Predictable Plot Quotes

Truthfully, I almost avoided 'While You Were Sleeping,' because I find those romantic comedies kind of precious, and they're full of lines that leave you feeling a little bewildered when you say them.

The problem with romantic comedies is you know the ending by the poster. So they're not movies you can keep doing over and over again expect satisfaction somehow.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

I think, very often, we're addicted to procedurals, those good guy/bad guy shows, and the 'problem' with procedurals is they all follow the same formula: The bad guy does his thing, the good guy goes after him, and in most cases, the good guy figures out who did it and catches him.

I hate it when, by page 30, I know what the lead's going to do and then what the bad guy's gonna do. Mostly it's just scripts by the numbers where nothing's surprising, nothing's interesting.

I do read some of the scripts from America and, even though the themes or subject of the film is very interesting, and some of the scenes are very interesting, there is a tendency that they have to explain everything. There will be no dilemma. This guy was evil, and this girl was very sweet. And in the end, we'd have to see eight endings because we'd also have to know what happened to the uncle. It's like, "Are you kidding me?!"

'Star Trek' is the McDonald's of science fiction; it's fast food storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time, and you don't really have to get involved. It's all plastic.

One of the pitfalls of a romantic comedy is that you know how it's going to end.

It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.

It's television. The reality of it is, if you go on the boards and people are saying, "I saw that coming," or "This is lame," or "I can't believe they're doing this again..." Having been one of those people myself, I know better, and try to avoid it.

The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.

'Law & Order' has the same plot every single episode.

Audiences know exactly what's coming and they know from the beginning of the movie that everything's going to be OK and there will be high jinks that will get you from the beginning to the end, and eventually all the misunderstandings will be worked out and everyone will be in love.

'The Sixth Sense' was a very enjoyable, successful movie despite the fact that there were plenty of people, including myself, who saw the ending coming.

If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed 'Love Actually,' they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me.

There are films where the promos reveal all the punches and when you go to watch the film you feel like having seen it all. Such films don't last after a good opening.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

It's not that I'm not a horror fan, it's just that the horror scripts I've been sent have been rubbish and obvious. Because they usually are in horror films - it's just about scare factor. You're always one step ahead, you know who's going to die first, you know who's going to survive, you're going to get a jump every twenty minutes.

Sometimes it's great when, you know, you're sitting down to watch a straightforward story, and you know how it's going to go, and you know how it's going to end. That's a fairy tale.