The Next Big Franchise

The Next Big Franchise

Sep 29

Okay, fellow nerds: where’s our next big book-to-movie franchise? Harry Potter’s all but wrapped. Twilight’s cycled through the craze/backlash/backlash-to-the-backlash stages with lightning speed. What’s going to swoop in and give us reason to line up, cosplay, and write obsessive-bordering-on-disturbing fanfic?

I’ve got a few candidates in mind — all from YA fiction, all ripe for big screenifying. Read on and feel free to share your own picks in the ol’ comments.

The Hunger Games: The first volume of Suzanne Collins’ tale of post-apocalyptic society, reality TV, and a tough-as-nails girl named Katniss thoroughly captivated my brain and soul — I know a book is awesome when I start avoiding simple things like meals and bathroom breaks and Twitter checks just so I can finish it. The just-released sequel, Catching Fire, takes this well-established world and builds on it. The stakes are higher, the brutality is more horrifying, and the romantic triangle reaches a serious breaking point. Oh, and it ends on an INSANE cliffhanger.

Seeing Collins’ dark, wildly creative world brought to life onscreen would be a major treat. Seeing her vibrant characters — gentle, charismatic Peeta; broken drunkard Hamish — would be even better.

Casting Choices: She doesn’t quite have the right raven-haired, olive-skinned look, but Ellen Page’s steel-willed scrappiness says “Katniss!” to me.

Wicked Lovely: Melissa Marr’s series about the various dramas and traumas bedeviling a modern day faerie court — and the humans who get swept into the madness — is already well on its way to moviedom. I love Marr’s depiction of faeries in all their viciously beautiful glory, but I think the central genius of this series is how well she captures the emotionally exhausting rollercoaster that is being a teenager. She’s not afraid to make her characters’ romantic entanglements unabashedly passionate. Fictitious teens occasionally seem a little silly to us oldsters with all their “OMG everything is SO IMPORTANT” ‘tudes, but Marr’s teens vividly remind us that we felt that way once, too (and maybe still do — you know, every once in a while). I was swept up from page 1 and would love to be able to lose myself in a film the same way.

Casting choices: He needs some piercings and a little roughing up around the edges, but this guy could work for Seth, faerie queen Aislinn’s sexy human boyfriend.

A Great and Terrible Beauty: I know I already raved about Libba Bray on Friday, but guess what? I’m totally gonna do it again. Bray’s Victorian era fantasy trilogy ably captures some of the same themes that made, say, Buffy so potent (teenage girls discovering their full power and potential), but in a wholly unique voice. There are big mysteries and delicious romances and these characters that just bolt off the page. I love that Bray develops her characters in such a way that they don’t always make the right choices or do the “nice” thing…yet we can’t help but love them and root for their friendship. The last sentence of the last book is one of those beauties that sticks with you forever. I can still recite it from memory — feel free to test me on this the next time we meet in person.

The canvas Bray works with is also pretty damn amazing — epic, but with an emphasis on character. And I feel like seeing it in movie form would give me that special feeling I haven’t really experienced since Buffy Summers herself ruled the WB airwaves.

Casting choices: I actually had this all cast at some point, but it’s one of those things that would never work in real life. No one is the right age, not even in relation to each other. But if someone happens to invent some kind of machine that can easily de-age actors appropriately (no, not like Botox, shut up), then we’re set: Gemma, Felicity, Pippa, Ann.