I know we’re all tired of watching the same movies over and over, so here are three movie genres that need to be brought back and how.
- Heist Movies
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Where have all the heist movies gone?
I recently watched Ocean’s Eleven for the first time ever, and I was blown away by it. It was so fun, so smart, and just plain cool. Thankfully, there are a few other Ocean’s movies to occupy my time, but I’d love to see more heist movies get made in general.
These movies have such a solid structure: introducing the team, planning the heist, executing the heist and something seems to go wrong, twist where our protagonists do something that wasn’t in the original plan, and our protagonists (usually) winning in the end. Changes in that formula could be really exciting.
My pitch: Superhero heist movie. That’s all I want.
The market saturation of superhero movies means that we’ve gotten to the point where a pretty simple origin movie isn’t all that interesting anymore. One of the ways to keep superhero movies interesting is to combine them with other genres. There have been several superhero movies like this. A great example of this is the cowboy movie, Logan. A bad example is the horror attempt, New Mutants.
A heist movie where the heist victims have tried to prepare beforehand for the superpowered would be so interesting. And it would encourage our superheroes (and screenwriters) to use the characters’ powers and abilities in creative new ways.
- Original Musicals
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Jukebox musicals, musicals adapted from Broadway, and animated Disney movies are excluded from this. Tom Hooper, director of Les Misérables and Cats, is also not allowed in this space.
We need a new movie that is an entirely original musical, purely created for film. The Greatest Showman, an example of this, was a pretty poor movie, but people still went crazy for it, which only proves that people are desperate for a good musical.
My pitch: Pretty much anything other than a movie about P.T. Barnum, who was just a bad, bad dude. And absolutely no superheroes for this one.
Broadway has some pretty insane musicals, such as Starlight Express, a Thomas the Tank Engine-inspired and roller skate-clad fever dream, and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a disaster. Also, Cats. We don’t need another Cats.
A new movie musical should be the opposite of those Broadway shows. It should be grounded, real, and raw. That’s what people like about a lot of musicals. If someone wrote a musical that was intensely personal to them and well-executed, I have no doubt that audiences would flock to it. Plus, having Hugh Jackman would help.
- Murder Mystery
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True murder mystery movies are just starting to enter pop culture again, but they’ve had a shaky comeback.
Murder on the Orient Express was a recent movie that was underwhelming and made a great Agatha Christie twist almost forgettable. It didn’t have any soul, any real character development, and it fell kind of flat.
Recent entries in the genre have either gone completely towards comedy like Adam Sandler’s Murder Mystery or so suddenly absurd that the film loses all cohesion and sense like A Simple Favor. A touch of humor can be great for movies like these, but I would love to see a more serious movie made.
My pitch: Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. There are so many of her stories that could make great adaptations. Death on the Nile is set to come out this year and I hope it will be good, but based on the previous film, I’m not too optimistic.
There should be a movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None. I recently read this book and loved it. Part of what made it great is that the story was not about a detective figuring out the mystery of who did it and why. It was 10 people who had been brought together on an island and tried to figure out what was going on amongst themselves. It focused on presumably normal people.
We’ve had a million pieces of media where a Sherlock-esque genius detective is only ever hampered poor social skills. It’s been done to death. The detective just isn’t as interesting as the other characters in the story anymore.
Focusing on other characters is what Knives Out did so successfully. It was not Detective Benoit Blanc’s story. It was Marta’s, and she wasn’t some incredibly intelligent, always-one-step-ahead character at all. She was real.
Genre is a great tool of cinema and gives the audience certain expectations for a movie, but when filmmakers are able to step outside of that genre and use different elements, they can create something new and memorable.
Injecting something new into something tried and true can give it new life, so that audiences aren’t always seeing the same movies they’ve seen before.
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