Are You Only Watching Superhero Movies?
(Then What Are You Really Learning About People?)
Every generation of screenwriters grows up on something. For some, it was westerns. For others, it was noir. For me, it was a mix of big, noisy disaster films — The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure — and smaller, human‑scale stories like Midnight Cowboy, Three Days of the Condor, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
The big movies thrilled me. The smaller ones taught me how people actually behave.
And that’s the question I keep coming back to today: If a young screenwriter grows up watching only superhero movies and CGI‑heavy action spectacles, how do they learn to write about ordinary human emotion? How do they learn to write characters who bleed, hesitate, doubt, yearn, break, forgive, and change?
Because here’s the truth: You can’t write real people if you’ve never paid attention to real people.
Superhero movies — even the good ones — operate on mythic logic. Characters don’t talk the way people talk. They don’t react the way people react. Their emotional arcs are engineered to serve spectacle, not humanity. And that’s fine. Those movies are fun. They’re huge. They’re loud. They’re roller coasters.
But if that’s all you consume, you’re training your storytelling instincts to chase scale instead of truth.
A screenwriter’s job — at least the part that matters — is to understand what makes people tick. Not “characters,” not archetypes, not tropes. People.
The guy who’s terrified of disappointing his father.
The woman who stays in a bad relationship because she doesn’t believe she deserves better.
The kid who lies because he wants to be seen.
The friend who betrays you because he’s scared you’ll leave him first.
You don’t learn that from a city collapsing in IMAX.
You learn it from stories where the stakes are emotional, not explosive. You learn it from films where the camera lingers on a face instead of a green screen. You learn it from watching characters make small choices that reveal big truths.
And you learn it from life — from paying attention, from listening, from being curious about people who aren’t like you.
So if you’re a young writer who dreams of writing movies, here’s my challenge: Watch the big stuff, sure. Enjoy the spectacle. But balance it with films where the most dramatic thing that happens is a conversation that changes someone’s life. Seek out stories where the climax is a confession, not a collapsing building.
Because if you want to write movies that matter — movies that stay with people — you need to understand humanity at ground level. You need to know how ordinary people feel, hurt, hope, and heal.
Special effects can carry a movie. But only character can carry a story.
And if you’re serious about writing — really writing — you owe it to yourself to study the full spectrum of human behavior. Not just the operatic, slow‑motion, end‑of‑the‑world stuff, but the quiet moments where people reveal who they are without meaning to. The glance that betrays fear. The pause before a lie. The smile that doesn’t reach the eyes. The tiny, human beats that no CGI budget can manufacture.
Because someday you’ll sit down to write a scene that has no explosions, no portals opening in the sky, no villain monologue — just two people in a room, trying to tell the truth. And if all you’ve ever absorbed is spectacle, that moment will feel impossible to write.
But if you’ve fed yourself stories built on character — stories where emotion is the engine — you’ll know exactly what to do. You’ll recognize the rhythm of real people. You’ll understand how they talk, how they hide, how they break, how they heal.
And that’s the real superpower of a screenwriter: Not the ability to imagine worlds, but the ability to understand hearts.
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