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 Hunger 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, 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, fail at the domestic box office with a return of just $29m in its opening weekend. As with The Hunger 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, will now have its budget cut before going into production.

Divergent sequel Allegiant struggles at US box office as fans tire of Hollywood's split ends Read more

Allegiant is only the most recent young adult science fiction effort to nosedive at the box office. One of the first to fail was The Host, led by Saoirse Ronan and based on Twilight author Stephenie Meyer’s futuristic romance about an Earth beset by bodysnatching (yet occasionally benevolent) aliens. Then came this year’s The Fifth Wave, with Kick Ass’s Chloë Moretz as a young woman searching for her brother in the aftermath of a devastating extraterrestrial invasion. Both were based on bestselling literary sagas, both simply failed to translate to the big screen.

Not so long ago studios were snapping up the rights to every young adult novel in circulation. But the genre’s recent struggles seem to have left many in development hell. A lot will be riding on the July release of Drake Doremus’s Equals, an original sci-fi piece starring Twilight’s Kristen Stewart as a young woman living in a dystopia where human beings’ emotions have been eradicated. There’s also Fallen, which will cleave closer to the dark fantasy romance blueprint of Meyers’s hit saga with its depiction of a school where many students have a connection to the paranormal. Scott Hicks’s film debuts in September.

If both fail, and Equals picked up weak reviews when it debuted in last year at the Toronto film festival, the young adult genre could well be dead as Edward Cullen’s pulse. And why should we care? After all, for every Hunger Games there are currently about a dozen Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part Ones.

The simple fact is that these movies, with their tendency towards female protagonists, are helping to balance a blockbuster slate that’s heavily weighted towards male-dominated superhero fare. This might all change next year if Wonder Woman blazes a trail for Warner Bros’s planned DC Comics cinematic universe, or if Marvel finally gets its act together on the diversity front and delivers a killer Captain Marvel movie in 2019. But neither of those prospects is exactly written in stone. There’s a reason writers have started to shoe-horn in gender-swapped storylines in the comic books: the basic superhero gene pool is one enormous sausage party. Even Captain Marvel used to be a bloke.

So where might female roles come from if the dystopian genre fails entirely? As usual, the best way to get a glimpse into the future is to keep a close eye on Lawrence.

Jennifer Lawrence to be paid $8m more than Chris Pratt for Passengers Read more

The Oscar-winner’s next big science fiction outing is Passengers, opposite Chris Pratt, which doesn’t have a young adult grounding and as far as we know isn’t designed to be the first in a series. Neither is it set in a horrifying future: Morten Tyldum’s film, which debuts in December, will take place entirely on board a vast spaceship heading off to a new human homeworld. The story begins when Pratt’s space traveller awakes early from cryogenic sleep and decides to wake up another passenger (Lawrence) to keep him from going stir crazy. Inevitably, romance (and presumably some kind of additional crisis, as the movie is projected to cost at least $100m) ensues.

Passengers follow Sandra Bullock’s turn as an astronaut struggling to deal with the aftermath of a disaster in space in the Oscar-winning Gravity, as well as numerous Alien movies old and new, in imagining a world to come built around dauntless women. It sounds like a tantalising blend of Titanic and Silent Running.

Could major success built around Lawrence’s remarkable star quality spark off a new wave of original female-led sci-fi, suddenly emancipated from the shackles of young adult literary roots? Studios might be forced to accept that endless adaptations of identikit teen trilogies, with their penchant for storylines that are about as cinematic as an episode of General Hospital , are not the future after all.