Spoiler ahead. In the new dystopian movie The Darkest Minds, which comes out on Aug. 3, Amandla Stenberg plays a teenager named Ruby who has rare telepathic powers. After landing in a government-established concentration camp with other kids who have mysterious abilities, Ruby escaped and joined a group of transient kids hiding out from bounty hunters. Among those fugitive kids is the super-smart Chubs (Skylan Brooks), who ends up getting shot towards the end of The Darkest Minds. But does Chubs survive? The Darkest Minds book series sheds some light on that cliffhanger, and it will make fans of the sarcastic nerd very happy.
In the sequel to The Darkest Minds book, called Never Fade, Chubs plays an important role, so it's safe to assume that the gun shot wound you see at the end of the movie gets properly mended. Whew, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief on that one. Well, maybe. As you know, a lot of the times the books change for film adaptations. The author of The Darkest Minds and Never Fade (two of the three books in the series), Alexandra Bracken, told Bustle that the movies might make some changes from the books. That already happened with the film version of the first of Bracken's series, as the author recalled.
Bracken said, "When it comes to the movie, they start with my book, but then so many people weigh in with ideas and suggestions. When I watched the movie, I found I was able to enjoy it all the more because of all the embellishment that they've put on things, I thought the changes they made were really smart and have streamlined the story for the screen."
The filmmakers behind The Darkest Minds definitely had their work cut out for them with introducing audiences who didn't read Bracken's books to the dystopian world. First of all, a disease wipes out 90 percent of the earth's kids and the remaining 10 percent all have special powers. But they don't have the same powers, they have a certain set of skills based on the color that their eyes turn. The kids either have red, orange, yellow, blue, or green eyes, and the government wants to euthanize those with red or orange-level abilities. Ruby gets by by hiding the fact that she can basically master Jedi mind control as an Orange for a while, but once the secret gets out, she has to split.
Chubs, who has a snarky comment for every mushy moment that Ruby and her crush Liam (Harris Dickinson) share, provides some much needed comedic relief in the otherwise ultra-tense movie, so it's great news that the character will likely return for a sequel. As for whether or not the Darkest Minds' book sequel will get a film adaptation like the first in the series did, it's too early to tell. If you want more Chubs in your life, check out Bracken's Never Fade, and you can find Brooks in Netflix's The Get Down as Ra-Ra Kipling.
