Part 2 of our Screenplay Gurus series takes the same lens from Part 1 — Vogler, Snyder and Hauge — and points it at the two highest-grossing original films of 2013: GRAVITY and FROZEN. No franchise, no sequel. Just the two films that audiences went to see in the biggest numbers that year, and the question of what their scripts actually look like when you run them against the guru formulas.
The short answer is: both films cleave much more closely to these structures than the award-season dramas we looked at in Part 1. Which is interesting — but not as interesting as how they deviate when you look more carefully.
GRAVITY maps onto Vogler’s Hero’s Journey in surprising depth: the umbilical tether as threshold crossing, Matt Kowalski as Obi-Wan, the hallucinated ghost in the pod giving the “use the Force” instruction. The structure isn’t just present — it’s legible, almost mythological. FROZEN brings a genuine dual-protagonist puzzle (who is actually driving the story — Anna or Elsa?) and a third act that plays out under its own rules rather than anybody’s formula.
What starts to emerge is that the frameworks are more useful at some points than others. Vogler has real things to say about Act 3; Snyder’s “finale — finish it” turns out to be pretty thin guidance for actually generating that emotional hit. And as Chas lands at the end of the episode: the three-act model itself might not be the useful unit. Sequences might be. Though you’ll have to wait quite a few episodes until we tackle them!
The craft questions in this episode:
- When a framework beat is present but compressed — a half-page refusal of the call, three lines of dialogue — what is it actually doing for the story?
- FROZEN has a protagonist who barely changes and a secondary character who changes enormously. Who is actually driving? Does it matter?
- If the three-act model makes Act 2 and Act 3 feel like a single blob, what happens if you think in sequences instead?
We also go deep on the frameworks’ different coverage of the Dark Night of the Soul — which Stu argues is less a formula beat and more a question every writer should be able to answer for their character. What is the lowest point? What does it take to get out of it? That turns out to be something these frameworks are, and aren’t, equipped to help with.