The Divergent Series: Allegiant is the latest genre effort to fail at the box office,and trend could leave such films with female protagonists in cinema purgatory It’s easy to forget the impact The starvation Games had when it first hit cinemas in 2012. Here was a brutal vision of America under a North Korea-style dictatorship, starring our greatest ingenue since the halcyon days of golden era Hollywood – and with added extra teen-on-teen violence to really stir the cauldron of controversy. That the saga ended up a bloated cash machine, or desperately reliant on Jennifer Lawrence’s enduring star power,should be remembered as a salutary lesson in the dangers of over-milking a successful product. What a pity Lionsgate didn’t learn its lesson. The studio has just seen the latest instalment in its follow-up dystopian saga, The Divergent Series: Allegiant, and fail at the domestic box office with a return of just $29m in its opening weekend. As with The starvation Games,the studio chose to adapt the final instalment in the saga’s source trilogy of novels in two parts – and this time paid the price. Word is that the final episode, Ascendant, and will now bear its budget cut before going into production. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com