10 years on from the final book’s publication, Divergent series author Veronica Roth has shared her thoughts on the films’ unfinished ending.
The author of the teen-dystopia Divergent series, which spawned a film series unceremoniously ended with one film left to be released, has been chatting to People about the franchise’s legacy – and it sounds like she’s come to terms with the third film’s abrupt end.
“It feels complete to me, relatively speaking, because what does that even mean at that point?” she adds.
The Divergent series arrived in the midst of a sizeable 2010s teen dystopia boom, with the first installment arriving the same year as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One and The Maze Runner. While both its stablemates would conclude their arcs with decent box office returns, Divergent ultimately ended up lost in the fray. Though the first film and its sequel, Insurgent, both made over $200 million, the planned two-film finale came to an early end after Allegiant underperformed with critics and audiences alike.
The choice to end the series with a final book split into two parts was also very in vogue at the time, with Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Twilight all making the financially lucrative decision to eke an extra film out of their box office-dominating franchises. In fact, the directors of The Deathly Hallows and Mockingjay have both talked about the difficulties and regrets this caused in the last few months.
“I mean, breaking things in two was all the rage at the time. That was why that decision was made,” says Roth. “But at that point, I think I always felt peace about it just because I knew the movies were taking a different track than the books, and if you change the lead up, you change the ending. So I kind of felt like at that point … I feel like that third movie, I don’t know — there’s a lot we could talk about with it. But it’s its own thing.”
About separating books into multiple movies, Roth says, “I just feel like it’s got to be a big, long book in order for that to make sense.”
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
