It's almost not fair that while other studios' young-adult adaptations crash and burn around them, Lionsgate/Summit keeps cranking out hits.
No one was sure whether Divergent, the combined studios' follow-up to The Twilight Saga and blue-chip franchise The Hunger Games, would fly in a market getting more crowded with teen dystopias by the year. It flew all right, to the tune of $275 million worldwide from its March opening.
Just under five months later, director Neil Burger's vision of the Divergent world, based on the novels by Veronica Rother and starring Shailene Woodley, became available Tuesday on DVD and Blu-ray. The studio shared some of the homevideo release's extras with Mashable, including these concept (and set) images along with commentary from Burger and producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher.
See for yourself whether they defy categorization:
First Image
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/First-Image.jpg" caption="Concept image from Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="First Image"]
Burger: "One of the first images I came up with was this opening image of the grass blowing in the wind, the sun rising, the birds circling in the distance, with the birds being a motif in the movie that figure in with Tris' fears and tattoos. Then we see this tanker sitting in the distance, sitting in the field and so maybe we think it wasn't always a field, that the water must have dried up."
Technology
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Technology.jpg" caption="Concept image from Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="Technology"]
Burger: "Chicago now is a city of 3 or 4 million people -- in the world of Divergent it's maybe 50,000, so they don't really have a need for the tall skyscrapers anymore. So what do they use them for? We combined that idea with the question of where do they get there energy. And the idea was to plaster the skyscrapers with wind turbines. Chicago being the windy city, that's where they get their energy."
Abnegation Village
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Abnegation-Village.jpg" caption="Concept image from Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="Abnegation Village"]
Burger: "We found this location right in the shadow of the city, south of the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower."
Abnegation House
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Abnegation-House.jpg" caption="Concept image from Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="DIVERGENT"]
Fisher: "The houses for Abnegation look so real that one time someone came by and offered $250,000 to buy one."
The Pit
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Pit.jpg" caption="Concept image from Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="The Pit"]
Burger: "The Pit is based on a marble quarry in Colorado. We've seen lots of movies shot underground in dark, dank spaces and the idea was trying to make it much more inviting and luminous. It’s unusual for an underground space and because the marble is white it also makes it a brighter place and it makes it more inviting and welcoming to Tris."
Hammer Fist
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Hammer-Fist.jpg" caption="Image from shooting on Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="DIVERGENT"]
Burger: "We came up with a whole new fighting style for the movie. We figured that 100 years from now people would be fighting in a slightly different way. If you know Krav Maga, which is a fighting style that has become popular in the last 20 years and seen a little bit in the Bourne movies -- if we used that it would have felt like we've seen that before. Garret Warren [stunt coordinator] came up with this new fighting technique which is based on the 'hammer fist' -- sort of hitting with the base of the fist instead of the knuckles which is safer on the hand and has a more powerful blow."
The Wall
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Wall.jpg" caption="Concept image from Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="The Wall"]
Burger: "The idea is that the wall is keeping them isolated. And so we had this idea to treat it like a big Faraday cage, which is kind of a device that keeps electronic signals from entering or escaping an area. Andy Nicholson [production designer] found an amazing reference of a huge installation in Ukraine and we used that as our model of the wall."
Erudite Location
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Erudite-Location.jpg" caption="Image from shooting on Summit Entertainment's "Divergent"" credit="Summit Entertainment" alt="DIVERGENT"]
Burger: "It's a very cool location shot at the University of Chicago library, designed by Helmet Jahn, and it happens to be over the place where they first split the atom."
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