It's been a little over a decade since Stephanie Meyers's first Twilight novel hit the shelves, and ever since then the Young Adult section has been the most consistently busy.
While Harry Potter and his series of adventures pre-dated Bella Swan and her love triangle by eight years, Twilight was when the YA popularity was at it's peak.
Last count had over 120 millions copies of the books sold, while the movie series collectively earned just under $3.5 billion worldwide.
However, this last weekend we had the release of the final Hunger Games movies, Mockingjay Part 2, to some surprising results.
In the U.S., the movie made $102 million in it's opening weekend. Comparatively, the rest opened as follows: The Hunger Games - $152 million, Catching Fire - $158 million, Mockingjay Part 1 - $121 million.
That is a massive 33% drop from the original movie, whereas the likes of Harry Potter (first movie: $90 million opening weekend, last movie: $169 million opening weekend) and Twilight (first movie: $69 million opening weekend, last movie: $141 million opening weekend) both seen massive increases over the course of their series.
Similarly, more recent YA adaptations such as Divergent (first movie: $150 million total, second movie: $130 million total) and The Maze Runner (first movie: $102 million total, second movie: $80 million total) lose numbers in their sequels, and the road to box office success is paved with the bones of series that never made it past their unsuccessful first movie; The Mortal Instruments, Beautiful Creatures, The Golden Compass, Ender's Game, The Giver, Eragon, Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events... the list goes on and on.
Likewise, there hasn't been an "event" Young Adult book series in some time. Ever since the likes of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner finished their publishing run, it's not that their hasn't been room for a successor. More likely, the market has been flooded following the initial unprecedented popularity of the sub-section, and with too much competition, nobody is getting the opportunity to stand out.
Of course, Hollywood isn't going to let a little speed-bump like falling out of fashion stop them from continue adapting the books. In 2016 alone, we have Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them, alien attack thriller The 5th Wave, Spielberg tackling the Roald Dahl classic The BFG, creepy chiller Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and romantic drama Let It Snow, all of which originated in the YA section of your local bookstore.
Whether or not this dip will level off, we will probably have to wait to see, but with the initial audience of Twilight now all grown up and moving on to the likes of Gone Girl or The Girl On The Train, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the hunger for Young Adult fiction.
