Hollywood tends to move in cycles, and any reasonably popular bandwagon is inevitably going to be not just jumped on, but run into the ground eventually. It may not have happened to comic book movies as of yet, but The 5th Wave is just one of many reasons why the incessant craze for turning YA literary sagas into would-be blockbuster franchises petered out so fast.
The obvious exceptions to the rule were multi-billion dollar behemoths like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, with The Maze Runner one of a very small number of lower-tier outliers, but it would be an understatement to say the misses drastically outweighed the hits.
Sure, The 5th Wave did manage to claw its way past $100 million at the global box office on a budget estimated to be hovering around the $50 million mark, but not only did that render the profit margins razor-thin if they were even there to begin with, but the film took an absolute trouncing.
Respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of only 17 and 38 percent from critics and audiences is not the bedrock upon which a multi-film series is built, and it wouldn’t even be unfair to label it as one of the most forgettable contributions to a medium that by and large hardly left much of an impact on the collective consciousness at all outside of its marquee properties.
Regardless, Chloë Grace Moretz going out of her way to try and reunite with her brother in the middle of an intergalactic invasion that renders humanity’s advanced technology obsolete in an instant has been currying fresh favor on streaming over the weekend, with FlixPatrol naming The 5th Wave as one of the top-viewed features on ViaPlay.