Grab Your Popcorn: 2026 YA Adaptations Hitting Big and Small Screens

Adriana comes from a family of figure skaters. Her parents were gold medalists, and her sister is is also supremely talented. Adriana is eager to carry on the legacy and win the Junior World Championships.

There are a couple of catches, and they’re big ones. The biggest: her parents’ skating rink is struggling financially, meaning that everything she and her family have worked for could fall completely apart. Adriana realizes as she’s training with her new partner Brayden one thing they could do in addition to showing off their moves on the ice is to pretend they’re in a relationship. This’ll really keep their fanbase engaged and excited.

But then Adriana begins to really fall for Brayden, and those feelings are made more complicated when the first crush she ever had-the boy who happened to be her former skating partner-is back in the picture. How can Adriana navigate old feelings, new feelings, keeping her skating career in tip-top shape, and working to save her family’s rink?

If you’ve been looking for The Breakfast Club meets zombies, with a main character who isn’t especially interested in surviving the zombie apocalypse, this adaptation of a 2012 YA novel will absolutely be your cup of tea.

Sloane Price has grown up in a violent household, and losing her beloved sister is among the worst things that has happened to her. With the zombie apocalypse here, she’s almost relieved. She can give up.

So when she’s barricaded in her high school with five other teens, everything she thought she knew about life, survival, and death are thrown into question as the six of them fight back against the unimaginable outside.

This live action adaptation of the ferociously popular manga is back for its second season, with a third season already planned as well.

One Piece follows Monkey D. Luffy–who goes by Luffy–as he works to become King of the Pirates and discover the One Piece, rumored to be the greatest treasure in the world. There’s one big problem for Luffy: despite his dreams of living life at sea, he lacks the ability to swim.

There’s not yet a firm date for when we’ll see the third season of My Life With the Walter Boys, but we do know that filming is done. It’s expected to hit the streamer sometime in the fall.

Season two of the show finished with a big cliffhanger, so rather than accidentally spoiling that, here’s the big picture overview of the story: Jackie wants to be perfect in order to get the attention of her parents. They’re the too busy to notice things sort, living a stereotypical New York City life. But when they’re killed in a tragic accident, Jackie is shuffled off to small town Colorado to live with the Walters.

It’s a home with 11 boys and one girl, and Jackie learns that perhaps her desire for perfection isn’t the best way to live her life—even if the habits of those Walter boys drive her up a wall.

There is no question that the next installment of The Hunger Games series will be a major theatrical experience. There’s already been a teaser trailer released, and we knew the release date of this film two years ago (wild!).

Collins’s latest is set before the first Hunger Games story, and it follows a young Haymitch. You can peep the trailer here.

A recent update on the adaptation of this series of short stories noted that several of the stories wrapped up production in 2025, with the whole slate of animation anticipated to be done in 2026. What this will mean for release in the United States isn’t entirely clear, as it sounds like it will be released in Asia first. (It may have already had a couple of episodes released, if the IMDB entry is to be believed).

In Chinese tradition, if someone dies unjustly or hungry, they come back to haunt the living—while some are satisfied by food, others continue their haunting. The stories in this collection travel through China’s history, and each includes a recipe and historical notes for taking the stories off-page, too.

It’s so refreshing to see a female creator’s work gain more than one season of an adaptation–the history of seeing such work be canceled after one season and no marketing has been one of the themes of the 2020s. But what’s even more refreshing is that this adaptation, which centers teens of color in a coming-of-age and coming-of-sexuality story is getting a much-anticipated second season.

This is Judy Blume’s classic, but set in Los Angeles in 2018.

There’s no official release date as of writing, but it’s expected to hit screens sometime this year.

The second season of Geek Girl is expected to drop sometime in 2026. The story follows an awkward and neurodivergent teen girl who stumbles into modeling and must balance the demands of being a teen with the fashion industry.

Can’t get enough of Nick and Charlie’s story in Heartstopper and bummed that the TV adaptation wrapped up in late 2024? Never fear. There’s a full-length feature film hitting small screens later this year. Filming wrapped up in July.

The plot of this entry into the series isn’t being shared yet, as it’s based off the sixth and final book in the book series, which is also not yet available.

Announced back in fall of 2024, Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun–which tells the story of Twilight from Edward’s perspective–will be given the animation treatment for Netflix. Reports on the adaptation note that Meyer was part of the production team bringing this story to life on screen.

Given how absolutely bananas fans went for the re-release of Twilight in theaters this year, in honor of its 20th anniversary, this is likely to be viewership gold when it releases.

Were you thinking that you might need to revisit the Simonverse, following the release of Love, Simon in 2018 and its companion Love, Victor in 2020? You might be in luck.

The last time there was much news about the potential adaptation of Albertalli’s The Upside of Unrequited, which follows 17-year-old Molly in her quest for her first love, was back in the summer of 2024. We got some casting updates, but that was about it.

Per the latest on IMDB, though, it appears The Upside of Unrequited is in post-production. There’s no streamer attached to the project yet, but chances are we’ll see some news on this one in 2026.