Move it up.
My first screenwriting teacher said “your main character wants something and spends the whole movie trying to get it.” Most movies follow that pattern, in hindsight. The hero wants to win the contest, or to take revenge, or to escape from Jason. The justification for this formula comes from none other than Aristotle's Poetics. Aristotle uses Oedipus as the archetypal tragic hero, and everyone knows that Oedipus wants to sleep with his mother and kill his father.
Except Oedipus does not intentionally sleep with his mother or kill his father. Oedipus wants to be king. And it doesnt take Oedipus the whole play to get what he wants. He gets it in the first act, and then spends two acts dealing with the implications of that desire.
The same is true of Macbeth. What does Macbeth want? He wants to be king. When does that happen? The end of the first act. Then what happens? The implications and consequences. It’s as if to say “You want something so badly? Here. Now what?”
It takes guts to give a hero his or her excruciating desire early on in the story. Because then both the hero and the writer are in uncharted territory. It’s the opposite of being delicate or precious with plot. And that’s what was so enjoyable about Solitary Man. Early on Michael Douglas's character has a desire that is licentious, stressful and therefore delicious. A timid script would have spread that dynamic over ninety minutes. But Brian Koppelman and David Levien take the more tragic, and therefore more heroic route by moving the third-act climax (ahem) up to the first act.
Links: Wikipedia | IMDB | Fandango | Netflix
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