Will There Be A Fourth Maze Runner
The Fever Code. The Kill Order is a young-adult dystopian science-fiction novel and the fourth book in The Maze Runner series written by James Dashner. It is the first prequel in series, telling the events before The Maze Runner and The Fever Code. It is followed by The Fever Code. It was published on August 14, 2012. We Maze Runner fans do not like to bring up this topic, but.here we go. You see, Newt was not Immune, like the rest of the Gladers. He had the Flare and becomes a Crank. Before, however, he gives Thomas a letter, in which he asks Thomas to kill him.
As young-adult franchises go, The Maze Runner has always had a grab-bag, bargain-bin quality to it. There’s a little bit of something for everyone—a wicked corporation (that’s conveniently named “WCKD”); a post-apocalyptic society choked with hordes of roving zombies; a futuristic city housing the elite; a love triangle; and a cornucopia of middle-aged character actors surrounding our teenaged heroes. As its final edition, The Death Cure, rolls into theaters, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer amount of content packed into The Maze Runner trilogy, if by nothing else.
We’re only six years removed from the release of the first entry in The Hunger Games, the film franchise based on a series of dystopian young-adult books that inspired a slew of Hollywood imitators—including the Divergent movies and the spiffed-up take on Lois Lowry’s The Giver. But in 2018, The Maze Runner seems almost charmingly outdated, a veritable throwback in today’s accelerated Hollywood climate. Plucky kids defying their futuristic corporate overlords might be yesterday’s news, but there’s one last maze for our heroes to solve.
The first Maze Runner, released in 2014, was set entirely within—you might want to sit down for this—a huge maze, populated by a coterie of athletic young male amnesiacs. The protagonistThomas (Dylan O’Brien) was dumped into the labyrinth without his memory, and bonded with fellow “runners” like Minho (Ki Hong Lee) and Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) as they tried to solve the mystery of their giant prison and did battle with horrifying techno-organic monsters. It turned out (spoiler alert) that the maze was a gigantic science experiment run by WCKD, a company searching for the cure to a world-ending plague.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - When the third film in the 'Maze Runner' trilogy hits theaters this weekend, it could mark the end of an era in moviemaking, as it will likely be the last movie of the so-called young adult dystopian subgenre.
The final chapter of the trilogy concludes the only even modestly successful franchise to come from the fever that followed 'The Hunger Games' in 2012, which seemed to convince Hollywood that every book starring a group of young people navigating a post-apocalyptic world needed to be adapted into a film.
It's six years later and no franchise has yet managed to achieve the same success as 'The Hunger Games.'
While the two previous 'Maze Runner' movies made a profit, the second was decidedly less successful than the first, making around $36 million less than its predecessor on a bigger budget.
There's plenty of reason to believe that the third entry in the series will continue that downward trend, as it makes many of the same mistakes as the first sequel.
Much of the first 'Maze Runner's' enjoyment came from watching a group of unreasonably well-groomed teenagers explore a maze, extract its secrets and ultimately escape. The creative problem solving by its protagonists helped the movie overcome poor writing and a general lack of new ideas.
But with the major characters free from their entrapment in the next two films, the trilogy loses much of its charm.
The filmmakers behind the series have already run out of source material, and the modest box-office grosses on the most recent movie hardly justify going to the effort of dreaming up new entries.
Another inferior clone of 'The Hunger Games,' the 'Divergent' series, has already died a slow, painful, and foreseeable death, as the fourth and final film was cancelled, leaving the over-arching story unresolved.
Meanwhile, other young adult franchises haven't been able to get off the ground.
'The Host,' 'The Fifth Wave,' 'The Giver,' and 'Ender's Game' all disappointed at the box office and failed to spawn sequels.
Plenty of young-adult novels set in post-apocalyptic worlds remain, but it's hard to see movie producers greenlighting adaptations if they have no reason to believe they'll pull people to movie theaters. So if this really is it for 'The Maze Runner,' that means the door likely is closed on young-adult dystopian movies, at least for now.
Hollywood has long demonstrated that it has no idea what its customers really want to see on the big screen. Dozens of sci-fi and fantasy adventures rolled into theaters in the late '70s and early '80s thanks to the runaway success of the 'Star Wars' trilogy. Don't remember any of them? That's because they all failed.
'Star Wars' succeeded in part because no one had ever seen a visionary director seamlessly mesh elements of sci-fi and fantasy into a movie filled with iconic imagery and endearing characters. That original blend translated into box-office gold that was nearly impossible to replicate. 'The Hunger Games' succeeded at the box office in a similar manner by mixing genres and styles and providing a compelling cast of heroes and villains.
Without memorable characters and original stories, attempts to duplicate the success of 'The Hunger Games' fell flat in an eerily similiar way.
The Maze Runner 2
Movie producers could learn a lesson from all of this, that maybe they don't need to pull the trigger on every project that just so happens to share a genre with a successful peer. But something tells me they won't.