With Poltergeist opening on Thursday night, now is the ideal time for 20th Century Fox to offer their first preview for The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. To be fair, I wrote most of this back in March when I thought the trailer was coming alongside The Divergent Series: Insurgent. Good on Fox for actually waiting until their own big movie, although to be fair Fox instead dropped the trailer for John Green's Paper Towns instead. Of note, we really need a shorter term for these kind of movies. Can I just call the likes of Hunger Games and The Maze Runner “YAFF”s from now on? If we must include the fact that they are based on books, I guess it can be “YAFLF” instead, but that doesn't necessarily roll off the tongue. Anyway, among current YAFF franchises, The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials is best suited to break out this year.
Now to be fair, that’s somewhat by default. 20th Century Fox's Percy Jackson is pretty much finished barring a fluke or a miracle, and same goes with the (never say die) Chronicles of Narnia (Fox and Walt Disney). Twilight Saga (Summit/Lionsgate) is finished, The Hunger Games (Lions Gate Entertainment) is taking its victory lap, and Harry Potter has a prequel trilogy courtesy of Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. dropping at the end of next year. So other than Divergent (Lionsgate), there really isn't any other big “YAFF”s currently in motion. Sadly I think we've seen the last of Beautiful Creatures or Vampire Academy and I'll believe a Mortal Instruments sequel when I see a release date. So yeah, by default, The Maze Runner is the one with the momentum right now.
The first one opened with a solid $32 million last September and jogged its way to $102m domestic and $340m worldwide on a $35m budget. Fox is hoping for a bump this time and they might just get it. That’s partially because the first film, helmed by Wes Ball, was quite a bit better than most of us were expecting. It was basically a straight-faced sci-fi horror thriller where only the last five minutes gave into any kind of “this is only the beginning” shtick. I might roll my eyes at a YAFF sub-genre entry, generally a bastion for female-led stories, offering such a sausage fest that even the characters are surprised when a girl shows up, but a good movie is a good movie. And the adaptation of James Dashner’s first of four novels was a rock-solid and often quite scary little jaunt into a labyrinth of horrors that showed off a sense of scale well-beyond its $35m budget.
As I've discussed before, when a first film ends up being better than expected, the second one can cash in those word-of-mouth chips over opening weekend. Heck, I personally went into The Maze Runner purely out of professional obligation and ended up rather enjoying it. I have little knowledge of the second book save that it takes place outside the “maze” this time around (apparently our heroes wander in the dusty post-apocalyptic hell scape, perhaps traveling by way of Fury Road), but I am actually a little excited to see what happens next, to the point where I am avoiding Wikipedia.
The Maze Runner is actually the biggest-grossing live-action hit ever to open in September, second for the month only to Sony’s animated Hotel Transylvania ($358m). So of course Hotel Transylvania 2 opens a week later. The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials opens September 18th, 2015 from 20th Century Fox. It stars Dylan O'Brien, Nathalie Emmanuel, Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Aidan Gillen, Giancarlo Esposito, Ki Hong Lee, Patricia Clarkson, Lili Taylor, Barry Pepper, Katherine McNamara, and Rosa Salazar. As always, we’ll see.
