But Mega-Showdown is Ready to Rise!
It was not a good weekend to be any writer who liked ballet. Etoile, on Amazon, didn’t even make it to its second season. And now we’ve got Ballerina, toe-scuffing its way to a 25 million dollar opening.
I don’t think you need to look far to figure out what happened here. The issue is two-fold. You can’t just create a brand new character in a universe and hope we’re going to love them. It doesn’t work that way. The way it works is you prove yourself as a secondary character in a bigger franchise. The audience falls in love with you. Then you go make your own movie (or TV show).
This formula has worked for decades. I don’t know why you think you can change it. It speaks to the value of great character writing. Creating a strong character that audiences resonate with remains the hardest thing to do in screenwriting. Which we’ll talk about more in a second.
The other problem was that Ana De Armas is not a movie star. It’s not even that audiences don’t like her. It’s that they don’t REMEMBER her. She doesn’t have that “must see” quality that only a dozen people in this profession have. The combination of those two things doomed this movie.
It’s too bad because Ballerina, as some of you remember, started out as a spec sale. This was one of those dream scenarios for a screenwriter. Most spec sales get stuck in forever-development. For your script to be pulled into a billion dollar franchise is the stuff dreams are made of. The fact that the movie has now flopped means less of that will happen in the future.
But I’m not here to dwell on the negative. I want to focus on the positive: What can we learn from this? Especially considering that the greatest screenplay competition is coming back to Scriptshadow. How can you use the lessons from Ballerina to create better characters and win the Mega-Showdown?
One of the tougher lessons I’ve learned over the years is that you come into every script with a handicap. With studio scripts, your hero must be grounded in reality. They can’t be wacky or wild or untethered. Why is this problematic? Because grounded people are boring. How’s that for a challenge: With every studio script, you must figure out a way to make your boring hero compelling.
The default solution to this is to make them likable. There’s only one problem with this. Likable people are still boring. We want to find a way to make these characters COMPELLING.
Lucky for you, I know how to pull this off.
You have to lean into real life and create a flaw for your hero that’s relatable and that resonates with others. You have to see grounded characters as an advantage. It allows you to explore the “real shit” and the “real shit” is what everyday people relate to.
Let’s say you want to write about someone who’s stubborn, someone who only sees the world the way they want to see it. It is their way or the highway. They are such a prisoner to their world-view that they cannot accept the views of anyone else around them, even their closest friends and family.
That may seem like a relatively boring flaw on the surface. But if you truly commit to it and explore it like you were researching a real person in real life, that character is going to feel REAL to the audience.
Once you achieve that reality in their eyes, they can now compare that person to people THEY KNOW. This is the trick to getting audiences to become obsessed with a character – when the character becomes a stand-in for real people.
This means that reading your script, or watching your film, offers the viewer the chance to CHANGE THEIR LIVES by reading your script to the end. You see, to them, if your hero can change, it means their friend or family member can change too! So they have no choice but to read to the end.
If you want to see this play out in a movie, check out Hoosiers. When Gene Hackman died last month, I watched a few of his old movies, including this one. Sure, it’s a formulaic sports movie about a tiny basketball team trying to win the state championship.
But what elevates it beyond the traditional sports flick is this stubborn coach at the center of the story – this guy who only does things his way. The writer and Hackman committed to that flaw so thoroughly that the character became real to the audience. I knew people like that Coach. Seeing him gradually bend and listen to others gave me hope that the people I knew could change as well.
Do you see what’s happening here? Your script is connecting the imaginary world (yours) with the real one (theirs). Now you’re playing in 4-D space and this is when movies become magical.
Absent a flaw, the other thing you can do to make us care about your main character is to create a genuine relationship in their life that contains an issue that is unresolved in some way.
I use the word “genuine” aggressively. If it’s not genuine, it won’t work. You have to dig into your own life and find these unresolved relationships that you can draw from and transplant onto the hero of your script. Only then will this work.
If you have never had your heart broken and try to write about a relationship where one character breaks another character’s heart, I guarantee you it’s not going to work. We won’t care. It will feel disingenuous. You have to draw from real life to pull this off.
The trick is to pinpoint WHAT, in the relationship, is unresolved (in a marriage one person does all the work, in a friendship there’s zero communication). If you don’t know, you won’t know what to build their scenes around. But once you know, it becomes extremely powerful because to explore any unresolved issue, your characters must push through conflict, and conflict is where all the drama is.
More importantly, the audience again gets to compare what they’re seeing onscreen to their life. And if it’s genuine enough, they will be able to mentally work through those same issues with the person they share that problem with. Whenever the character onscreen does something, they will be able to think, “I could do that. And maybe that will fix the issue we have.” Or, “Ugh, that’s what my person always does! I hate that.”
When they are thinking these things, they are EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED in your movie as opposed to casually involved. And once you’ve got them emotionally, they are captivated.
But it’s not easy! You have to draw from real life and you have to make sure the characters’ actions reflect how things would genuinely go down in the real world. The second you start cheating and making up reactions or lines based on what you want to happen rather than what would happen, you will lose them. Which is why so few writers are able to pull great characters off.
But the point is, when you’re writing these bigger movies, and you’re forced to ground that main character, you don’t have many avenues to make that character interesting. Is that why Ballerina didn’t work? I don’t know. I didn’t see it and it’s been forever since I read the script. But if I had to guess, I’d say that nobody’s coming out of that movie feeling like they’ve connected to the Ballerina character for the reasons I just brought up.
So, to summarize. If you like to write wacky heroes, write an indie movie that costs less than 5 million bucks to produce. Or use the secondary characters in your studio scripts to have fun with. But if your script depends on a hero that must be grounded, the main ways you’re going to make those characters compelling to an audience are to explore a genuine flaw or explore a genuine broken relationship.
Remember this when writing your Mega-Showdown screenplay.
VIVA LA MEGA SHOWDOWN!!!
