I thought I'd post this because I thought of it recently, well first everything the guy said in the video sappy love story big eyes endearing alien creatures but also a surefire way to make a blockbuster movie/tv show is to depict something that in real life would be somebody's paranoid delusions or possibly some drug trip and play it completely straight and make them the most sympathetic characters ever - like X-Files (and within the show the Lone Gunmen characters), Enemy of the State, even something like 24 you could stretch your imagination like basically a lot of the first season in particular was like 'I know I'm doing crazy shit and holding random people hostage and carrying a guy's thumb in my pocket but it's totally cool my wife and daughter have been kidnapped please believe me"
I'm sure it's a long list but it's really that general of a movie premise by now it's hard to think of
True Lies
really Sarah Connor's entire character come to think of it
Edit : The Net
Edit: maybe True Lies is a little bit of a stretch but wasn't the whole idea like 'guy gives completely implausible story about what he was doing instead of having an affair but it turns out to be true'. I guess in the real life version Jamie Lee Curtis would be delusional to the point that she imagined all the events of the movie in her head
but yeah basically make them heroic or sexy or a good mother/father or all of these things and you can make the storyline more and more implausible (sarah connor is really the trifecta though being a milf who shoots everything and is batshit insane but has a heart of gold) also develop backstory of mother and son while simultaneously donning skimpier combat gear and bigger guns as the movie progresses. By the logic of the movie they could have turned her into sheba queen of the jungle with a coconut bra and make the audience totally believe it if only Cameron could manage to write some sufficently heart-melting family scene just before
Edit: I didn't watch the second part of the avatar review does avatar incorporate this at all
Edit: oh so if it needed to be said real version of Terminator would be some 300 lb ugly NRA dude who's all infowars.com and kicks his dog every 5 scenes
edit: probably Hitchcock invented the basic premise like 'everyone really is watching me' or 'the world really is coming to an end' and it's in horror movies too I guess (The Omen/The Exorcist would be the worst premise ever if the kid wasn't really Satan and it was just some religious nut) but I think it's quite possible Cameron was the first person to like use tits and stuff instead of writing/mood to sell the idea
ok that's a little bit of a stretch, add 'and win awards this way'
Edit: I don't remember a lot about the Exorcist but isn't there a lot of stuff that sort of could happen, like aren't there a lot of accounts from old times that mirror stuff in the movie but the kid actually had Tourette's for the swearing bit or they had some other mental thing people didn't know about then