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Good morning, Dauntless! Hello, Erudite! How goes it, Amity? How you feeling, Abnegation?! (Don’t answer that. You’re just going to say, “It’s not about me. How are you?”) This is the Divergent squad and we’re here to bring you this week’s episode of the Monitor podcast.
https://soundcloud.com/wired/the-monitor-episode-41
And this week we have a very important question: Is YA over? Like, not over over. There will always be books for young people. (Long live Judy Blume!) But as far as huge money-minting movie franchises go, maybe we’re seeing the end of days for film adaptations of young adult fiction. This weekend the third movie in the Divergent franchise, Allegiant, brought in just $29 million domestically at the box office in its opening weekend—a 44 percent drop from the previous installment, Insurgent, and $9 million behind reigning king Zootopia. That’s not a good look, and it might mean audiences are finally losing their taste for dystopian YA flicks.
You know what audiences haven’t lost their appetite for? Superhero stuff. And we’ve got a big one coming up this weekend with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. We also have some slightly smaller superhero fare on offer now that Season 2 of Daredevil is on Netflix. In other words, we have a lot to talk about on this week’s WIRED culture podcast. We’ve got editors and contributors Angela Watercutter and K.M. McFarland, as well as editorial fellow Emma Grey Ellis, in the booth and we’re ready to mourn the end of the YA boom and look expectantly toward our cape-filled future. Pop in your earbuds and join us, won’t you?
A few helpful links for things we talk about in the podcast:
-K.M. McFarland’s piece on the toy-collector Easter egg that went out to buyers of Funko’s Star Wars subscription box -Emma Grey Ellis’ story on the Batman v Superman marketing campaign –Projections for Batman v Superman’s opening weekend box office -The new Luke Cagetrailer -WIRED’s take on Batman v Superman:
