Reply #58: Not true - everyone loves a well-written story

[anigbrowl]

but getting people to fork over several million bucks for a good story is hard. Even great stories are not an automatic guarantee of a good film. Take Romeo and Juliet, there's been loads of films made on that theme and many of them are entirely forgettable.

To be perfectly honest, people do not really go for the stories. There aren't that many different stories anyway when you go past the superficial stuff. Consider: a beautiful princess is held captive by an evil tyrant, and a handsome young hero must rescue her and then defeat the forces of evil - with the help of some friends! Sleeping beauty, basically. And Star Wars. And too many others to list.

What people really go for are the characters...which is why having a good villain is almost more important than a good hero, and why people quote cool lines of the movie at each other afterwards. Darth Vader is THE best known character in Star Wars for the same reason that 'Mirror Mirror on the Wall' is the best-known line in Snow White and 'Why so serious' is the most-quoted Batman line. And this is also why you see so many comic-books made into movies, they understood this years ago and they know the basic story formulas inside out.

And with very few exceptions, it's far, far easier to sell a character to an audience with a well-known actor. The fact that they're already established means the audience is already interested in seeing them, whereas with an unknown actor any flaws in the script will be interpreted by most people as bad acting. Seriously. It's also true that if the sound is bad most people won't remember it but will say the picture didn't look good.