When a film does unexpectedly well, I believe it’s important, as a screenwriter, to ask the question: “Why?”
I don’t care if it was a Michael Bay flick, a goofy horror movie, a love story, a slow-moving biopic, or whatever. To be dismissive of any movie that does exceptionally well at the box office is to ignore the very audience you are hoping to court later on when you start making movies.
So… Moana 2.
Best Thanksgiving opening ever at 220 million bucks (for 5 days).
That’s too many bucks, man. You can’t chalk that up to, “Kids animated movie on Thanksgiving. Of course it did well.”
No no no no no no no.
Don’t oversimplify it.
The first movie made 56 million dollars its opening weekend. This film made 135 million (over the three-day weekend). So the sequel made over two times as much. When do sequels make twice as much as the first films at this scale? It’s rare.
And it wasn’t one of Disney’s billion dollar franchises either. The first film topped off at 640 million. In fact, when the original Moana finished its run, it was seen as a soft failure by the studio. It did solid business. But not the kind of business expected out of a Disney animated movie.
So, what happened?
Why did this previously forgotten movie birth a sequel that became a smash hit?
The first reason has nothing to do with screenwriting. Disney is able to track, with terrifying exactness, what their audience watches simply by checking their Disney+ database. And Moana was getting a lot of love on streaming.
But from a storytelling perspective, its success is obvious.
The “mismatched pairing” is one of the most reliable storytelling mechanisms around. Why? Because what you’re trying to do with a screenplay is entertain the reader. You do this by creating drama. And the best way to create drama is through conflict.
The problem I see in a ton of screenplays is that the writer struggles to keep the conflict consistent. He’ll write one scene that has strong conflict. Then there will be 6-7 scenes with little to no conflict. Finally, after 25 pages, another scene with good conflict will arrive.
When you place a mismatched pair of characters on an adventure, you have conflict built into EVERY SCENE AUTOMATICALLY.
And if you want to get more advanced, you can create even more conflict by widening the difference-gap between the pair. The wider the gap, the more conflict you’ll get from them. Moana is compassionate and selfless. Maui is self-centered and insensitive. They see the world in completely different ways.
That’s what you need for an effective pairing.
And the great thing about this is that you can use it in any genre and it will work. In action, we have Hobbs and Shaw, a no-nonsense cop and a suave criminal. In Drama, Green Book. A quiet thoughtful pianist and a brash Italian driver. In Romance, When Harry Met Sally. A womanizer and a woman desperate to find love. In sci-fi, The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian is stoic and driven by duty. Baby Yoda is playful and mischievous.
Think about that for a second. How different Mandalorian and Grogu are. I mean they are so so so so so different. When you do this, you will never have to find conflict for your scene. It will naturally happen.
So the next time you want a guaranteed formula that works, create a pairing that’s not just different from one another. But VERY different.
Moving onto movie number 2. That would be Wicked. The film dropped just 30% to an 80 million second weekend. I have to give it to that little green witch. She didn’t drop much at all.
As I like to remind people, the first weekend take comes from the marketing. The second weekend take comes from the screenwriting. If you wrote a good script, people will tell others about the movie fondly, which means a lot of those referals will show up for weekend #2.
How big of a deal is this?
It’s actually made me consider seeing the film.
Now granted, it raises that possibility from -6% to +3%. But that’s still an improvement. I think I need to do some pre-movie hypnosis therapy preparing me for 2 hours of Ariana Grande creepiness. If I can somehow mentally block out her bizarre movements and 2nd grade voice, I might go.
Of note is the audience for these films. Wicked and Moana 2 have a 70% female audience. Gladiator 2, which took in just 30 million in its second weekend, is the big male movie. And they’re not showing up.
This is a strange glitch in the box office matrix because female-led movies have been declining faster than Jamba Juice stock over the last three years and it was looking like we were moving back to a male-dominated box office.
But with the ultimate male movie barely putting up a Gladiatorial fight and these other two films becoming box office bonanzas, we may have to rethink that strategy. Should we be propping up female protagonists once more? Or is the disappointment of Gladiator 2 rooted more in poor storytelling?
I’m still on my holiday weekend, watching whatever movies my parents force me to. The latest one I’m checking out is The Long Goodbye, a 1970s film about a PI looking into a disappearance. I’m 30 minutes in and, so far, it’s quite good.
If anyone has time to check it out, watch the first 15 minutes. It’s a fun little 1970s version of GSU. The hero wakes up in his apartment, hung over, and his cat is hungry. His goal is, simply, to get his cat food. Hmm, saving the cat. Where have I heard that before?
Not long after, the inciting incident arrives. It’s classic screenplay structure, playing out all the way back in 1974! We’ll see if it continues to use that classic structure tonight. :)
What’d you see this weekend? How was it?
