How often do you watch a film or TV series and feel the ending is a let down? It seems to be the norm rather than the anomaly nowadays, as if, in these days of short term concentration and visual effects spectaculars, an actual logical, pleasing resolution to a story is considered less important than hooking the audience in the first place. It’s my contention that too many franchises simply cannot have effective endings because the actual drama is severely restricted by the need for the main characters to be alive and well at the end – for example with almost every comic book adaptation in the last twenty years.
Maybe it’s a harsh comparison, but compare the endings of say the serious Oscar contenders this year – The Artist, The Descendants, Moneyball – to some of the great films of the past. Their resolutions are satisfactory, but not much more. You don’t have their conclusions cemented into your memory the way the greats of yesteryear still are. Is it too negative to suggest that getting people to spend money watching these films is more important than the films themselves having a real impact? I don’t think so. All of those three films are very good, but do you come out of the cinema going ‘Wow!’. Nope.
I’m in the process of writing an ending to a feature length script at the moment and along with my co-creator we’ve been deliberating the possibilities endlessly. Sometimes you have the ending and work backwards, but in this case we started with the characters and worked forwards and this resulted in us having 3-4 possibilities for an ending, all of which we’re reasonably happy with, but not completely set on. Hopefully we can find the one that is most likely to get the audience to go – wow! Back to work…
