I’ve heard this theory that there are a handful of plotlines that are common among most movies. Is that true?
Something bad happens to a loved one, so the main character goes on a mission to get revenge. That is a common trope I’ve seen in multiple movies.
However I don’t know if I agree with the concept that many/most/near all movies follow the same dozen or so plotlines and general ideas. Does anyone know?
Depends on how broad you want to get. Here’s a description of just about all movies/tv/books:
Being deals with problems related to being a Being.
We’ve done this many times about novels, because people have claimed that there are only 12 plots, or 6, or 3, or 2.
The entire argument is utterly meaningless. It always devolves to making larger and vaguer generalisms. All movies are about life and death. Bleh.
Ignore whoever’s making the argument and get into a better discussion.
And all European philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.
The Master speaks:
Actually, the Greeks boiled it down to two plots –
Comedy, in which the hero succeeds, or
Tragedy, in which the hero succumbs
While there are a few classic literary (including movie) themes such as
Man Versus Self
Man Versus Society
Man Versus Man
Man Versus Nature
Man Versus Supernatural
to call them “plots” is stretching things. Consider that “Man Versus Society” encompasses – among others – Romeo and Juliet, Animal House and High Noon, while “Man Versus Nature” could describe both Alien and Airplane!.
If you’re vague enough you can make the list of possible plots arbitrarily small, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. The standard short list includes items like ‘man vs man’ and ‘man vs nature’, which are so vague you can fit a whole variety of movies in between them. When you’re saying that Spider Man, The Maltese Falcon, Gattaca, The Dictator, Trading Places, Hamlet, and Airplane! all have the same plot, you’ve stretched the definition of ‘same’ so far it’s pretty worthless, and you’re not really saying much about the movies themselves.
Yes, and whey were all written by Boccaccio and then rewritten by Chaucer.
To the extent that someone is trying to make a Deep Statement on this topic, I agree. As a bit of cliche wisdom, though, the basic concept is sound. It’s just that the actual number doesn’t matter*.
The point is that narrative plots are like notes on the Western scale of music. There are only so many, and yet they can be used in an infinite variety of ways, from church chants to punk rants. So Humans can see both the simple foundation AND the richness of variety. Man, we’re deep.
Also, the “few plots” topic also lends itself to understanding how the same few plots are used by different cultures and eras. Shakespeare is referred to as a Modern Human, not because he used the same foundational plots as most mythologies and cultural narratives, but because he focused on the internal dialogues of the characters vs the external moral lessons of old. The same set of plots were assumed; it was the interpretation that matters.
So I like basic point, but it’s what you use it to noodle on that counts.
*I favor two: One day, our Hero went on a journey, and One day, a stranger came to town. 
Link to a previous thread, where you said the same.
(My reply, then, was a quote: “Let me tell you the plot of every one of his damned stories. Somebody wanted something. That’s the story. Mostly they get it, too.”)
I knew we’d hashed this over a few times here. At least I’m consistent and yeah, I like yours, too.
Well, there’s only a limited number of…
Let’s say in one movie the bad guy gets away, in another the bad guy gets killed, and in another, the hero decides that revenge isn’t the answer.
Is it the same plot?
Boy Meets Girl, Boy Gets Girl, Boy Loses Girl: is it the same plot if he’s Oedipus?
Isn’t this the “better argument” I mentioned upthread? 
kunilou had a better set of plots, though. And I’m seeing a bias in both yours and his in that they are male-oriented. Romance novels probably outnumber every other type of fiction published today combined. You can put romance into “a stranger came to town” but that does as much serious damage to romance as it does to that definition.
Most of the academic discussion of story since WWII has involved not the ways the story can be told, but the ways that story can be read. Everything from deconstruction to queer theory involves the reader’s perspective (and often privileges it over the writer’s). Yes, much of that can be stretched to extremely silly head-up-buttness. I’m reading a critical edition of *Frankenstein *that comes with academic essays in five areas of criticism: Reader-response, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Marxist, and Cultural. I don’t think there’s any overlap in them to the point where you might not realize they were talking about the same book. I’m reading *Frankenstein *because I want to use it as a historical reference for my book on robots in popular culture, specifically about humans as creators who fear their creations. The actual plot of *Frankenstein *is irrelevant for almost all these perspectives. It flows over several of kunilou’s categories as well.
As you note, the only item of interest or importance is what the author does with the plot, not what the plot is or how it can be categorized.
I came in here to basically say the same thing.
The traditional idea behind a literary story is to create conflict. That narrative then creates different possible endings depending on how the conflict is resolved. When I was in school I was taught four different types of narrative conflict:
1 Man vs man
2 Man vs nature
3 Man vs self
4 Man vs society
And I see kunilou added another one that I wasn’t aware of. So to answer the OPs question, I’d say there were less than a dozen plotlines; but each retelling can be interesting in it’s own right.
You left out the one where the hero discovers that the bad guy was actually not the bad guy, and its variant in which the person the hero was expecting to be his strongest ally was actually the bad guy.
Here’s a related question: How much can you change a story’s setting and characters before the story is fundamentally different? Is Forbidden Planet still the Tempest? If I make a movie about superspy Jane Bond, is it still a James Bond movie? What if I set that movie in ancient Egypt?
What about a combo? I’m guessing a story where our hero is a fugitive on the run from the law would be the Man-Vs-Society plot – but let’s say he’s doing that while he’s trying to clear his name, proving he’s innocent by proving a guilty individual framed him; couldn’t that be a Man-Vs-Man plot? So what is it when you have Harrison Ford hunting one guy and getting hunted by guys in general?
Out of curiosity, what year did you graduate?. I learned there were only 3: Man vs Man, Man vs Nature, and Man vs Himself. I graduated in '91. I was just wondering if they added *society *since then, or removed it before I learned it.