As previously mentioned, it’s pretty wild that The Maze Runner’s sequel is already generating casting news. The fact that The Scorch Trials, the second installment in James Dashner’s Maze Runner series, is being fast-tracked to production only solidifies the franchise’s place as a blockbuster YA novel-turned-film. In fact, the success of The Maze Runner is a little bit of a game changer in the world of Young Adult film: in spite of the similarly well-faring Divergent, there have been a fair share of disappointments in the genre, and TMR surely could have gone either way. The face that it did so unbelievably well all but guarantees lots more YA books-to-film in the near and distant future.

One of those future projects is The 5th Wave, the Rick Yancey adaptation which will give YA reigning princess Chloe Grace Moretz her own YA adaptation franchise. But many more are being planned as well (like Tim Burton’s take on Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs), and they will all have to live up to Twilight, The Hunger Games as well as now The Maze Runner if they want any slice of success themselves. And of course, not only must the first installments be huge enough blockbusters on their own; they must also generate enough interest in potential sequels, and duke it out with sequels from other popular series.

The reason The Maze Runner’s success is so significant is purely mathematical. There have been a slew of successes in the genre, sure, but there have also been a fair share of failures: Ender’s Game, Beautiful Creatures and most famously The Mortal Instruments were all projects with equally rabid YA fan bases around the books, and the studios were confident that each would be huge. But the hugeness never came…instead, sequel The Mortal Instruments: City of Ashes had to be removed from production schedules in light of how much the first movie bombed.

The Maze Runner tips the scales when it comes to the box office. If it had done poorly, studios may have started to take the hint that these YA adaptations are a real crapshoot: even with strong literary fan bases, there is no guarantee that a big noisy film version will knock it out of the park. And it must said, there was indeed a lot wrong with The Maze Runner film and it’s interesting that it did SO well. But its success means one thing – studios will surely be willing to try a lot more in the genre, and therefore we will see a lot more, both good and not-so-good.

So are you ready for more? The Scorch Trials, first sequel to The Maze Runner, is a bit more of your classic post-apocalyptic YA fare: Thomas and company face the foreboding and sun-scorched open roads of a devastated planet ravaged by solar flares. Let’s see how that one does, along with the rest.

—DH

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