Could Leonar­do DiCaprio be about to revive the YA genre?

In news that is sure to delight teenage (not men­tion thir­tysome­thing) film fans every­where, Leonar­do DiCaprio looks set to com­bine his two pas­sions, movies and envi­ron­men­tal activism, in the form of Kay­la Olson’s forth­com­ing young adult eco-dis­as­ter nov­el ​‘The Sand­cas­tle Empire’, which his pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Appi­an Way has recent­ly bought the rights to.

Although Olson’s book is still await­ing release, the basic premise cer­tain­ly seems to tick all the typ­i­cal YA tropes. Set in a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic 2049 where cli­mate change, coastal flood­ing and over­pop­u­la­tion has crip­pled soci­ety, a young girl named Eden attempts to fight back against the auto­crat­ic pow­ers who have seized pow­er all while search­ing for her miss­ing father.

A lack of orig­i­nal­i­ty seems to have halt­ed the genre’s ini­tial suc­cess, with 2015’s The Fifth Wave strug­gling to put bums on seats, while Kat­niss Everdeen has tak­en her final cur­tain call. How­ev­er, DiCaprio has indi­cat­ed a con­fi­dence in the mate­r­i­al, although at this ear­ly stage it’s unclear he will appear in the film or sim­ply take an exec­u­tive-pro­duc­er role.

In a state­ment regard­ing Virun­ga, an envi­ron­men­tal doc­u­men­tary pro­duced by Appi­an Way, DiCaprio stat­ed: ​“There’s nev­er been a more crit­i­cal time for our plan­et or more of a need for gift­ed sto­ry­tellers to help us all make sense of the issues we face”. If DiCaprio can chan­nel this sen­ti­ment into The Sand­cas­tle Empire, it may just breathe new life into the YA genre while engag­ing a new gen­er­a­tion on an ever-press­ing issue. With the YA genre not in the great­est of health, we think there’s room for a more envi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious view­point amidst the ral­ly­ing ado­les­cent hero­ines and post-apoc­a­lyp­tic love triangles.