It's not often you get to see stories like this in the film world, so savour it.
Thanks to repeatedly poor showings at the box-office and almost universally negative reviews, Variety has reported that the Divergent Series is being kicked out of theatres and into the realm of television for its finale. Ascendant, which was originally scheduled for a June 2017 release, is now being turned into a TV movie with the film also acting as the beginning of a spinoff series set in the same universe.
The previous film, Allegiant, is currently sitting at 13% on Rotten Tomatoes and only made a paltry $179,000,000 against a production budget of $110,000,000 and an unknown figure for promotional and marketing. The series - which has had some heavy-hitters like Naomi Watts, Jeff Daniels, Kate Winslet and Miles Teller - will now meet its end on television, which is a pretty ignominious end for a series that was intended to rival Jennifer Lawrence and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games.
As it stands, it's not yet confirmed if Shailene Woodley, Theo James and Ansel Elgort will be returning for the TV movie finale as it's likely their deals worked from film to film rather than an entire franchise.
So, thoughts? It's fantastic that studios are finally beginning to realise that you can't polish up a turd and expect it to work for everyone. Young adult adaptations are now officially done and dusted and, to be honest, that's no bad thing. Hunger Games was essentially the outlier as most of them were pretty underwhelming, both commercially and critically.
It's a shame because, as we mentioned, there were a lot of decent actors attached to the series - and now they've got this crap attached to their CVs.
Via Variety
