The YA dystopia craze died because it didn’t evolve

polygon.com:

Note: This essay on the Hunger Games phenomenon and the rise and fall of YA dystopias was originally published in 2021. It has been updated and republished due to the 2023 release of the prequel movie The Hunger Games: Songbirds & Snakes. .

The 2010s saw the rapid rise and equally rapid fall of the YA dystopian genre, with The Hunger Games and its followers dominating headlines and popular culture. It’s been argued that the dystopia boom was inspired by cynicism and anxiety in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but for those of us who became teenagers in the YA dystopia-obsession era, the films in particular served a different function: They cultivated a distrust for the government, expressing and amplifying how millennials around the world were tired of tyrannical leaders.

The Hunger Games in particular helped popularize what had already become a thriving literary subgenre, with books from Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel The Giver to Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series shaping the dystopian boom. And then the wave of Hunger Games copycats oversaturated the market and killed the fad — or so the popular story goes. Author Suzanne Collins calls back to it with her novel and now movie The Hunger Games: Songbirds & Snakes, but she’s unlikely to revive the subgenre, even if the movie turns out to be a hit. There are good reasons the YA dystopia boom ended, and they were built into its premises and execution all along.

The intensity of the fad certainly contributed to its end. In 2014 alone, four would-be blockbuster YA dystopian films hit theaters:The Hunger Games Mockingjay — Part 1, The Maze Runner, Divergent, andThe Giver. But saturation isn’t enough to kill a genre, as the last decade’s rolling wave of new superhero films proves. The