'Pig' and 'John Wick' Are Prime Examples of Shaking Up This Trope

I think I'm not alone when I say that I love a good revenge movie. They're one of the most reliable genres. They often pit likable heroes against evil villains and have lots of fun showing us someone scorned rising against the odds.

Two of the best vengeance genre movies to come out recently are Pig and John Wick. Each of them is a completely different take on the genre, though they share a lot of similarities between both titles. 

While John Wick became a franchise, and Pig is closer to an art film, I think they both are fantastic for writers and directors to study.

Check out this video from Thomas Flight and let's talk after the jump. (Spoilers for each movie to come.)

Pig vs. John Wick—A Study in Vengeance 

As fans of both movies, I think it's so interesting how they take a similar premise and spin it off.

In Wick, his dog is killed and he seeks to make the person pay. In Pig, his truffle pig is stolen, and he seeks to get it back. Each character starts from a place of being a recluse and dealing with deep emotional pain.

Where each plot differs is that Wick kills his enemies and gets pulled back into a criminal underworld. In Pig, our chef has to learn forgiveness, and so does the bad guy. They both deliver larger-than-life subcultures, but each spins the vengeance movie to play with the expected narrative.

We talk about this a lot on the site—the way to have your spec screenplay stand out from the crowd is to challenge the reader and give them something they haven't seen before.

If you're writing in a genre with a lot of films, like the revenge genre, you have to flip some tropes around. Characters who forgive, or unlock a secret world, characters who fight for their pets, or whose pets are part of what defines them, fit nicely into what we've expected from these sorts of films. But they also shake what we've become accustomed to—especially in Pig, where there's forgiveness at the end. 

What kinds of things can you flip in your own work in progress? What kinds of notions about writing and storytelling can you riff on to entertain us? 

Let us know what you thought about these respective movies and their messages in the comments. 

Source: Thomas Flight