of the cast. In the end, three movies were produced on a more or less annual basis from March 2014 to March 2016. The allegory is too broad to countenance that anyone over the age of 19 would question why their government thinks the happiest people are stupid, selfish, lying cowards, and vice versa for each of the other categories. Well, she’s special because she’s all five, but the label applies to anyone who makes this barking system into any sort of Venn diagram.Īnyway, over the course of the books and the films, Tris and her good-looking teenage allies zipline around a bit and start a revolution. The hero of the story, Tris Prior, (played by the great Shailene Woodley in the films) is dubbed as ‘Divergent’ because she embodies… more than one of these traits. In the futuristic walled city of Chicago, the obligatory social classes are named by thesaurus for the attributes that each of them represent – Dauntless, (Brave!) Erudite, (Smart!) Abnegation, (Selfless!) Amity, (Happy?) and Candour (Honest?).

If you’re not up on your YA dystopian series, a spotter’s guide would identify Divergent as the one that posits a society built on the results of one of those Zimbio personality quizzes that your relatives on Facebook went doolally over a few years back. Both are dystopian sci-fi series aimed at the YA audience and on the cinematic side of things, both were produced for the screen by Summit Entertainment and Lionsgate Films. Try three issues of Film Stories magazine – for just £4.99: right here!īased on the novels by Veronica Roth, The Divergent Series was very much modelled after the success of The Hunger Games, both in print and on screen.

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