The Importance Of Narrative Drive Episode III (do not expect a logical sequence here)

​The failure of Divergent vs Hunger Games
(I’m going to use the movies and the books interchangeably here: they tell the same story – or lack thereof – and the final movie in the Divergent series never got made.)
 
Why did Divergent not go the course?
The short answer is, that movie number two (Insurgent) sucked but we all went to see it anyway, cos movie number one (Divergent) was pretty decent with some interesting visuals (dystopian City of Chicago, high speed train, flying fox over cityscape spring to mind) and a fine lead in Shailene Woodley. Number two did pretty well at the box office because we were all ready and willing to go see it after number one: the producers foolishly decided to pay attention to box office ratings rather than how people actually felt about the movie, and on the back of this split book number three, a la Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, into two movies… but no one bothered to go to number three, cos two was so rubbish.
So, number three failed catastrophically, and number four never got made.
 
Why did movie number two (Insurgent) fail? Not box office, but as a movie.
I could talk about the implausibility of the basic premise (everyone is one of five simplistic personality types, and has to stick to that caste for life); plus any number of characterisation/psychology flaws that grew more obvious and annoying as the story progressed – but I won’t, because I suspect a lot of the target readership/audience was happy to overlook that stuff.
But what they couldn’t overlook – though maybe they didn’t understand the basic problem – was the failure of story.
The fact is, number one worked perfectly well as a stand-alone. At the end of Divergent, Tris and 4 have basically foiled the plot of evil clever-caste woman Kate Winslett, stopped the soldier-caste from carrying out her plans for city-wide domination through a kind of drugged/implanted hypnosis, and balance consequently should have been restored.
But – Tris and 4 choose to run away, as if still on the run. Why? The soldier-caste was acting under duress to carry out Winslett’s plans: as Tris and 4 got rid of the duress, Winslett should have been toothless and beaten. She no longer had a docile army carrying out her evil will. Victory was Tris’s, but she ran away – obviously so the author could manufacture another book in the series. But the subsequent books didn’t work. For that very reason: basically, the plot was already fully resolved.
As a stand-alone, Divergent worked well. Beyond that, it had nowhere to go.
 
By comparison – Hunger Games did string out the finale into two movies, so number three dragged a little – it was basically just filler while we waited for number four – but the plot had to happen: it had inevitablity, that final confrontation between good and evil, killing the monster President Snow (plus twist) as Mr Booker would theorize.
 
And Harry Potter is crafted by a plotting whizz: JK is the grand master of complex plot chess. Six novels of increasing hugeosity, but everything that happens is consistent, mysteries within mysteries, wheels within wheels, powerful characterization and growth, and it all moves towards the inevitable massive climactic confrontation between the good of Hogwarts and evil of Voldemort.