Story Elements Found In Blockbuster Films by John Truby Video Lecture | Screenwriting: From Beginner to a Pro - Career Development

what's the best script you've seen on
screen this year there's been some good
films that have come out in the
summertime Hunger Games and Avengers now
in both cases we're talking about you
know super popular films we're not we're
not really time that Oscar winners here
but they do what they do extremely well
and I like to talk when I get my class I
like to talk about the story elements
that are found in hit films because
writers don't realize that in order to
sell a script they have to write this
script that Hollywood is looking to buy
now to understand what that is you have
to understand that what Hollywood's
basic marketing requirement is which is
they are selling to a worldwide audience
now for years now it has not been the
u.s. audience that they're most
concerned about it's a worldwide
audience and it turns out that to sell
to a worldwide audience to have a
blockbuster know there are certain story
elements that are in those blockbuster
scripts and a lot of writers don't
realize this they think that well it's a
blockbuster film because it has movie
stars or because it has a lot of special
effects and so on well not so Hollywood
has not been a movie star based system
for at least a decade even though most
people think that it still is all about
the movie star no it's about the script
and it's about the story elements that
are in the script now there are certain
story elements that writers have to have
in their script to appeal to a worldwide
audience because we have to get beyond
those cultural differences those
national differences so the first thing
that you realize when you look at these
hit films is that they're almost always
based on the myth genre myth form is the
most popular story form in the
old and has been for many years and in
the case of both Hunger Games and the
Avengers
we have myth based stories which have
then been updated now in the case of The
Avengers
we had another really good story element
that they use which is the concept of
the dream team the all-stars that are
brought together and this is a very
popular story form when you combine that
with a myth based story you've got a big
hit on your hands and by the way that's
the main reason that Disney bought
Marvel Comics in the first place was to
get access to what I call the character
Bank which is a number of characters
that are already established have
worldwide appeal and which we can then
use in any number of films ad infinitum
in the case of The Hunger Games you have
a very good adaptation I think of a book
in the sense of that once again we have
this myth foundation and in this
particular case the novelist is really
the person who brought all those myth
elements together very similar to the
way JK Rowling did in the Harry Potter
stories you get this element of the
young female archer that this is right
out of Greek mythology
Artemis Diana character you get the
William Tell story with her shooting the
arrow through the the apple and so on
but she brought together all of these
classic myth elements and put them in a
story which he then modernized using a
science fiction form so again we get a
very powerful combination of myth and
science fiction that again made for a
worldwide hit
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