Los Angeles - As vampires Bella and Edward take their last bites on the big screen, Hollywood studios are on the hunt for the next Twilight, a movie that plays on teenage angst and, more importantly, lights up the movie box office.
The first four Twilight movies earned $2.5-billion at theatres worldwide, propelled by passionate fans of a book series about a vampire-and-werewolf teen love triangle. Box office watchers project Breaking Dawn - Part 2 will haul in $150-million at US and Canadian theatres this weekend, one of the year's biggest film debuts.
Eager to replicate that performance, studio executives have been trolling through young adult novels with the dream of uncovering the next big blockbuster franchise, paying as much as $1-million to secure the film rights to the hottest books.
At least four films based on books for teenagers will reach theatres next year, with young love forced to overcome alien parasites, evil zombies and other supernatural bad guys.
Executives hope they can uncover a story that excites tech-savvy teens, who supercharged the buzz mill for The Hunger Games and other hits by spreading the word to friends through social media posts.
“It's a very enthusiastic and deep passion that young people feel for a book they love,” said Nina Jacobson, executive producer of The Hunger Games, which spawned a blockbuster film franchise with $687-million in worldwide ticket sales this spring.
“When they love something, they share it,” says Jacobson.
The four-year Twilight movie saga lifted tiny studio Summit Entertainment into Hollywood's big leagues and paved the way for its $412-million acquisition in January by Lions Gate Entertainment, the studio behind The Hunger Games.
The coming young adult films incorporate paranormal themes like those in the Twilight movies or dark dystopian futures and battles for survival reminiscent of The Hunger Games, and do it through the drama of young love.
Summit is aiming to get Twilight fans buzzing about next February's zombie romance Warm Bodies with a trailer before Breaking Dawn - Part 2. Warm Bodies star Teresa Palmer chatted about the movie - a love story between a zombie and human - while she strolled the red carpet at a Breaking Dawn premiere.
A couple of weeks after Warm Bodies, Warner Brothers will trot out fantasy movie Beautiful Creatures, about a teen girl with magical powers and a boy who is drawn to her, with a debut on Valentine's Day.
The movie “shares as much in common with Twilight as it does with Harry Potter,” said Andrew Kosove, co-president of production studio Alcon Entertainment, referring to the boy-wizard series that grossed $7.7-billion in worldwide ticket sales and woke up Hollywood to the power of adaptations of children's and young adult books.
In March, Open Road Films releases The Host, a science fiction tale about alien parasites from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. Sony's The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, about a teen girl who tries to protect the world from demons, comes out in August. Summit's drama Ender's Game, the story of a boy who leads the charge against an alien invasion, is scheduled for November 2013.
They'll battle the latest installments of existing young adult franchises such as the Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire that comes out November 2013. Warner Brothers will release Hobbit movies in December 2012 and December 2013.
The fever for young adult movies is so hot among Hollywood executives that studios snap up the rights to some books before they hit store shelves to keep them out of the hands of their competitors. Screen Gems, a unit of Sony, announced October 9 it had bought rights to Black City a month before the book went on sale.
The studio moved quickly based on a “high level of anticipation for the property in the online community and other young adult circles”, it said in a statement.
Hunger Games producer Lions Gate scooped up the rights before publication of Divergent, and is making a movie for 2014 that features young Hollywood star Shailene Woodley, who played George Clooney's troubled daughter in the movie The Descendants last year.
The Divergent book series has sold more than two million copies, pacing ahead of both Twilight and The Hunger Games at the same point in their histories, Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer told industry analysts on a November 9 conference call.
“We are putting out to our fans right now we think that this is the next big franchise,” Feltheimer said.
The web is producing hot properties too. Media Rights Capital plans to develop three movies based on writer Amanda Hocking's Trylle Trilogy about a young girl with special powers.
Hocking gained fame by selling more than one million copies of self-published books on the Internet, an unusual feat that demonstrated fans' rabid support for the stories, said Media Rights Capital Co-CEO Modi Wiczyk.
“There is clearly a pre-existing audience,” Wiczyk said. “It makes life easier.”
Still, there is no guarantee book lovers will flock to a movie version of their favourite read, said Keith Simanton, managing editor of movie website IMDB.com. Film adaptations of The Seeker and The Spiderwick Chronicles failed to give birth to the kind of big movie franchises that have become the lifeblood of Hollywood's movie studios, he said.
“It is going to continue be a trend, until one of them fails in a big way,” Simanton said. - Reuters