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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

> This won't work for them forever

You are under estimating the power of formula. Disney had a huge run with prince-princess stories for kids and they only recently toned it down because of huge negative effects on kids. They can easily go on forever on this theme if they want to. Vast majority of movies made in Indian cinema (aka Bollywood) are information-less and even story-less movies that just revolves around one thing: Two people fall in love and there is some problem. You can literally find identical story lines in other 100s of Bollywood movies. Very very few people there has given thought to making movies on something else. This has been going on for about 50 years there and no signs of stopping.

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The "formula" has changed a lot in recent years. You need to revisit Bollywood! Some of the biggest hits this year which I have seen do not follow that at all.

Uri Gully Boy Kesari (I don't watch that many movies it seems!)

It is true nowadays, there seems to be more originality in Bollywood than Hollywood

( I don't see that many!

Yes. Pixar has a template:

Once upon a time there was ___.

Every day, ___.

One day ___.

Because of that, ___.

Until finally ___.

Pixar movies are "nobody becomes somebody due to external event". That's a common pattern, beaten to death in the Star Wars franchise. But it's not the only pattern. It's not Game of Thrones. It's not Star Trek. It's not even most winners of "Best Picture" Oscars.

This is completely nonsensical.

Toy Story? Cars? Inside Out? Up? Coco?

None of these follow that template. Sure, some like a Bugs Life and Rattatouille follow this, but in quirky ways. All conventional narrative structure involves an external incident. That sets up the central conflict of the narrative.

Disney movies like Big Hero 6, Moana or Frozen are more likely to follow it, though again, there’s a lot more craft in the story and surrounding context than the base structure suggests.

Many of these were Pixar movies, not Disney. Pixar almost always insisted doing things differently (guess who was it’s CEO). Disney on the other hand almost always insisted in serving “sugar”. There is even a phrase for this, it’s called Disney Effect: https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/family/disney-princesse...

> "nobody becomes somebody due to external event"

Pixar, StarWars, Lord of Rings, Harry Potter and virtually most other big banners use "nobody becomes somebody because they were already somebody" formula. Give it a close look and you will find lead characters in these movies didn't actually worked for their super powers or earned special status. Luke can become Jedi not because he worked for it for his whole life but because he was born that way. They were already special but put in difficult circumstances which made them not look special. But eventually they overcame and their "specialness" poped out anyway. People identify with this template because everyone thinks they are special and supressed because of external circumstances. Movie with a message that you are just as normal as anyway and you have to put years of grit to be successful - this typically doesn't go well with most audiences.

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