Brittany Previte
Hollywood loves Young Adult fiction, as do I. This month we will see Ender’s Game, The Book Thief and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire on the big screens nationwide. These three films are just the latest installments in a long line of YA book-to-film adaptations, a trend that will plow through 2014 as avid readers and viewers eagerly await titles like Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars. Hollywood is frenziedly capitalizing on what experts are calling a second renaissance of YA literature.
While I myself look forward to seeing some of my favorite books adapted (and, I admit, dogmatically criticizing each film as it strays from my imaginings of the books), I worry about the consequences this YA love affair has on the genre. With movie studios snatching up rights to these books even before they are written, marketers putting films in boxes as the next Harry Potter, and authors writing books specifically engineered for adaptation, a general feeling of manufactured storytelling pollutes both the page and the screen.
Beyond box office earnings, these films have the potential to evolve into franchises a la Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games. The obsession with these films (yes, even Twilight) leads to more books checked out of libraries, more fan-fiction written, and more in-depth discussions about stories, which is positive in my opinion.
Where the picture gets less pretty is when the art that first engaged readers is shoved away to make room for the next popular series. After the Twilight phenomenon began its reign, bookstores paraded out sections dedicated exclusively to teen paranormal romance, and now, riding the success of Suzanne Collins, every YA fiction writer and her brother is writing the next great teen dystopian novel. It has long been the tendency of writers to hop on the bandwagon of popular trends, but the similarity of books lining the shelves in the YA is startling.
I am sometimes awestruck by the lengths some will go to in order to force art. James Grey’s company Full Fathom Five, for instance, hires lesser-known authors to basically mass-produce books engineered to reach maximum marketability and adaptability for film. Its book I Am Number Four, sold well and spawned a mildly successful film, yet as many consumers and critics realized, the story is bland, with a typical and unlikable protagonist. A good book is no guarantee of a good film: see Eragon and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, for further evidence — yet adapting a mediocre book that attempts to find some formulaic success by catering to Hollywood’s every whim is just embarrassing.
I, for one, will be going to see Catching Fire and the rest because I enjoy the original books and am excited to see them adapted to a new medium. However, I reserve the right to sigh and roll my eyes at the endlessly repetitive covers in the YA section. Hopefully, as readers and moviegoers discriminate between good art and shameless mediocrity, the YA genre can find its footing once again as a medium for diverse stories that tackle important issues.