Are Dystopian Movies Making A Comeback?
The year is 2012, the theater is packed, you can hear the soft crunching of popcorn and opening of candy, all while you hear a rather chipper Elizabeth Banks utter, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” Did I paint the scene well? The Hunger Games premiered in March of 2012 and the Dystopian genre was forever changed. Movies such as Maze Runner, Divergent, and The Giver soon followed, along with The Hunger Games sequels. The craze was nothing like I had seen before. Dystopian books were flying off of the shelves of book stores, making kids actually like read, and the movie theaters were sold out with lines of hundreds of girls donning Team Gale and Team Peeta shirts. Then, as quickly as the obsession flushed the nation, it quickly drowned out. But, why?
The dystopian genre shows us a futuristic society with eerily familiar themes of the current one we live in. Everyone can find similarities within themselves to relate to the characters of these stories and, if you can’t, you can at least detect a resemblance to the way the characters live in their society to ours. For as long as film has been around, Hollywood always toyed with the genre… and for good reason. The genre consists of subgenres that allow it to cast such a large audience. Dystopian movies have drama, adventure, and action, all of which have been the most popular movie genres in the United States and Canada between 1995 to 2023 (by total box office revenue). But, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. The dystopian genre started to fall behind in the box office, mainly because audiences knew what to expect. The movies that were emerging all shared common tropes and characters, often leading them to feel predictable and repetitive… that is, until 2023.
Within the same month The Hunger Games originally came out 11 years ago, the francise was suddenly… trending on TikTok? Yup, you read that correctly! In March of 2023, Netflix added all four Hunger Games movies to their platform, causing a resurgence for both original and new fans to binge their favorite dystopian movies again and have a newfound appreciation for them. This very well could have been a marketing tactic to get audiences excited for the new prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, hitting theaters this November. But I fell for it, as did everyone else, as the movies were in Netflix’s Top 10 within a week of being added. I missed watching these dystopian movies. As common as some of their tropes were, aren’t we all victims to predictable plots sometimes?
Suzanne Collins, the author and bestseller of the original Hunger Games trilogy, released The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in May of 2020 and the book became the top selling book in any category for the first half of 2020. To date, there are more than 3.5 million copies of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in print in North America. I think the quote “absence makes the heart grow fonder” applies directly to the dystopian genre. A Quiet Place, released in 2018, while not distinctly dystopian or marketed as such, takes place in a post-apocalyptic future and rang in a worldwide total of $341 million in the box office. Dune, which is set on dystopian planet, was released in October 2021 and earned $402 million in the box office. It seems as though everything dystopian is gaining traction again, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. That’s especially true with the release of The Last of Us, which premiered in March of 2023 and became the most-watched Max show ever, averaging over 30 million viewers per episode. Are you seeing a pattern here?
The want for dystopian films is back, better and bigger than ever before. With the prequel of the beloved Hunger Games releasing this November and fans already rallying behind the film, I think it’s safe to say (I’m also seriously hoping) there is a current revival of the dystopian genre.
To quote President Snow: “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear.” Cheers to that!
