One of the prime reasons that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone did so much better than the likes of Eragon was that it was a relative original in concept and form. It was a big-budget fantasy spectacle set in a magical British boarding school and it wasn't really copying anything in the marketplace. The same goes for Twilight, which was a mix of harlequin romance and chaste horror parable and completely unlike anything else in the male-centric fantasy marketplace. And yes, that also goes for The Hunger Games, which was a relatively "real world" post-apocalyptic action drama (with enough fantastical flourishes to justify its futuristic setting) about impoverished children forced to murder each other for the amusement of the "1%". That's not exactly what anyone should think of when they think "Twilight rip-off".
You could argue that The Hunger Games was green-lit based on the success of Twilight or that Twilight was able to get its uber-faithful adaptation from Summit Entertainment because Harry Potter was a hit franchise, but all three mega-franchises were genuine originals at least compared to what else was out in the marketplace. If there is an argument for originality over merely mimicking what worked, it's that the copycat never earns as much as the original. With the exception of The Grudge, not a single one of the Asian horror remakes that followed in The Ring's footsteps grossed anywhere near what that 2002 Gore Verbinski thriller grossed. Few of the would-be "shock horror" films that followed in the wake of the Saw franchise earned as much as the one that started it all, and no found-footage horror film has earned as much as Paranormal Activity four years later.
The first may or may not be the best, but it is almost always the biggest grossing. But again, the good news is that Divergent doesn't need to gross as much as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, but merely only as much as The Spiderwick Chronicles. For the moment, even as I argue that the marketing is tripping over itself trying to explain the film's arbitrary fantasy rules, let us celebrate that we have another big-budget action film centered around a female protagonist. Let us take a minute to amuse ourselves at the notion that Shailene Woodley, once considered not "hot enough" to play Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, now has her own franchise.
I hope Divergent is good and if it's good I hope it makes enough money to inspire a sequel or two. But I also hope we're in a position a few years down the line where we have enough female-centric genre franchises that we don't feel the need to compare them to each other. I don't want Divergent to be the next Hunger Games, but rather the first Divergent.
