After being accidentally cryogenically frozen, four Brooklyn hipsters wake up 50 years later to find their neighborhood overtaken by corporations, and must fight to save the last standing bar from becoming a Starbucks.
BHerrPenpusher
After being accidentally cryogenically frozen, four Brooklyn hipsters wake up 50 years later to find their neighborhood overtaken by corporations, and must fight to save the last standing bar from becoming a Starbucks.
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Transported fifty years into the future spells many, potentially sad, out comes for a young person. Their friends and family may have moved away or died the world as they know it will be completely different – a bar turning into a Starbucks is mighty small chips in comparison.
Are there any better goals with greater stakes at hand that could be used instead?
Look at the film Idiocracy for example, in this film the MC also gets frozen and is defrosted in the future, and he wants to get back home to his own time. Throughout the story he learns how the world turns out in the future and understands that humanity will likely not survive, so towards the end his goal changes from leaving to saving humanity. It’s an outrageous comedy and the stakes are pretty high.
As Nir Shelter said.
And the script has a legal complication: ?it will have to get clearance from Starbucks to use their trademark. ?What are the chances of ?Starbucks signing off on a story where they are the villain?
Just saying.
Okay.
Is there any particular reason why it has to be 4 hipsters???Why not just one?
And what if he owned the bar when he was accidentally frozen? [Hence, bigger stakes, greater emotional investment.]
And what if when he’s thawed after 50 years, he discovers it’s being sold out to a BBC (big bad corporation) by his granddaughter (as old now as he was then). ?She wants to cash out, take the money and run off to wherever.
But he wants to keep he started the bar, ?and because it’s the an island of familiarity in what has become for him an alien world. ?[Again, bigger stakes for the character, more emotional investment in the outcome.]
And what if he has 30 days to raise the money to match what the BBC is offering.?[A ticking clock to amplify the urgency.]?
Whatever. ?Anyway, ?I suggest the story — and logline — would be stronger if : 1]) It were to focus one 1 hipster instead of an ensemble of 4; and ?2) he’s the original owner, struggling to hold on to his past in more ways than one; and 3) There’s a ticking clock.
fwiw.
Don’t let the allure of an ensemble cast blind you to a good structure. Multi protagonist plots are notoriously difficult to pull off well, and subsequently to finance.
Ask yourself, aside from the group dynamic, what do the multi protagonists give the story that it wouldn’t have with one? As I don’t see how having 4 main characters actually helps.
To that matter building high, and preferably personal, stakes for 4 separate characters is both very difficult and inefficient – it’s hard enough to do well with one.
Secondly I find that laughing at hipster’s “skewed” priorities has not only been done, but also likely to fill no more than a scene or two at most worth of comedy.? For a full length feature to be made out of it, you need more, hens the suggestion for more/higher/personal stakes.