With the first film at the $260 million mark worldwide after three weeks of release and a few big territories still left to open in, the future for the Divergent franchise looks good. With Lionsgate having previously stated that they were going to do a trilogy to adapt the books, things have changed a bit as the third book, Allegiant, will now be broken into two parts. This is a bit of a trend in the last couple of years, particularly since Young Adult authors have been doing very thick final books for their trilogies to try and wrap things up, something that a lot of them aren’t too experienced with which leads to some bloat. The first installment of Allegiant was already plotted for a March 18th, 2016 date and now the fourth installment will land on March 24th, 2017.
Though the film did not hit Hunger Games levels here for audiences, it did do well enough to spark the sequels and it’s also gaining a lot of fans in another important area – the books. With the three novels done and out, bbox sets and ebook bundles have jumped by 55% in the last week according to Deadline and there aer almost 20 million copies sold worldwide.
“Veronica Roth brings her captivating story to a masterful conclusion in Allegiant, a rich, action-packed book with material that is ideally suited to two strong and fulfilling movies,” said Friedman and Wachsberger. “The storytelling arc and world of the characters lend themselves perfectly to two films, a storytelling strategy that has worked very well for us on the two Twilight Breaking Dawn films and about which we’re tremendously enthusiastic for the two upcoming Mockingjay films of The Hunger Games franchise.” Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher of Red Wagon Entertainment are producing the series.