GENRE RESEARCH - Teen box office history

IN SUMMARY

• For a successful teen film, romantic comedy isn't the best choice of genre, as recent times have shown like many other genres such as superhero and horror, the franchise model is now being used for young adult fiction as well.
• Next to that intellectual property has been the source for a number of big hits, which another general growing trend in the film industry, who want to rely on an inbuilt audience, which also includes teenagers who might not have read the book(s) but are convinced by word of mouth that it is high in quality, and also thereby give in to peer pressure.

THE BIGGEST HITTERS
Big hits with teen films now are in adaptations of bestselling books, mainly being hybrids with fantasy, horror, science-fiction and dystopia like, these all being book series they are also franchises (and note the trend to have adapted for the final book in two parts, of course not a strategy to make more money. If they really were interested in having more time to adapt the source material faithfully then they might have for example fulfilled JK Rowling's wish to adapt the fifth and sixth book into to films as well)

• Harry Potter, total box office of 8 films:                                                         $7.7b

• Twilight, total box office of 5 films:                                                                      $3.3b

• The Hunger Games, total box office of 4 films:                               $2.97b

• Divergent, total box office of 3 out of 4 films released so far:          $765.4m

• The Maze Runner, total box office of 2 films out of 3 released so far: $660.6m

So if we look at this trend, all the other franchises are attempting to come as close to the financial success, and the other conglomerates want to compete with the success of Warner Bros..

So teen romance, teen comedy and teen drama isn't enough, the intellectual property and hybridity with other genres. 

There are some exceptions of recent years, which include two adaptations of the author John Green's The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns, coming in with a worldwide box office of $307.2m and $85.5m.

Teen romance and coming of age films in the past, box office successes when looking at their budgets but still not having come close to the 21st century franchises.

Pretty In Pink, domestic box office: $40.5m
The Breakfast Club, $51.5m
10 Things I Hate About You, $53.5m

RECENT PURE TEEN FILMS
The Edge Of Seventeen, worldwide $18.8m