fuckyeahisawthat:

verycharismaticdragon:

Venom (2018) is a Romcom, and here’s why

(or ”in this essay I will” joke gone very very wrong)

So, as most of us already noticed, Venom (2018) sure feels like a romantic comedy disguised as a superhero (well, antihero technically) movie. But is it truly? The short answer is yes, but I didn’t just spend my afternoon hunting proof to leave you with a short answer.

Now, I must note that Venom is really not the first superhero movie to mix another genre in. Off the top of my head, and perhaps most obvious, Ant-Man is mixing superheroics with a heist movie. Black Panther has the political thriller going. Thor: Ragnarok is a full blown cocktail, adding at least three more genres to the original one. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone thought to mix in romcoms, and I for one am grateful that our first example of it has alien slime falling in love with a guy.

Because that’s what happened, despite certain people bending over backwards just to not acknowledge it. But I promised you proof, so let’s get to it.

How do you determine if something is a romantic comedy or not? “That’s just the vibe I got” is really not going to cut it in a debate. But what is a vibe if not our subconsciousness recognizing a certain pattern? In this case, the pattern was the plot structure. Not being a huge fan of romcoms in general, though, I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. Thankfully, I didn’t need to: with a bit of googling, I found out that most articles have referred to the same source when it came to the romcom plot structure: a book “Writing the Romantic Comedy” by Billy Mernit. According to him, all romantic comedies can be broken down into seven story beats. How many of those would you guess does Venom follow? Hint: it’s all of them.

The rest under cut. Careful, spoilers start here!

Keep reading

Yooooooooo, this is some really excellent meta. I was thinking “man I need to look up some rom-com story structure templates because Venom definitely fits,” but rom-com isn’t my genre as a writer at all so I didn’t have that info at my fingertips. But you fuckin nailed it, @verycharismaticdragon! And you pinpointed exactly why something about the hospital scene felt a bit…off…to me the first time through, because it’s not the reaction we’d expect Eddie to be having to those particular circumstances at that point in the story…except within a rom-com framework it totally is.

The relationship beats don’t fall exactly where they would in a traditional rom-com because the movie is a little front-heavy; there’s a lot of setup and the key relationship storyline doesn’t start until the beginning of the second act. The “I am Venom and you are mine” scene, which would happen at the end of the first act of a traditional rom-com, happens at the midpoint of this movie (I checked the timing when I was watching it the second time through). So the structure is a bit squashed, but all the beats are definitely there.