Which Teen Dystopia Film Series Is The Best?



There was a time in the early to mid-2010s when movie theaters weren’t exclusively ruled by superhero films, there were still plenty of other genres and even subgenres that were doing incredibly well. Perhaps one of the strangest sub-genres to find success during this time was the era of the teenage dystopia films.

0:001:51 – The Teen Dystopia Era
1:527:44 – The Hunger Games
7:4513:09 – The Maze Runner
13:1020:01 – Divergent
20:0227:05 – The YA Dystopian Awards Ceremony

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44 thoughts on “Which Teen Dystopia Film Series Is The Best?”

  1. As somebody who has read every single book series on that list and seen the movies hunger games wins other then haymitch who was supposed to have brown hair and eyes they all look extremely similar but the killing scene sometimes were bad because the movie can’t be r or they’d lose money but catching fire is fantastic and mockingjay let’s be real here didn’t have much to work of off I still find prim dying a horrible choice but hey I love how she kills coin instead of snow and all the characters are really great

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  2. Divergent series sucked. I hated it. The books and movies. They messed it all up with rewriting the story.

    The hunger games failed from jump to stay truer to the books. If they would have done it right there would have been more sore material to fill the last movie for a two parter.

    The maze runner was boring. Books and all.

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  3. This was something that I never really thought about and I think you completely nailed it. I will say I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Maze Runner but I think that’s really because it’s not my type of movie it still is a good series. This may also be an unpopular opinion but I kinda like the Mockingjay movies. The first time I watched them I really was like this is just a lot of filler stuff but after rewatching the series Mockingjay pt. 1 does a lot of character building and you get to see some of the effects of the characters past. It kind of dove into some more serious topics of ptsd and mental health and it was interesting to see how it seemed to change to a completely different genre. I do think that it is the worst out of the 4 movies but I feel like they would have had to cut out some very important things if they made it into one movie.

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  4. The third Hunger games movie is not amazing I agree but the last one was great. It’s a war movie. The Coin/Snow dynamic is very cool. They really should have made it a single movie even if it had to be somewhat longer.

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  5. For me the best films are the maze runners but I just love the hunger games books – I love that the films are so true to the book but the maze runner just got me curious and invested. Also I've seen maze runner before i read the books

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  6. I read the maze runner books last year because I never did as a teenager. And I kind of hated them. The first one was okay but they just got worse and worse.
    Then I thought I'd watch the movies and see if I liked them better. But because they're so incredibly different from the source material I ended up hating them even more 😅

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  7. I would slightly recommend the movie, "The Giver", which granted isn't the best or wholey original. But as for a teen focused dystopia film it was a breath of fresh air compared Hunger Games and Divergent.

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  8. the thing with mockingjay is that you have to realize you are not going to be getting the same thing as the movies prior. like mockingjay pt1 is all about the propaganda and political aspect of a war/rebellion and pt2 shows what happens when action is finally taken! i think the pt1 & pt2 split was necessary or else it would’ve been a very muddy movie

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  9. i don't know what it is about teen dystopia books and movies, but i could never finish a series. i would always read the first one, and maybe start the second, but drop it off pretty quickly (except hunger games, i finished the second one). same for these movies, i watched the firs tof all of them, and the second hunger games, but never finished any of them.

    fun fact, when i read the hunger games, i never pictured the districts like it was the US, lmao, i am canadian, so the way i pictured it was if british columbia was the capitol and from there, it was districts in chronological order until they reach the other side lmao

    i do agree that catching fire isthe best, i rewatched the first 2 recently to see if i wasn't just using my nostalgia goggles, but no they hold up so well, it's so good.

    funny enough, another movie in the genre that i happened to be the perfect audeince for was the giver. i was in school reading it at the exact same time the genre was at its peak so they made a movie, and so while it's not the best movie of all time, that one has a nostalgia factor for me, i love it a lot.

    a series i always thought would be made around that time was an adaptation of the uglies series, it was pretty big but they never did. but they just announced a show that should be coming out soon-ish. very weird time for it, but given the messages of environment and beauty standards, i guess it can work

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  10. I’m pretty sure the only reason Tris had that hair in insurgent was because the actress was in The Fault in our Stars around that time and had her hair cut for it. That being said, the way they styled it was god-awful 😬

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  11. katniss is definitely the better MC imo. thomas is kind of an unremarkable character. maybe him being the "chosen one" alone wouldn't be a good enough reason to dislike him on, but a alot of his character traits are very stereotypical "chosen one" qualities. minho, newt, or even theresa had more interesting arcs.

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  12. I love Divergent. It was an infinitely better book to me as a teenager than Maze Runner or THG honestly. I thought the first movie was great, and Neil Burgers on screen adaptation was honestly very on par with the book but after the director change is when everything went down :/

    The new guy didnt care about the source material from what I remember, “the box” in Insurgent wansnt even a plot line. The entirety of Allegiant was so far off ANYTHING in the book I was glad when they didnt make Ascendant in the end because Allegiant disappointed me so bad I almost left the theater crying when I was 14 😅

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  13. The Divergent movies are pure trash compared to the books… The ending was emotional and went in a completely different direction from what you'd expect

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  14. I really love dystopian novels, my favorite saga of the genre is The Fifth Wave, followed by The Maze Runner and Divergent, I just think teenage dystopia is a really interesting and entertaining genre in books and movies, I wish the industry kept making this kind of films. Hopefully The Hunger Games prequel and the upcoming Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" Netflix adaptation will kind of revive the genre.

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  15. For The Maze Runner I think it is the best example that it is possible to adapt a book series making it different from the source material but keeping it fresh and memorable, unlike the divergent and 5th wave movies, which changed everything without reason or sense, killing the spirit of the books (more notoriously in the second case. Seriously I will never forgive how they killed the 5th wave) they actually tried to create a new vision that would accommodate movie audiences without driving fans of the books completely crazy.

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