It seems as if the movie industry keeps running out of ideas, so they make movie adaptions of books instead. Movie adaptions aren't a bad thing, but they never seem to do justice to the details you get from reading. Once a good original concept is made popular, you can almost guarantee that the rest of the movies will be similar concepts for the time being.
One of the most popular genres in America is the Dystopian Future. The media is obsessed with the idea of some horrible society oppressing the people. Be it movies, books, or tv shows. The people reading or watching these stories sympathize with the protagonists, and disagree with the villain. People have always had a knack for envisioning horrible futures for the state of mankind. One could argue that these stories kind of reflect certain fears of people.
The scenarios for these futures will vary from oppressive governments to some forms of plague. For example, “The Hunger Games” is a story about a corrupt president who separates the people of the nation into groups, and has the morbid hunger games in order to establish fear and dominance to the people. And the few people who disagree are considered rebels by the people in power. This story was a major kickstart for the entire genre. After it was published, many other various fictional governmental distopias were created. The more books, the more movie adaptions. And people keep reading and watching them.
Although some may disagree, many people can say that our current government isn't the best it has ever been. Neither is the media for that matter. If you disagree with the majority, or the majority disagrees with you, it is very likely you might be threatened or blacklisted. People have received death threats for merely disagreeing with others. Then these same people who judge people for not agreeing with them on certain subjects, go and rave about how horrible the oppressive people in these stories are. It’s kind of strange how many comparisons you could make between some fiction and some reality. Writers tend to project the fears of people into their stories, and for some reason, that’s what we like. As far as governments go, people are perhaps so afraid of being oppressed that they do it to others themselves.
The other type of distopia is usually caused by sickness. What happens every flue season? There’s something new everyone freaks out about. You hear “this type of flue will kill you.” or “I’m not going shopping because ebola!” People are terrified that anything will be the next black death. How is this about the distopian genre? Zombies. America is obsessed with zombies. There are stupid movies, there are serious movies, there are tv shows. Zombies are everywhere. They are the most popular form of fictional plague. If you’ve heard of the recent Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie, you know that if you ever run out of ideas, you can just slap zombies in someone else's story. How likely is an actual zombie apocalypse? Not very! But in the stories, it spreads like wildfire, it wipes out most of the population, and it usually has no cure. People write about it because people are afraid still of it. The idea of the dystopian future has taken off in America. But not very many people realize what their creators inspiration is.
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