Shortly after Mahana, a second major coming-of-age film was released in the same year, Taika Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), and, like Waititi's earlier exercise in the genre, Boy (2010), quickly smashed all previous box office records. Not only has Hunt for the Wilderpeople become New Zealand's highest-grossing film to date, but it has also been universally well received by critics, both in New Zealand and abroad, where it has played on the international film festival circuit. Within the context of New Zealand coming-of-age films, it marks a new phase in the evolution of the genre in that a version of the generic model is used as a symbolic paradigm for exploring the dynamics of race-relations between Māori and Pākehā as they advance into the twenty-first century under the influence of biculturalism, which has been sponsored as a state ideology by successive governments since the 1980s.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople tackles much the same theme as Boy – the longing of a young teenage Māori boy to find love and acceptance – and adopts the same expressive mode, which is to take material that is intrinsically dark and disturbing and to overlay it with surface humor and a comedic treatment. Waititi also draws heavily on popular youth culture, presenting his adolescent hero as a devotee of hip hop, just as Boy in Boy is a fan of Michael Jackson, and includes frequent allusions to popular films, especially New Zealand hits from the late 1970s and 1980s such as Sleeping Dogs (1977), Smash Palace (Roger Donaldson, 1981), and Came a Hot Friday (1985), as well as international hits like Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), and Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001–3). There is a major difference between Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, however, in that, unlike Boy, the later film is an adaptation. That in itself would not be exceptional were it not for the fact that Waititi treats the source in such a way as fundamentally to change its nature, and in so doing to reshape it in order to make it serve an entirely new purpose.