Life-or-death stakes, maybe for a number of people, certainly makes good viewing, but for all types of film? Action, adventure, mystery. But not for all types of drama, or comedy. A "small" movie built around character might make much out of situations that aren't life-or-death. Great comedy results from making mountains out of mole hills--actually the opposite of really having high stakes, just pretending outrageously that you do.

Michael, it's interesting how stakes can get played out in stories. For example, in the movie As Good As It Gets, at the very end when Melvin (Nicholson) and Carol (Hunt) head to the bakery, Melvin steps on a crack in the sidewalk. In the script, it says he "registers the momentous fact, then joins Carol inside." For a person with OCD, being able to overcome a seemingly small thing is actually a really big thing.

So stakes are scaleable -- as long as they mean something to the characters and, therefore, by extension to script readers and movie viewers.

Big films seem to require the setting of stakes really high--somebody's life, the lives of many people, a disease cure, a natural disaster imminent. The stakes are obvious, they are external (physical), and they don't require much convincing. We believe without being told. Successful comedy can derive from making truly minor issues into major deals (ludicrously)--then fighting over them as though life-or-death. That's not really setting the stakes high, it's making believe. Then there's another type of movie, "character-driven" let's call it. These work by making us empathize with characters who are dealing with things, often internally or emotionally, whether we'd see them as high stakes or not. By making us see character development (or spiritual growth) as hugely important, alternatively. These "stakes" are not external or obvious. They must be explained to us careful; we require convincing to see them as such. Even in reality, for the characters themselves, these issues might not be major (at least not individually; collectively, perhaps). We're just watching how they, people we've come to care for (or hate), deal with what comes up in their lives; how they grow and change as a result. This type of story does not depend on the writer setting the stakes high, but on the writer making us believe in his characters and their challenges.