What is genre? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, genre is a particular type or category of literature or art. In the world of movies, it is often times the one-to-two words that describe what a viewer should expect to see from a film: romance, action, comedy, animation, etc.
As we saw in the chart from last week’s blog, the fifty highest-grossing films of all time (adjusted for inflation) yielded a wide range of genres.
In the lead was adventure, animation, and comedy. Following close behind? Action and sci-fi. In last place, there was a tie between crime, family, musical, thriller, and western. Many of these films had a combination of genres. The most popular combination was action adventure films. Some of the least common include horror comedy and crime comedy, and is it really that much of a surprise? It would appear that mixing genres as different as these can be done, but is much trickier and not as commonplace as other combinations. Often times, these combination films comes out less Blazing Saddles (#49 on our list) and more like the half-dozen Scary Movie parodies.
So what can we learn from looking at this data? For starters, it helps to look at the most commonly targeted audiences and the greatest way to appeal to as many of the viewers as the film can. Bigger audience appeal = more tickets sold. Capisci? For example: action films have a tendency to appeal to men more than women, and vice versa for romance films. That’s not to say that there aren’t women out there who like action movies or men who don’t hit the movie theater for some sweet romantic comedies. Even as a women, I love action movies. That said, the most popular genres–adventure, animation, and comedy–tend to bring about happy and/or exciting movies that often appeal to both sexes. Nearly everyone can find a way to relate to these films. Even when adding subgenres, these movies tend to steer clear of less-popular themes, like horror and westerns. While not everyone enjoys adventure, animation, or comedy, it is certainly easier to fill a theater and sell tickets to a comedy film than it is to a western or horror film–where only a small percentage of the population is interested in seeing cowboys or the terrifying things that go bump in the night. For this reason, it is much easier for a great adventure script to get sold than it is to sell a just-as-great western. Lately, there has been a trend of adding subgenres to films in order to attract a larger audience. This was done recently with Natalie Portman’s character in the new movie Thor 2: The Dark World, a marketing movie so obvious that Jimmy Kimmel even talked about it on his late night show (you may find the clip below).
Since Thor already had a large audience of men who were drawn to this film for the action scenes and plot so famously found in Marvel stories, the marketing to women through romance scenes was promoted in order to expand audience appeal even more and attract viewers (particularly women) who may not have come to see this movie otherwise. If you are able to add a sub-genre and market your film/script to an even larger audience than by all means more power to you!
I’ll say it once again, as I did last week, if you are super passionate about a particular subgenre or less-popular genre–go for it. You have a much better chance of writing a really great script if you write about something you feel legitimate excitement for than if you write about something that bores you. That said, if you are starting from scratch and feel no particular sense of allegiance to any one genre, the odds are in your favor if you write within some of the more popular genres displayed in this date. Sure, there may be more competition, but there will also be more production companies looking for those scripts, more money to fund them, and more openings in the market to place those films.
Next post we’ll talk about popular story structure and elements. Until then, write on!
Talk soon.
-The Plot Girl
The Plot Girl 