Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015)

It's divisive. Only 64% of audiences liked it, by Google's archived audience score. Critics gave it 45%.

Thomas and his fellow Gladers face their greatest challenge yet: searching for clues about the mysterious and powerful organization known as WCKD. Their journey takes them to the Scorch, a desolate landscape filled with unimaginable obstacles. Teaming up with resistance fighters, the Gladers take on WCKD’s vastly superior forces and uncover its shocking plans for them all. Wikipedia ↗

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is a 2015 American dystopian science fiction film directed by Wes Ball, the sequel to The Maze Runner. Having escaped the Maze, Thomas and the surviving Gladers discover that the organization WCKD, which imprisoned them, is hunting them to harvest a cure for the Flare — a devastating virus that has turned much of humanity into zombie-like Cranks. The group flees across the Scorch, a desolate, sun-scorched wasteland, seeking a resistance group called the Right Arm while being pursued by WCKD's forces and surviving encounters with Cranks in abandoned cities.

The Scorch Trials shifted the franchise from the contained mystery of the Maze to a more expansive post-apocalyptic road movie, trading the first film's claustrophobic tension for larger-scale action and world-building. The abandoned mall sequence, in which the group encounters Cranks in pitch darkness, delivered the franchise's most effective horror-tinged set piece. Dylan O'Brien continued to anchor the series with committed physical performances.

The film earned $312 million worldwide on a $61 million budget. Production of the third film was delayed by over a year after Dylan O'Brien suffered serious injuries during a stunt involving a moving vehicle, an accident that highlighted the genuine physical demands placed on young franchise leads.