I watch a LOT of movies so I eventually came to have an understanding of the ins and outs of film storytelling with respect to what flies and what doesn't fly with audiences. Do audiences appreciate and embrace originality?
Up to a point, yes.
When people put a movie on or walk into a theater, they do so with certain expectations. These expectations have to do with story, the manner in which the story unfolds, and even expectations of a certain level of technical quality. People generally point their face at a screen with an expectation of what to expect which is based in large part on what they've become accustomed to (as per their preferences of course). We've been watching movies for a hundred years, so we ALL know what a movie is and what it isn't by now. Experimental cinema notwithstanding, commercial films (movies) ARE a certain thing and everyone knows what that thing is.
Audiences have become accustomed to a known spectrum of film story types, a finite number of different film plots, and a finite amount of different types of story structures.
Having an original idea for a film story doesn't mean it's a good idea. It might only mean that it's an original bad idea and was never entertained up to present because it was always deemed a bad idea. You won't win any prizes for making a film based on a dumb original story idea unless you're hoping lightning strikes as in the case of good bad films which are as rare as June rain in Arizona.
Most films involve human beings interacting with one another. People love watching other people do things. That said, a film audience also has expectations of "types" and behavior with respect to a film's characters, which also brings up the subject of casting. Generally speaking, certain "types" are cast to match certain roles/characters.
If you get a new job as a lumberjack for example, you will have certain expectations of who your co-workers are going to be. As you drive to your first day of work in your diesel Super Duty F250, you'll envision big burly men (like you), not women, not children, not senior citizens, and not scholarly looking Asians. As such, it's very much the same with casting movies and the expectations of an audience.
Film genres, and character types exist for a reason. An audience will want to see certain things and will only allow a certain degree of deviation from their reasonable expectations.
Sure a certain amount of artful genre and character type juggling can and should sometimes be employed but in the end it still all falls within a finite range that works for an audience.
As such, I would assert that audiences embrace the familiar far more than the unfamiliar when it comes to films (and of course art, food, music, etc.) You can lose an audience as much by withholding details (having them fill in too many blanks - being too ambiguous) as you can by throwing too much nonsense at them. If you're creating farce, that's fine, but that of course is a genre so it comes with certain rules as do all other film parameters.
I suppose it's a bit disheartening to think there's a ceiling with respect to film story telling, that we can't just use an "anything goes" aesthetic or exploit complete originality in filmmaking, but our tastes have limits as does everything else in life.
©2018 Chris Santucci
