In Theaters: January 26, 2018

There is only one wide release this weekend.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure

This is the last of the YA adaptation trend.  The end of the line.  There are no more in development.  What Twilight started ten years ago ends here with Maze Runner.

The Passing of the YA Adaptations

Only four ever became film franchises at all.  Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent, and Maze Runner.  Twilight ended forever ago now, and the other three have all slowly dwindled into box office oblivion.  In spite of all this, the YA adaptation genre has left two disturbing trends behind: splitting the last story into two movies (Twilight had that idea before Harry Potter), and hiring Jennifer Lawrence.  I'm curious to see which of those trends ends first.  Jennifer Lawrence has stifled much of her star power, in my opinion, but she's far from any point of no return.  And this May we have Avengers: Infinity War, which was originally titled Avengers: Infinity War - Part 1.  But back to Maze Runner.

Another awful trend that comes from YA adaptations is retaining the title of the first book in the titles of all following movies, as in "Maze Runner: The Death Cure", or "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2".  It stems from the assumption that the audience is too stupid to catch on and realize that this is a sequel, and that's a bad start to any project.  Okay, but seriously, back to Maze Runner now.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure is the last of the Maze Runner series.  Basically all you need to know to be caught up is that there's some crazy disease ravaging mankind that turns people into zombies or something, and there's an evil organization that kidnaps immune kids to study them.  And for some reason the kids they study always die, I can't remember why.  So the good guys are some punk kids that got away and are gonna do their darnedest to stop those bad guys!  Because in YA sci-fi your main character needs to be a special teenager.  Like, only hope for mankind kinda special.

Dylan O'Brien plays the lead and he's very good in everything I've seen him in.  I would like to see him do more movies.  He already led his own movie outside this franchise with last year's American Assassin.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language, and some thematic elements.

      Big Shot Critic