A 12-year-old YA dystopia is currently the sixth-biggest movie on HBO Max worldwide. Not a new release. Not a prestige awards play. A movie about teenage boys in a grass field.
The Maze Runner climbed to that spot within days of hitting the platform internationally, and it’s sitting at Number 1 in nine countries right now: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The genre that ate the 2010s
For a stretch there, every bestselling young adult book series got a shot at a franchise. The Hunger Games is the one that stuck, and it’s still going thanks to prequel material Suzanne Collins keeps writing. Divergent didn’t manage it. Its final movie was cancelled outright. The Mortal Instruments got its attempt and that was that.
The Maze Runner is the one that never quite got its due, and it’s still underrated to this day.
What it’s actually about
Based on James Dashner’s novel of the same name, it follows Thomas, a boy who wakes up in a grassy area called the Glade with no memory of who he is. He lands in the middle of a group of other boys who’ve been surviving there, with a maze standing between them and the rest of the world.
Monstrous creatures roam it. That doesn’t stop Thomas and the others from starting a mission to escape the maze and work out why they were held captive in the first place.
Why the chart position matters
Old movies land on streaming platforms constantly. Most of them settle somewhere in the back half of the top 20 and quietly slide off. Number 6 globally, for a film that came out 12 years ago, is a genuinely different result.
The action-packed one, it turns out, is the one people came back for.
