"The Maze Runner" author James Dashner and film adaptation's lead actor Dylan O'Brien have talked how the upcoming Wes Ball-directed film is distinct from recently released young-adult novel based movies like "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent."

Based on the first book in the young-adult trilogy of the same name by Dashner, "The Maze Runner" follows the story of teenager Thomas (O'Brien) who wakes up to find himself without any memory of his past in a giant maze called The Glade, which is already inhabited by a group of similarly amnesiac boys - and later, a girl - working to plan an escape. The routine of The Glade has gone erratic since his arrival, and it becomes apparent that Thomas is the key to their great escape, according to Zap2it.

"We don't have romance in the movie, and I love that, for the first time in one of these really cool YA stories," O'Brien told The Hollywood Reporter Monday, Sept. 15, at New York City's SVA Theatre at a special screening of the 20th Century Fox film, presented with Teen Vogue. "During what's going on [in other films], how is there romance happening? It doesn't make any sense."

"These kids are fighting for their lives, they're not gonna stop and kiss and cuddle, and I love that so much," the 23-year-old "Teen Wolf" star said about "The Gladers" in his upcoming flick. "It's so not YA, it's a sci-fi action thriller."

In an interview with Colorado Springs Independent, Dashner revealed that his biggest fear when he agreed to the idea of making his novel into a film was that creative people behind the production "were going to turn it into a big romance, because every YA [movie] that has come out has this romance plot line, or it turns into a love triangle."

But "there's not even a kiss [in the movie]," he revealed.

Dashner said that he has already accepted the fact that many people, especially adults and the media, are absolutely going to have a preconceived notion  that "The Maze Runner" is just "another YA adaptation."

"I've seen that in a lot of the fall preview-type stuff. I totally understand it, because there have been a lot of really bad adaptations of young adult novels in recent years. But I feel like the media doesn't talk that way, for example, about superhero movies," he explained. "The first review I saw for [The Maze Runner] was some guy in Australia who just ripped it to shreds, but his bias was just so evident. He even tweeted 'please don't make any more young-adult movies.'"

Though O'Brien thinks "The Maze Runner" has an "underdog script and an under-the-radar project with all relatively up-and-coming actors," he believes it could exist among those other young-adult film series, because "it's so good," according to BuzzFeed.