Suderman points to it, a formula that “lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay”:
[I]t came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s.
When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.
McArdle hates that so many contemporary, formulaic movies are targeted at male adolescents:
I watch movies from decades past, like “Chariots of Fire” or the “Killing Fields” or “Sophie’s Choice,” and I’m struck that few of them could ever be made now; they’re both too slow, and too subtle. (Note: none of these movies is particularly subtle.) For that matter, as the Official Blog Spouse points out, “Jurassic Park” might not get made now; there’s almost no action in the first hour, and it definitely doesn’t conform to Blake Snyder’s formula. Steven Spielberg recently told a film school class that “Lincoln” was “this close” to premiering on HBO. If Steven Spielberg can’t get a movie made because he’s insufficiently formulaic, Hollywood has an enormous problem.
Alyssa also thinks the studios need to diversify:
I wonder if part of the problem, and one of the reasons we see fewer of the lower-priced movies aimed at adult audiences instead of attempts to pull in teenagers and young men, is that studios have gotten into the habit of wanting the same outcome from every film, rather than understanding that their slate of films can function like a stock portfolio, the profits from some bigger profits fueling smaller movies that could have a longer critical and commercial shelf life.
The Dish 