Why do so many films fall apart in the third act?

I watched Heretic for the first time yesterday, which got me thinking: why DO so many films start out promising and then fall apart in the third act? It seems a common problem.

Examples welcome.

The Substance has entered the chat.

Having done of bit of screen writing myself in the past, it comes down to the fact that great stories usually come to you from their genesis, not their ending. Very few people say I have a great story ending, now I just have to find the beginning. It's mostly starts with "I wonder what would happen if..." So by the time you sort all of that out, the ending is about timing up loose ends to an original great idea. And those don't always come together in a satisfactory way - especially when someone has just invested 1.5/ 2 hours into your story and are expecting more than you are capable of delivering.

^ tying up loose ends

That makes a lot of sense, r2

r1

beat me to it

R2 Very few people say I have a great story ending, now I just have to find the beginning.

I sure wish that Conclave wasn’t in this category.

My English teacher in high school stated you write the ending first and work your way backward. He was wrong about many things and a bad person but he was correct about this.

Trap, the recent M. Night Shyamalan movie with Josh Hartnett, has a disastrous third act. The rest of the movie is pretty bad, but the third act is a total mess.

Same with Old, r8. The premise was interesting and set up well I felt; but when it derailed, it was catastrophic!

Didn't his daughter direct that and The Watchers r9?

r10 Shyamalan directed Old, not his daughter.

2 different nepo daughters. One “sang”/acted in Trap, another directed The Watchers.

Both are perfect examples of the term nepo.

The Substance is in control all the way to the bitter end. It feels complete and devastating.

"Titanic", c'mon what were the chances THAT boat would sink. Really now.

When they started having third acts.

Seriously, all that schematic Syd Field crap has made American film and TV shallow and unsatisfying.

Even a lot of TV shows end poorly. Writing a satisfying ending is damn hard.

Because the majority of writers today don't understand basic story structure:

Beats >> Scene >> Sequence >> Act >> Story

1. Inciting incident

2. Progressive complications

3. Crisis (Obligatory scene)

4. Climax

5. Resolution

They don't understand that every scene needs to turn, and the scenes which end sequences and acts require meaningful turns. They don't understand how to intertwine subplots and how to converge subplots - parallel vs. hinged subplots - with the main plots to resolve them to obtain a satisfying conclusion.

Finally, they don't understand the principles behind antagonism - what is conflict.

The Brutalist, after three engrossing hours and a truly epic quality—

The rape that comes from out of the blue and takes place on a public street (alley?), as if this would be someplace even a drunken rich industrialist would find OK. (Also, if anyone looked like he might rape Toth, it was his cousin in the first hour, who seemed ready to kiss him at any moment. Maybe throwing in some gay undertones looked like depth to Corbet.)

After the melodramatic overdose, Toth’s wife coming into the family mansion and in front of total strangers and some family accuse him of raping—her husband! In the 1950s! More melodrama as she gets dragged out.

And a increasingly prevalent practice—the ambiguous ending to a previously straightforward narrative, apparently to give everyone something to discuss on the way home. What happened to Harrison???

This all struck me as throwing a lot of stuff on screen in search of an ending, disappointing since the movie really was a strong piece of work until then. Oddly, the epilogue which a lot of reviews found unnecessary didn’t bother me at all. At least it cleared up a few loose ends. Still don’t know what happened to Harrison, though.

Another problem with commercial feature films is there's so much money involved and so much power tripping taking place. But that's always been true, and not only in Hollywood. The makers of "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "The Last Laugh" were famously forced to attach total crap endings to otherwise delightfully well-crafted narratives.

The best example I can think of is Heat (1995). Very strong first and second act but it runs out of steam after the big shootout. I like that it ends with the two enemies holding hands but it's a weak third act.

Good example, r20

My top pick is Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which, for the first 2/3, is a riveting sci-fi story with an excellent cast and a superb sense of pacing g and ratcheting tension.

Then it abruptly turns into a low-IQ monster movie, ruining everything that preceded it. One of the times I left a theater feeling profoundly frustrated, if not angry, because a film derailed itself so obviously and violently.

Shyamalan's The Visit had a very satisfying ending I never saw coming. You always try and piece together what it might be with his movies. That had just as satisfying an ending as the Sixth Sense.

I loved "The Favourite" but it was coasting on goodwill earned by the first 2/3 at the end.

I don't have an answer, OP, just an example.

I was immobilized by shock, caught in its tractor beam, at how fascinatingly bad Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" (Josh Hartnett, Hilary Swank) is.

So, it's saying something that with 35 or so minutes to go, it just leaves the first 2/3rds in the dust and just goes NUTS.

"My jaw dropped" is usually only a figure of speech but mine actually did at the last 1/3rd of BD.

I'm starting to think great films are simply ones that DON'T fall apartment in some way in the third act

*apart

I just watched “Last Night in SoHo” which starts well but the third act is a bunch of predictable moments with the twist of “the well known actor in the oddly small role is the key to everything”.

To be honest, it’s what makes animated films and most action stories so good - they give us exactly what we want in the third act. Even though you can see it coming a mile away, we enjoy being right and we like seeing how well they execute giving us what we want.

The formula laid out in Save the Cat is the industry standard. Everyone tries to deviate from it to be interesting - because no one wants to really admit how formulaic it all is. But it is. and you usually end up with a disappointing film IF you don’t follow it.

Interesting about The Favoirite r24, I felt the opposite. First you need to separate and ending of a film from it’s denouement. The ending to a film doesn’t meant the last frames of the movie. The ending is the wrapping up of the story. Anyway I remember feeling satisfied, after having invested so much in one idea of the movie, to realize Emma Stone’s character had been set up the entire time and was on a race to the bottom. I thought that shot of her being stuck washing the legs of a mad queen (even made more mad by a broken heart) very effective - when we see her living in the reality of the shitty world she fought so hard for. She thought she was playing everyone but ultimately got played. I liked it.

I love watching. shitshow films that you all describe--

I am going to watch Sunshine and The Black Dahlia today

"Shining Through" (1992) with Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith was the one for me where two thirds of the film was good (Melanie Griffith's character was smart and independent) and the final third had her character suddenly become a damsel in distress and had to have Michael Douglas' character come and save her.

What did you think, r31?

A lot of films are more or less believable until the third act.

I’m going to take an opposing view and say there’s too much attention on plot, not enough attention on character. At the core of all good writing is character. It’s characters that drive a story.

Also, these films have bad endings because they never had anything to say in the first instance. (The Substance excepted because that is a great film.)

r35 Aristotle would disagree. He famously wrote in The Poetics, "Plot is the soul of tragedy."

My favorite example is Blood Simple, one of my very favorite movies. With the exception of M. Emmet Walsh, who plays the corrupt private investigator, the characters are really utterly forgettable and one-dimensional. A jealous husband, a cheating wife, a hapless employee. It's not the characters that make it a great film; it's the tangled web they find themselves in as a result of their own false assumptions. And I think pulling off a flawless plot is much more difficult than writing a believable character (although neither is particularly easy).

He may very well have said as much but he didn’t say plot should be given primacy above all else.

Characters want things. They are motivated to act. They encounter challenges. They are human. Take care of that and you don’t have to worry about plot.

He says, in fact, this:

"The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action."

Well, I dunno. Tell it to Marvel.

One could argue that the creation of the literary melodrama of the late 19 C with its focus on interiority may have changed that. But I’m not here to argue.

Did Aristotle ever say anything about the virtue of learning how to assert your own point of view without opposition to and therefore robbing someone else of theirs?

I think he did say at one point, speaking of himself in the 1st person on a rare occasion, “Quoting Aristotle doesn’t make you Aristotle.” I think that was him.

Is r39 posting from a dorm room at Oberlin?

Return of the King was ruined for me because it REFUSED TO END

Here's another example

I wanted to kill Tarantino when his voiceover kicked in 3/4 of the way through the Hollywood movie.

What jumps out for me in that quotation, R38, is why Aristotle (who devoted some thought to metaphor) thinks that the outline of a portrait is analogous to plot and not to character, and vice versa for the colors and shading.

[quote]The formula laid out in Save the Cat is the industry standard. Everyone tries to deviate from it to be interesting - because no one wants to really admit how formulaic it all is. But it is. and you usually end up with a disappointing film IF you don’t follow it.

I'd argue that, rather than being formulaic, as such, storytelling itself has requirements due to how we as people view and relate to them.

It's like psychology where there are certain patterns in how people think, feel, and react. For most people to have the intellectual and emotional connection to a story (and enjoy it), the story itself must follow a certain pattern.

It's not new. Joseph Campbell identified it years ago in stories told millenia ago.

No exit strategy?

Unwilling to have a happy ending?

The desire to be unique, artsy and independent without being any?

I would add There Will Be Blood, which went off the rails at the end for me.

Stephen King Syndrome. Awesome idea. Great narrative. And no clue how to pull it together to a conclusion.

Well to be fair, King was doing a lot of coke during those fertile years.

I just watched A Different Man. Stupid plot twist in the third act. So disappointing!

I started that SInners thread recently (expected to hate it and I ended up liking it very much) This was one of the rare films that I recall that had a GREAT ending.

I fucking LOVED The Substance and liked "idea" of the ending but thought it should have been more brutal with what happened to the "audience"- It was played for laughs and I did not like it all. It should have been like the prom scene in Carrie- Instead it was more "metaphorical".

Luis Buniel said all you need to do is create suspense and the audience is yours.

Bunuel.