Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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More than a decade after the Divergent trilogy and its film adaptations wrapped, author Veronica Roth is returning to the world that made her a YA phenomenon, this time asking what would have happened if her protagonist, Beatrice “Tris” Prior, had chosen a different path.
The Sixth Faction, released on Oct. 6, reimagines Roth’s bestselling series (Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant), which is set in a post-apocalyptic society where citizens are divided into factions based on personality type. The first book in a planned duology is an alternate-universe retelling rather than a prequel or sequel, and it began as a personal project for Roth.
“Divergent has this staying power that I wasn’t expecting,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s hard for books to have that kind of lingering effect on a readership, and because it had that power, I thought I needed to course-correct my own feelings about it. I’d carried some anxiety baggage about Divergent, and I thought making something new would help me rediscover my love for the characters and the world. That’s where The Sixth Faction came from.”
Re-immersing herself in the “old worldbuilding” felt different and fresh, Roth adds. “If you want to make it new, you have to go in another direction, and that was very cool,” she says.
After more than a decade away from the series, Roth reread it “more than once” and listened to the audiobooks. “There’s something about audio that defamiliarizes the text. It’s like reading it for the first time, and that freshness was really helpful,” she says.
Rereading changed how she saw the books: “I feel like no one is as critical of these books as I am. I think that’s important for a writer’s growth, and they’ve been such a big part of my life that you just think about them a lot.”
Despite being her own harshest critic, Roth says she was surprised by the strength of her characters. “I think I had a good instinct for character even at that age, although I didn’t have skills in every area that I hopefully do now. The delight of it was a surprise.”
Set in the same world, The Sixth Faction explores what happens when tragedy strikes at Tris’ choosing ceremony, and her decision leaves her in the “crosshairs of an underground rebellion, where a boy with secrets as dangerous as her own — a boy with only a number for a name — may be the only person she can trust.”
Despite early concerned fan speculation that Tris’ Divergent love interest, Four, might not be in this story, Roth laughs at the notion that he wouldn’t return. “He’s literally on the cover,” she says.
In the original books, Four was Tris’ instructor after joining the Dauntless faction. This time, Roth says, they meet on equal footing. She acknowledges that the earlier setup of a student and teacher falling in love was “a little problematic,” adding, “let’s all remember it’s been 15 years.” She explains, “He’s not teaching her anything, and she has things to teach him, too. Finding the romance and the spark without that altered power dynamic was really my focus.”
The new book also took a tonal turn. “What surprised me is how it just emerged as a conspiracy thriller in this really exciting way,” Roth says. A theme she hadn’t planned also surfaced: the adults in Tris’ life repeatedly fail her, and that is how she comes of age. “That felt so timely,” Roth says. “I imagine that entering the world as it is now is really difficult for them, because it feels like there are no paths laid for them anymore, and that’s definitely how Tris feels.” Where the original series leaned on a chosen-one narrative with Tris, she says, this book is “a little more about collective action.”
Looking back on the trilogy, it’s impossible not to think of the film adaptations, which were released from 2014 to 2016. Shailene Woodley starred as Tris and Theo James as Four, with the films also starring Kate Winslet, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz, Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn.
The films, which arrived amid a YA dystopian boom that also saw The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner books making the jump from shelves to screen, originally opened strong at the box office. After releasing Divergent in 2014, subsequent sequels Insurgent (2015) and Allegiant (2016) followed, the last of which covered only part of the third book. The studio had planned to finish the story with a fourth film, Ascendant, but it never came to fruition after Allegiant’s disappointing box office performance.
Lionsgate eventually pivoted to turning Ascendant into a TV movie for Starz that could launch a spinoff series, but the plan was scrapped after the cast, including Woodley and James, declined to return for a television format. The adaptation was never completed.
“I think at that point all of the actors had kind of moved forward,” Roth says of the unmade film. “Everyone had moved forward, and we weren’t going to move back.”
Despite the bittersweet ending, she remains grateful for the films: “They kind of gave me this great opportunity in my career that I wouldn’t have gotten without them.”
Because the final chapter of the story was never filmed, fans were left to wonder whether the movies would have kept Tris’ tragic fate from the 2013 book. (Spoiler warning: Tris dies, in an ending that divided fans.)
Asked whether the films would have kept the book’s heartbreaking ending, Roth is candid that it’s “hard to say, because of course they’re going to tell the author, ‘Totally, we’re going to keep your ending.’”
For now it remains an unanswered question: “I think they were trying to figure out a way to make it work, but obviously it didn’t come to fruition.”
Roth stands by the ending she wrote, though her feelings have grown more complicated.
“In one sense, I’m very proud of my past self for doing the best she could and for following her artistic integrity as best she could. So I never want to say I regret it, because that would be a betrayal of her,” Roth says of her younger self. “But my feelings about it have become more complicated as I get older and realize how young that character really is. I didn’t feel it at 23 or 24 when I was writing that book, but I feel it now. I do stand by it, because it’s a time capsule of where I was at that time, and I did the best work I was capable of.”
She also sees value in it: preparing young readers for grief, she says, “is one of the jobs of literature at that age.”
Of Tris’ ending, Roth says, “It’s so much more tragic than I realized. The benefit of time: hindsight is always 20/20.”
With the original trilogy and films behind her, Roth has already finished the duology’s second book, due in February. On her book tour, she has been revealing the cover for that book, The Last Testimony. Once the duology is complete, she says, the Divergent series feels “nice and closed for now,” though she’s learned “don’t ever say never.”
In an industry booming with book adaptations, Roth is hopeful that The Sixth Faction could help revive interest in the dystopian genre.
“Dystopia is always about observation of the present, so it’s a good critical-thinking genre, even if it’s a more adventurous story. It still has its place,” she says.
But the hope is “always that the rising tide will lift all the ships. If people poke their heads into a bookstore because of this book, then I’m happy.”
The Sixth Faction is one of several projects in a busy stretch for the author. She released the adult dystopian fantasy Seek the Traitor’s Son in May, with a sequel coming next year. “It’s just all dystopia all the time for Veronica Roth,” she says. Writing the Traitor‘s Son and Sixth Faction in parallel got a little tangled, she admits. “I did have a couple of sentences that were the same, and I had to remove them,“ she says laughing.
As for whether the Sixth Faction duology could get the adaptation treatment as the original Divergent books did, Roth doesn’t rule it out but isn’t focused on it: “I sent it to the people I needed to send it to. But I’m so focused on books; that’s my preferred medium. If something happens, that’ll be really fun, and if it doesn’t, that’s alright.”