Recently I have been researching into which types of thrillers and movies are most successful. I first looked at http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0410/Movie-Genres-With-The-Best-ROI.aspx#axzz1p1hJf8sR to find the most profitable film genres. It compared each genres ROI (return on investment to see which films made the highest income. The genres were action and adventure, drama, romance and comedies, documentaries and horrors and thrillers. From this I then went onto imdb to look at the top 50 thrillers. Pulp fiction by Quentin tarantino was rated number 1 with more than half a million votes, the top ten seemed to mainly consist of films which were rated 18 and most of them seemed to be crime thrillers this was interesting and very pleasing as we focused our thriller on being a crime/physcological thriller.
I then looked at the top crime thrilers pulp fiction yet again came at no.1 with se7en and reservoir dogs following at no 2 and 3. http://www.flickchart.com/charts?genre=Crime+Thriller
I then looked at the top physcological thrillers. Silence of the lambs was at no 1 and it seemed that physcological thrillers had to have a crazy villian driving the story such as hanibal lecter or travis bickle from martin scorcesse’s taxi driver. http://listverse.com/2008/06/23/top-15-psychological-thrillers/
Finally to get a character basis I looked at afi top 100 heros and villlians on wikipedia tosee what people expect of a hero or villian. The top hero was Atticus Finch from to kill a mocking bird and the top villian was hanibal lecter from the silence of the lambs. It seems the hero had to be a man with a strong sense of moral and justice who must over come a great evil to protect what he holds dear. The villians seem to be men and women who may have once been good but have however become twisted and corrupted. It also seems that a film with a strong villian may not always have a good hero and vica vesra
The research was very helpful and although it may not be very representative however it has given me quite a few ideas on how to construct our opening and characters
