Buddy movies seem to work like romantic movies: Two people who are in conflict with each other end up together. Where romantic movies are about love, buddy movies are about friendship. There is the possibility of having three buddies. One is set against the other two. For example GHOSTBUSTERS, BEVERLY HILLS COP or CITY SLICKERS. What seems to be the most important aspect of those movies is the reason why those characters are stuck together in the first place. Those people, it seems, are not made to be together. They are too different. They are opponents of each other. The reason why they share any scenes to begin with is the well-spring of their ongoing conflict, the fun for the audience and for the writer. In cop movies like Lethal Weapon, the reason they have to work together is usually because they become partners. In Beverly Hills Cop, Axel is looking for the guy who killed his partner and the other guys are just trying to do their job. In 48 HRS. Jack gets Reggie out of prison, because he needs him to catch the criminals he's after. In DE L'AUTRE CÔTÉ DU PÉRIPH Ousmane wants to solve a murder case, so he steps outside of his boundaries and tricks the guy from homicide division into working with him. In DJANGO UNCHAINED Schultz frees Django to help him collect a bounty. So if you try to pair a space alien and a dog-robot, you better come up with a good excuse. :D

Good point, Sven. But although Scott persuaded me about buddy pictures not being a genre I'll still pitch my scripts in this vein as buddy comedies since every time I tried to pitch some of them as "bromantic comedies" it made producers cringe and I don't know exactly why. Maybe it's a WASP thing.

Thanks, Illimani. Yes, you better not make people cringe by making up words. Be original in your writing, not in your marketing. I think it's actually wise to promote your script as a buddy picture, because that's very specific and everyone loves that. There's another thing I have to add about this story type. I'm writing a buddy cop comedy at the moment (in the outlining stage). I'm working on my opponent right now. Looking at a few buddy cop comedies, the opponent is almost always the leader of a gang. He's probably a murderer, a thief, a smuggler (of drugs, weapons, cars or art) or all of those things. His evil plot often boils down to going through with his regular business. Examples of this trope you will find in LETHAL WEAPON, 48 HRS., STARSKY & HUTCH, THE ROOKIE, THE GUARD, RIEN À DÉCLARER or Luc Besson's TAXI. HOT FUZZ breaks away from this by having a cult leader of serial killers as the opponent, putting more emphasize on the detection than the defeat. What do you think about the opponent? From the top of my head I couldn't even remember one clearly. I had to go back to the synopses to find the names and such. If I was to compile a list of the greatest movie villains of all time, there wouldn't be a single one from a buddy picture on the list.

Another great insight there, Sven. I don't have an answer to your question but I have a guess: in almost every buddy comedy (or buddy action with comedy elements) the villain is not the antagonist/shadow, but he/she is a shapeshifter of sorts and the obstacle that he represents has for antidote when the conflict between the hero (buddy #1) and the shadow (buddy #2) comes to a resolution/balance. So I think a way to create a memorable villain is to make him/her the shadow, while buddy #2 will be mostly a "love" interest or ally for buddy #1. I think that's what happens in many buddy pictures which are not comedies and also in the few buddy comedies that have memorable villains, like "Some like it hot".

I'm not sure if this isn't the whole purpose of the buddy picture: Having a cardbord villain to defeat, because the real opponents are the buddies themselves. The whole fun comes from seeing them work together. If the villain is more interesting than them, he could take away from the charme of the buddies. To get a grip on the villains in LETHAL WEAPON, I analysed the actions they undertake to win. General McAllister and his mercenary group sell drugs on a large scale, but their comrade Hunsacker wants out. 1. To silence Hunsacker, they pay a hooker who poisons his daughter. 2. They kill the hooker to cover their tracks. 3. Because he just won’t shut up, they kill Hunsacker. 4. They try to kill Riggs and capture Murtaugh’s daughter. 5. They call the police to ensure Riggs is really dead. 6. They call Murtaugh to persuade him into exchanging himself for his daughter. 7. They take Riggs, Murtaugh and his daughter hostage. 8. They want to torture them to find out what the police knows about the drug shipments. 9. McAllister tries to escape with the drugs. 10. Mister Joshua drives to Murtaugh's house to exact revenge on Murtaugh's family. 11. Mister Joshua grabs a gun to shoot Riggs. It's interesting to note that the whole plan is ridiculous in the first place. There's no way they could have been able to keep this a secret: Imagine two homicide cops being shot from a helicopter in broad daylight. Also, poisoning Hunsacker's daughter and then killing off the hooker in the first place isn't exactly a stealth operation. It works in the movie, because you don't question the case -- at least I never did. :D

This is your game plan, if you are a villain in a buddy cop comedy: a) Go through with your evil plan. b) Hide your tracks from the investigating cops. c) Kill the cops. d) Escape. Or take revenge. Or do both.

Sven, I must disagree this time. I understand that you are talking only about buddy cop comedies and not bud comedies in general, but still, I would insist in my hypothesis: villains usually are there to put obstacles in the duo hero's (buddy #1) journey that he will only overcome as he teams up with his shadow (buddy #2). The final fight with the villain is the moment when there is no longer a reticence in teaming up. Buddy #1 and Buddy #2 become, as a whole, a "lethal weapon" that can't be stopped. That's the structure you are looking for. That's the structure of "The Heat", and the few people who are bashing this movie are the ones who think that, because "The Heat" has this structure, despite the uniqueness of the hero (Bullock) and shadow (McCarthy), it's being considered cliché. So, unless you can come up with unique protagonists (like this guy I know, who is working on a buddy cop script that has for hero a gay man who will team up with a womanizer) I think you'll have a lot of trouble selling your script, no matter how awesome it can be. As an alternative you can try to get out of this structure and assign other archetypes to your buddy duo. Some ideas: 1 - Keep buddy #1 as a hero and buddy #2 as a shadow, but make buddy #2 the villain. I tried this formula in my sports buddy comedy that is currently on the Black List (the title is "Tackles" if you are going to look for it on the website); 2 - Buddy #1 as hero and buddy #2 as a "love" interest. I used this formula in another script of mine, about a closeted gay superhero (buddy #1) who has trouble coming out to his best straight friend (buddy #2). I think I built a pretty memorable villain (who is a shapeshifter + shadow).

Illimani, I totally get you and I agree with your analysis. I was probably talking more about the story I'm writing right now. Let's take another look at Scott's list of variations of the buddy picture. In the end, two conceptual possibilities stand out: * When "Two worlds collide", the stories are about a friendship being formed - from their first meeting until them working beautifully together (IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, LETHAL WEAPON, RUSH HOUR). * In "Them vs. the world", the stories are about an already existing friendship that's being strengthened by the events that take place (DUMB AND DUMBER, WAYNE'S WORLD, A NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY). You can decide to make their differences more comical than dramatic. You can decide to reveal that the buddies are more similar than they thought in the beginning, technically that still falls under the "two worlds collide" category. You can decide to kill one of the buddies off or have him sacrifice his life for the other, in some kind of anti-buddy movie. No matter which of the two categories you choose, you are always able to have two transformations going on or simply one. Co-Protagonists or the Hero vs. Trickster dynamic.