Hopes 'Divergent' will be next teen Hollywood smash hit
All eyes in Hollywood are on the box office fortunes of the movie, which hits theatres in the US tomorrow.
Adolescent adventures have made a mint for the Santa Monica-based studio Summit-Lionsgate: the five Twilight films earned $3.3bn (€2.3bn) globally, while the two Hunger Games movies so far have taken in over $1.5bn, and two more films are to follow.
Divergent features many of the main plot points that made The Hunger Games a blockbuster success: a future post-apocalyptic world, and a courageous teenaged girl aiming to save the world from tyrants.
Relative unknown Shailene Woodley — whose credits have so far come in independent films like The Descendants and The Spectacular Now — said she asked Oscar- winning Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence for tips before her leap into the commercial big leagues.
“I sent her an email. I was just curious, she had gone from doing indie films to doing Hunger Games, which is a giant film obviously, and I wondered if it had changed her life in positive ways,” Woodley told reporters. Lawrence’s reply? “She said, ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do drugs. Don’t make a sex tape. And don’t go to [grocery chain] Whole Foods the day the movie opens’,” said the 22-year-old actress.
In Divergent, set in Chicago, society is divided into five factions: Abnegation for the selfless, amity for the peaceful, candour for the honest, dauntless for the brave and erudite for the knowledgeable.
At the age of 16, every adolescent must choose their faction for life, helped by a personality test. But Woodley’s character Tris turns out to be divergent — a rare finding meaning she has the skills of several factions. This makes her a danger for the established order, and a target for Jeanine (played by Kate Winslet), an Erudite leader.
In the best-selling book by Veronica Roth, Tris is 16 years old. But director Neil Burger deliberately chose to make his heroine older. “We did that for two reasons: Shailene is a little bit older, and also I felt like the story was a very grown-up story, actually,” said the director.
Apart from Winslet, the young actress found herself largely surrounded by a group of young up-and-coming actors including Miles Teller, Theo James, and Ansel Elgort.
A whole new game: ‘Divergent’ in theaters Friday http://t.co/AdZkmV1Nec pic.twitter.com/Af7j8QTndD
— GastonGazette (@gastongazette) March 19, 2014
Elgort, who plays her character’s brother, made indie film The Fault in Our Stars with her immediately after Divergent. “Shailene is one of the great actors of our generation, in our young age group,” he said
“For them to put me with her twice in a row is a huge compliment. It’s saying that I might be of the same calibre, and that’s just awesome.”
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