The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is there a dramatic question posed early on that establishes which moment will mark the end of the story?

As we established in chapter five, most stories are built around a hero’s longstanding problem, which becomes acute in the first scene and eventually gets resolved in the last scene. In most of these stories, the hero’s problem and the audience’s “dramatic question” are essentially the same: Will the hero defeat the villain? Will the couple find true love? Who killed that person discovered in the first scene? 

The end of the problem is obvious in Jaws (the shark gets blown up), but some problems aren’t solved so definitively. If the hero doesn’t know when his problem is going to end, the writer must establish a “dramatic question” in the minds of the audience, creating a subconscious expectation in our minds of when the story will end.

In the wonderful heist movie Charley Varrick, Walter Matthau robs a small-town bank only to discover that he’s accidentally ended up with the mob’s money, and now he’s being hunted by some very bad guys. The reality is, even if he gets away, he’s going to be on the run for the rest of his life, so how could the filmmakers keep the ending from seeming anticlimactic? They came up with a great solution: Near the beginning, we see one of the mobsters announce, “He’ll never make it out of Arizona alive!”

This is brilliant, because the audience subconsciously notes that “getting out of Arizona alive” has now become the official measure of success, so we’ll stand up and cheer when Charley cleverly gets out of the state, even though we know he’ll have to keep running for years after that.

Likewise, near the beginning of Never Cry Wolf, we see a bunch of grizzled Yukon mountain men laugh at nerdy newcomer Charles Martin Smith, who has come to study wolves. One of them declares, “He’ll never make it through the winter!” Once again, we instantly accept that as the benchmark of success, even though his story will continue past the end of the movie.

Of course, in both of these cases, it still would have been fairly obvious that the movie was over, since each movie ends with the hero leaving town. In these cases, the question is intended to make a potentially anticlimactic ending seem more satisfying. But some stories truly need the dramatic question to be stated openly.

The Godfather is a long, sprawling story. Our hero Michael leaves town in the middle, hangs around in Sicily for a long time, and then comes back for the final stretch. The primary relationship, between Michael and his dad, ends halfway through when his dad dies. The secondary relationship, between Michael and his fiance, Kay, seems to end a little later when Michael weds someone else in Sicily. So why does the story keep going? Why doesn’t the audience get (overly) frustrated?

Here, too, the end date is planted in our mind subtly at the beginning of the story, when Michael tells Kay, “In five years, the Corleone family will be completely legitimate.” So the dramatic question becomes, “Is that true?” No matter how many ups and down and beginnings and endings Michael experiences over those long five years, the ultimate question remains unanswered, so the audience is willing to go along for the ride toward that five-year deadline without saying, “Jeez, I thought this movie was done an hour ago!”

Rulebook Casefile: Imposing a Dramatic Question in 20th Century Women

This movie’s great strength is that it’s a free-ranging slice of life, but you still have to impose a bit of structure in order to make it feel like a coherent story.  In this movie, at around the 20 minutes mark, Annette Benning asks the two women in her son’s life to help raise him.  Then, near the end, she tells them to cool it.  That’s all the structure you need, and Mills hangs his whole sprawling loosey-goosey movie on that rickety frame, which works just fine.

Rulebook Casefile: Dramatic Questions on CSI

How many storylines should a pilot have? Usually, they have fewer storylines than an average episode. Because we have to get to know all of the characters and the world of the show, there’s less time for plot. But another way that the “CSI” pilot is remarkable is that the creators go the other direction: there are five cases in this episode.

This is another way in which the show was unusually realistic and still very unrealistic at the same time:

• On the one hand, we’re seeing them contribute to some cases and then hand the work off to others, and accepting that we may never hear about this case again. This allows them to spotlight the quotidian reality of police work, and just show “a night in the life of a forensic lab”, instead of pretending that police only pursue one case at a time, as one might guess from “Law and Order”
• But they know that we’ll demand closure to at least some of the cases, meaning that they have to create two cases that unrealistically get reported and closed all within that one night’s span, including instantaneous test results that actually would have taken weeks.

So what does all of this do to the “dramatic question”? The opening teaser of the show begins with Grissom showing up on the scene of a supposed suicide and determining that it was murder, and of course we keep cutting back to the progress of his investigation over the night…but in the end, the crime remains unsolved and temporarily abandoned.

And here’s the remarkable thing: the audience barely notices. Looking back, there is a moment where Grissom tells the victim, “We’ll keep trying, something will turn up eventually, it always does,” but you hear that on cop shows all the time, and I for one never noticed that the case is never mentioned again in this episode. (It would indeed be solved eventually when new evidence appeared twenty episodes later.)

Normally, it’s very unsatisfying in any story if the original dramatic question is simply abandoned, but this is another remarkable achievement of this show: they get us to admire the team’s successes and failures, and they discourage us from differentiating between the two. This is part of the show’s celebration of the scientific method: the purity of the process is more valuable than the attainment of a desired result. The fact that, by the end of the pilot, we’ve already learned to admire Grissom despite his lack of results is a testament to how successful they have been in quickly rewriting our expectations.

Rulebook Casefile: Asking the Right Dramatic Question in Groundhog Day (And Shutting Down the Wrong Questions)

Rewatching Groundhog Day, I realized a curious thing: I’ve always admired the ending for not explaining anything, and just leaving it as a metaphor…but why do I like that here when I hated it so much on “Lost”?

In the infuriating “Lost” finale, it felt like they were saying, “Whatever, dude, let’s just say it was god or something…It’s all just an allegory anyway, so what do you care?” Groundhog Day could be characterized the same way, but it’s a master class in how to do it right. It didn’t have to answer those questions because it never asked them. There’s only one question this movie wants to ask:

• What should Phil do with his day in this town?

But there are a lot of questions they don’t want to ask. Most obviously:

• Why is this happening?

But if you think about it, there are a whole lot more questions that could have distracted us:

• What was the one mistake that Phil made that caused him to be punished in this way?
• How did Phil become such a miserable person?
• Will Phil make amends for his lifetime of wrongs?
• Can Phil reconnect with his parents, lost loves, etc?

Compare this to a very similar movie, Scrooged, which was also about a jerk played by Bill Murray who is given one mystical day to make amends for a lifetime of being a jerk. That movie was all about facing his past, identifying where it all went wrong and reconnecting with his ex. How does this movie shut down those more traditional avenues of redemption?

A big part of the answer is the blizzard. What does the blizzard do for the movie? On first viewing, we only notice two things:

• It proves he’s not a very good weatherman, since he failed to predict it.
• It makes him even more miserable, by trapping him in a town he hates and downing the long-distance wires, so he can’t call and complain to anyone.

But we don’t notice all of the other things that it’s accomplishing.

• He can’t go anywhere.
• He only has access to one therapist, who sucks, so he only visits once.
• He can’t visit any paranormal experts.
• He can’t reach out to anyone from his present.
• He can’t confront his past.

Crucially, the movie doesn’t ignore these possibilities, but it does blow past them, devoting about five minutes of screentime to the fact that the roads and phone lines are down and there’s no hope of useful therapy. Once that’s been established, the viewer unconsciously takes all those questions off the table, and naturally arrives at the one question Rubin and Ramis want us to ask: “Okay then, what should Phil do with his day in this town?”

The problem with “Lost” is that they spent six years teasing us with glimpses of a massive sci-fi backstory. Then they finally revealed the answer: “Eh, it’s all just a metaphor and they all got to kiss each other in heaven, so whatever...The End.”  No.  Just no.  If you don’t intend to provide any answers, then you have to take those questions off the table early on.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Very much so: When will he finally have sex.
Alien	YES, when will they kill the alien?
An Education	YES.  Will she get into Oxford?
The Babadook	YES. Can they make it until the psychiatrist comes?
Blazing Saddles	YES. Same as above.
Blue Velvet	YES. whose ear is that?
The Bourne Identity	YES. what will happen when Bourne and Conklin meet?  Why did Bourne lose his memory?
Bridesmaids	YES. Will the wedding go well?
Casablanca	YES. we also see a plane leaving and people wondering who’s on it.
Chinatown	NO. This movie has major dramatic question problems, as we’ll discuss.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  his wife asks him how much longer.
Do the Right Thing	YES. It’s clear that this will be the story of one day, and it is asked what will be the consequences of the heat.
The Farewell	YES. Well, we’re primed for the lie to come out, and, whether or not it does, for her to die, but neither comes. But the movie is structured around the trip and does end when the trip ends.
The Fighter	YES. He says he’s going to be a champion.
Frozen	YES. The dramatic question changes a few times, until Anna gets hit in the heart and the dramatic question for the rest of the movie is, “Will she beat the curse?”
The Fugitive	YES. It’s implied: when will Gerard take Kimble into custody.
Get Out	YES. Chris’s dramatic question (Will they accept me?) will be answered definitively (and ironically) halfway through, and then we will default to Rod’s original question (Will he make it home?)
Groundhog Day	YES. The first shot after that: His hand against a green screen: “Somebody asked me today, ‘Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you want to be?’”
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Where is the nest?
In a Lonely Place	YES. did Dix kill her?
Iron Man	Not really. The movie kind of ends halfway through, then fires back up again. Finally, it becomes, “Can Stane be stopped?”
Lady Bird	YES. Well, we assume based on everything that it’ll end when she leaves town, but it goes a little longer, which tries our expectations a bit, but we accept it.
Raising Arizona	YES. At what point will Nathan Arizona confront his kid’s kidnappers.
Rushmore	YES. We think the question will be, “Can Max stay in Rushmore?”, but he’s kicked out early on, so instead it becomes, “Will Max find love?”
Selma	YES. We see the woman denied the right to register and so we build to the moment when she’ll get the right to register.  We see the marchers turn back twice and look forward to them making it.
The Shining	YES. The question is raised early on of can they make it through the winter without going insane, so we know that the movie will end when they leave, one way or another.
Sideways	YES. The wedding is coming up, they talk about when he’ll drink the 1961 wine, and Jack pledges to hook Miles up.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Can they catch Bill in three days before he kills again?
Star Wars	YES. What are the plans, why does the empire want them, and who will end up them?
Sunset Boulevard	YES. how does Joe end up in that pool?  (Sikov claims that most people don’t realize that’s Joe until the end, but I think most people do.)

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Separate from genre, is a consistent mood established early and maintained throughout?

At this point, your genre has now added one set of limitations, and your subgenre another. So once you’ve accepted that, are you now free to tell any story you want within those limitations? 

Your story also needs a mood, and that mood (light, dark, satirical, zany, postmodern, over-the-top, gentle, harsh, chaotic, intense, meditative, lurid, fairy tale, bittersweet, pulpy, etc.) also carries its own limitations.

Mood is one of the trickiest and most elusive parts of writing any story. No one ever compliments you on your mood but will savage you if you get it wrong. Mood problems are to blame when the audience assumes your story will maintain a certain emotional undercurrent but then feels betrayed when you veer off in a different direction.

Many writers fear mood. They want to be able to take the story anywhere, and they resent the fact that the audience might not be willing to follow along. But good writers can use mood to their advantage because it’s an essential tool for managing expectations.

Let’s go back to 1977 and change just one thing about the movie Star Wars. What if, instead of “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …,” the opening crawl had started with the line “It is the year 25,172!” Even if the rest of the movie had stayed the same, I doubt it would have been as big of a success.

Lucas’s opening line is brilliant. It defangs the audience. It says, “Hold on there, buddy. This may look like science fiction, with spaceships and lasers and robots, but it’s really a fairy tale. It’s going to be about sword fights, magical hermits, and rescuing princesses, not supercomputers, air locks, and explosive decompression.” George Lucas was managing our expectations. He was establishing a certain mood before we could start making false genre assumptions that would have left us frustrated.

The film (500) Days of Summer did something similar: An omniscient narrator openly states at the beginning, “This is not a love story,” which preps the audience for the movie’s melancholy ending.

In both cases, the audience is being directly addressed, but you needn’t be so direct. On a more subtle level, your early scenes convey to an audience “This is going to be the kind of story where this sort of thing happens and has these sorts of consequences.”

As a kid, I fell in love with Back to the Future as soon as Michael J. Fox grabbed onto the back of a Jeep while he was on his skateboard. Then, to up the ante, he switched to the back of a cop car!

This scene had nothing to do with the plot, but it had everything to do with setting the mood. In real life, skateboarding while hanging onto a car traveling at normal speed is recommended only for the suicidal, but this movie is set in a universe where the laws of physics are a little gentler, and rebellious teen misbehavior is all in good fun. No matter how much trouble is about to ensue, it’s probably going to be okay. That’s why Doc’s last-minute resurrection feels like a satisfying payoff instead of a cop-out.

Rulebook Casefile: Wes Anderson’s Unique Imagery and Mood

Wes Anderson is one of those directors who defines “love him or hate him”…but really it’s both: many people who hate him will admit that there’s at least one they actually like, and even those who love him will admit there are some that are just too annoying.

How do you describe the mood of Rushmore? You might say odd, or delicate, or kooky, or precise. But there are also less charitable words that have been thrown around: Precious. Affected. Twee. Is that fair? It depends on you, and how successfully Wes has bewitched you into seeing things from his point of view. I definitely love Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I pretty much love The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic, but I find both Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom to be a bit too much.

One thing that started to grate on me in Anderson’s later movies was the distinctive clothing choices. Anderson loves to pick a signature kooky outfit and stick with it in every scene. In Rushmore, however, it makes sense: At first, Max is at a private school where you’re required to wear the same outfit all the time, and Max is the most enthusiastic student, so we buy that he wears his blazer even off of school grounds. Then when he gets sent down to public school, it’s funny that he continues to wear it. Notably, however, as he begins to accept public school, he switches to new clothes: still kooky, such as a green felt suit, but Anderson isn’t afraid that we won’t recognize him, as he seemed to be with other characters in later movies.

It’s also to Anderson’s credit that he gives Max a bit of extra flair in some scenes but not others: Max’s red beret is stylish and distinctive, and it turned out to be a key piece of marketable imagery, appearing on the poster and DVD box, but it would be silly to wear it too much. Marketable imagery is essential, but a little goes a long way: Don’t sacrifice character or story logic in pursuit of a signature look, as Anderson does in some of his other movies.

Straying from the Party Line: A Mood Disaster in Groundhog Day

Let’s just focus in on just one deviation from the norm:

• Deviation: The mood is uneven at first, as exemplified by the terrible song that plays over the opening driving montage, which make it seem like this movie is going to be another “Caddyshack” (also by co-writer / director Harold Ramis). Later songs by Ray Charles and Nat King Cole set the right wistful mood, but this song, which Ramis himself wrote for the movie (“Predictions show / A heavy low / You’re feeling just the same / But seasons come and seasons go / I’ll make your smile again…I’m you weather man!”) sets entirely the wrong mood. It’s an upbeat party song.
• The Potential Problem: This is usually the third rail of writing. It is extremely rare to see a movie recover from a mood problem.
• Does the Movie Get Away With It? I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and I hate that song more every time, so it doesn’t “get away with it”, but it pulls out of the skid very quickly.

It’s always very tricky when a movie has a shocking plot turn 18 minutes in that knocks everything into a completely different genre. Writers Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis made it even trickier by choosing not to foreshadow the turn at all, not even though the use of mood.

It seems like it would have made the most sense to use some scoring here that says “something mystical is about to happen” like this music that gets used in the trailer for every movie of that type:

I don’t mind that the filmmakers chose not to do that, but even if you’re not going to imply anything strange is coming, you at least have to make sure you don’t make any promises you don’t intend to keep, as this song does. It says, hey kids, we want to rock and roll all night and party every day! It creates false expectations. Basically, it just sounds dumb, and makes you expect a dumb movie.

Ultimately, this is a very daring movie that does a lot of re-writing of the audience’s expectations. For the most part, it gets away with it…once it regain its footing, after this major misstep.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, good humor. Apatow is plenty dirty, but he distinguishes himself from Phillips and McCay by having a laid-back benevolent vibe.  My favorite example of this is the way the waxer winces and laughs in sympathy.  She neither ignores nor enjoys the pain.  Everybody feels real and gets to be as sympathetic as possible.
Alien	YES, chilly, airless, distanced, cold, cool, creepy, etc. We begin with empty helmets talking to each other: this is a dehumanized world in every sense. And the ending is as hushed as the beginning.
An Education	YES.  The opening montage establishes the threat of boredom, and music establishes the potential joy of liberation.
The Babadook	YES. Chilly, haunted
Blazing Saddles	YES.  Zany, meta and smart: Bart sings “I Get a Kick Out of You,” then tricks the overseers into singing “Camptown Ladies.”
Blue Velvet	YES. very much so.  Post-modern, creepy, oddly optimistic, sleazy. This is established instantly in the pan down from the perfect flowers to the beetles underneath, the dog ignoring its owners distress to drink from the hose instead, etc.  This is a world with a dark underbelly in which bonds are breaking down.  The danger is that the darkness will surge to the surface.
The Bourne Identity	YES. hip, youthful, handheld, raw, electronic music, dyed hair, etc.
Bridesmaids	YES. Snarky, wistful, melancholic, heartfelt-yet-raunchy.
Casablanca	YES. a veneer of witty sophistication with a grim reality poking through. This is extablished right away when a man is shot dead in streets, but locals don’t lose their good-humor with the aghast tourists.
Chinatown	YES. Cool.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  darkly-comic but tense and paranoid, established by the fugazi scene. Donnie is in danger for her life, but he has all the power, and dominates Lefty. Donnie already casually endangers an innocent person (the person who gave lefty the jewel) to serve his purpose, implying danger is more to his soul than body.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Vibrant, brash, outrageous, buoyant.
The Farewell	YES. Unfortunately, like too many indie films, it has a blue filter on it, literally and figuratively.  I guess you could say the mood is “indie.”  Mood is the movie’s biggest flaw.
The Fighter	YES. it’s surprisingly upbeat and funny throughout, no matter how grim it gets, which is one of Russell’s gifts.
Frozen	YES. A snarkier and more absurd version of the standard fairy tale
The Fugitive	YES. Realistic and somewhat fun.  There’s a lot of chatter and real-life detail.  This is an outlandish story in an extremely grounded and realistic world.  Interesting, we would normally call this tone “gritty”, but it’s pointedly not that.  This is a fairly benign world, in which even the marshals mostly enjoy their day while they do their grimly-determined work.
Get Out	YES. Creepy, odd, satirical
Groundhog Day	NO. Eventually, but it has a tone disaster early on with a terrible upbeat-blues opening song that almost wrecks the whole movie. Later, we get appropriate music (Ray Charles and Nat King Cole, who are more timeless, emotional and contemplative)
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. A delicate but successful mix of scary, fun, morally serious, and snarky. The finale is surprisingly funny and scary at the same time. Established quickly by the contrast between dark, violent imagery of first scene and kid-friendly voice-over. People will die violently, but maybe not people we care about. (though they may be maimed)
In a Lonely Place	YES. witty cynicism with a strong undercurrent of despair and violence. Established by the contrast of the almost-fight in the street followed by his gentle witty interaction with the kids, where he accepts their conclusion that he’s a nobody.
Iron Man	YES. Light (even in terrorist captivity), zippy, brash.
Lady Bird	YES. Poignant, droll.
Raising Arizona	YES. The amazing theme song creates a “folk-ballad” mood.
Rushmore	YES. I suppose the word would be “precious”, but that sounds insulting when it’s actually charming.
Selma	YES. Weighty.  Very little comic relief.
The Shining	YES. cold, clinical, dehumanized creeping horror, established by the scene with Danny looking in mirror, seeing blood, then mom describing his abuse in a detached way.
Sideways	YES. When he apologizes for oversleeping and promises he’s out the door, then we cut to him reading on the toilet reading, which gets the first of many mordant chuckles from us, then we see him doing the crossword while driving! The audience freaks out, but the camera doesn’t.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Sprightly, not-gritty, smart, with a slight edge of black comedy.
Star Wars	YES. The fairy tale element is consistent throughout. C3PO calls him “Sir Luke” accidentally.  The side-wipes give it a ‘turning the pages of a fairy tale” feel.  “That wizard’s just a crazy old man.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. pitch-black comedy. Yes, Joe doesn’t lose his flippantness, even after death, and Norma remains campily entertaining, even after she kills Joe.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the ending satisfy most of the genre expectations and defy a few others?

“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.” 

—Terry Southern, writer of Easy Rider

Everybody went into Return of the Jedi rooting for Luke Skywalker to kill Darth Vader. When the moviemakers chose to redeem Vader instead, the audience was happily astonished.

But what if, in addition to that, Luke had turned evil and Yoda had ended up with Leia?

If you defy too many expectations, then you’ll lose the audience entirely. Shocks pile up until they become the new normal, leaving the audience just as bored as they would have been if you had stuck strictly to convention.

Kelly Reichardt makes super-small-scale independent films. Her first two movies, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, are amazing, but her third, the indie-western Meek’s Cutoff, is so reliably iconoclastic that it became predictable. Halfway through, I figured out the movie is so in love with ambiguity that it could only end one way: cutting off abruptly just before the climactic reveal. The ending that was supposed to be shocking just got an eye roll.

Most jokes are composed according to the “rule of threes,” in which a situation is repeated twice, then gets turned on its head the third time. Why three? Because you have to establish a pattern before you can break it. If you want to surprise your audience by defying a genre trope, then you need to first lower their guard by delivering a series of familiar payoffs, something that Meek’s Cutoff wasn’t willing to do.

So the question is, how can you deliver on classical genre tropes without resorting to old clichés? There are many groan-worthy clichés that persist for no good reason, such as “Let’s blackmail a random guy into committing a crime.” This tired story starter violates common sense, and we’ve seen it a million times. The same goes for anything involving world-weary assassins, nursery rhyme-spouting serial killers, or cool guys who don’t look at explosions. But other clichés are harder to get rid of, because it just makes sense to tell a story that way:

• Why is every heist story about "one last job"? Because otherwise, if this heist doesn’t work, there’s always the next one, so who cares? 
• Why is the hero always unexpectedly forced to work with an ex-spouse? Because it’s a handy shortcut to add emotional complexity to a situation and turn obstacles into conflicts. 
• Why is it always good cop/bad cop? Because it makes for good character contrast, and it also happens to be true to life. Cops really are trained to do that. 

Not all clichés can be avoided. The trick is to pull off the clichés in new, exciting ways, which is why our job is so hard.

Once you’ve paid off a few expectations, then you’re free to wallop the audience with something that breaks the rules. The more time you spend rolling the rock uphill, the more satisfying it is when you let it come crashing back down.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, he gets laid, but in a very non-bro way: after marrying a grandma.
Alien	YES, it fulfills all except one: the male leader dies and a subordinate woman survives and becomes the sole survivor.
An Education	YES. Satisfies almost all. She doesn’t realize the boring boy is right for her, but that’s not universal in these movies.
The Babadook	YES. The monster is both defeated and not, but nobody dies.
Blazing Saddles	YES.  It works as a straightforward western, a straightforward character comedy, a spoof and a satire.
Blue Velvet	YES. the villain is killed and the girl is got, but we suspect that the hero will never be satisfied now that he’s seen the dark side.
The Bourne Identity	YES. they reshot the ending to add more action, but kept the hero committed to his newfound pacifism.
Bridesmaids	YES. Happy wedding, she gets guy, but he doesn’t save the day and the villain is befriended instead of getting comeuppance.
Casablanca	YES. they admit they love each other and kiss…but then he sends her away.  They shoot one Nazi…but forgive the other.
Chinatown	YES. The mystery is solved, but the bad guy gets away with it and the femme fatale is exonerated of any wrongdoing before she’s killed.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  the mob has a falling out, which is common, but the feds win, which is uncommon.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Comedy and drama come with fewer expectations than other genres, and it meets them all.
The Farewell	YES. It majorly defies expectations.  We’re totally expecting the lies to come out.  But it satisfies a few as well, with heartfelt scenes and laughs.
The Fighter	YES. It satisfies just about all.
Frozen	YES. The curse is broken and everybody gets what’s coming to them, but the princess both end up unmarried.
The Fugitive	YES. everybody is caught, but none of the bad guys are killed, which is why this movie was nominated for best picture: it rises above the base violent urges that usually fuel these genres.
Get Out	YES. No good guys die (except maybe if you count the victimes buried deep within Georgina and Walter) and evil is totally defeated, so it’s more like an action movie ending than a horror ending.
Groundhog Day	YES. He gets the girl and finds happiness, but only through not wanting to have sex with her that night.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. They win the big battle but they also make peace. Hiccup wins but he also loses his foot.
In a Lonely Place	NO. it doesn’t satisfy any of them, but that’s the point: this is a feminist film (albeit much less so than the book) that wants us to be aware of and worried about our urges to see violent pay-offs.  It works brilliantly.
Iron Man	YES. Villain is defeated, girl is lost (which is common for this genre), but secret identity is rejected, which is shockingly new.
Lady Bird	YES. She grows up and moves away, but doesn’t find love.
Raising Arizona	YES. They get an unlikely happy ending (getting forgiven for the crime), but not as happy as it could have been (if they had gotten to keep the kid)
Rushmore	YES. All are satisfied.
Selma	YES. Social progress, great speeches (though the King speeches had to be faked, due to his family’s attempts to sabotage the film)
The Shining	YES. It satisfies them all: the black guy is killed, the ax murderer is killed by the innocents who live, there is a brief implication at the end that events may re-occur, etc. Nevertheless, many genre-fans are not satisfied with this movie, because of the reluctance to commit to the supernatural element.
Sideways	YES. He ends up with the girl, but he doesn’t have to change in order to do it.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Bill is caught, but Lecter gets away.
Star Wars	YES. The hero, the rogue and the mentor are all fairly traditional, but the princess is kick-ass, which defied expectations at the time.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. our hard-boiled narrator is killed and the murderer is arrested, but it’s all oddly funny.