Sitting at number six among HBO Max’s biggest movies worldwide right now is a young adult dystopia that turns 12 this year. It isn’t a fresh release. It isn’t an awards contender. It’s a film about teenage boys stuck in a grass field.
The Maze Runner reached that position just days after arriving on the platform internationally, and it currently holds the Number 1 spot in nine countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The genre that ate the 2010s
There was a period when practically every bestselling young adult book series was handed a franchise attempt. The Hunger Games is the survivor, still running on the prequel material Suzanne Collins keeps producing. Divergent never got there — its concluding film was scrapped altogether. The Mortal Instruments had its shot, and that was the end of it.
The Maze Runner never really received the credit it deserved, and it remains underrated even now.
What it’s actually about
Adapted from the James Dashner novel of the same name, the story centres on Thomas, a boy who comes to in a grassy enclosure known as the Glade with no idea who he is. He arrives among a group of boys already surviving there, separated from the outside world by a maze.
Monstrous creatures prowl through it. Even so, Thomas and the others set out on a mission to escape the maze and figure out why they were imprisoned to begin with.
Why the chart position matters
Catalogue titles arrive on streaming services all the time. The majority park themselves in the lower reaches of the top 20 before quietly disappearing. Cracking number 6 globally, 12 years after release, is a genuinely different outcome.
As it turns out, the action-heavy one is what audiences came back for.