Exploring the Types of Film Openings in Cinema
- rijarizwan062
- Nov 11, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 12, 2025
A film's opening is crucial to, not just the storyline, but serves the main purpose of engaging an audience. It's one of the most important in the list of essentials required to captivate your target audience. If a filmmaker doesn't succeed with this task, they automatically encourage an audience to leave the cinema or close their streaming service. Opening a film can be done in different ways, and every few years some adventurous and artistic directors manage to create more categories of film openings in the mix, with today's day being the "era of expression", as I'd like to call it.
(Learn more about the importance and role of film openings in my previous post)
We can categorize film openings into the very elements they consist of (which are mostly self explanatory):
Backstory
It provides important information about the characters and story prior to the current timeline of the film. It unlocks the past for an audience giving them an important outlook on certain events from the character's past or the history behind an event/organization in the Diegesis of a story. We see this technique majorly used in animated Disney and Pixar films, as it makes the story easy to follow.
{Diegesis refers to the internal world of the story, which the characters live and experience}
Therefore, we can take the example of one of my personal favorites, the animated Disney film, "Tangled" (2010). This opening can also be classified into another type of opening too: Prologue montage with a voiceover.
It successfully establishes the backstory to the plot and Rapunzel's past for the audience, leading to a better understanding of the characters and access to knowledge the protagonist is unaware of.
Character
Some films open by introducing their main or supporting character(s). This is extremely important: it creates the audience's first impression of the character. Whether they're the hero or the villain (to categorize it into the simplest character types) is completely reliant on how the filmmaker shows them in the beginning. We can take the example of the Oscar-winning film, "Joker" (2019) directed by Todd Phillips.
In the opening shot of the film the audience is introduced to the main character Arthur Fleck, also known as 'The Joker' (played by Joaquin Phoenix) before his descent into becoming a nihilistic criminal. So from the get-go, they grasp onto whatever facial and behavioral cues the actor brings forward to create a particular impression of the character on the audience. They see the Joker's mental disability and disturbances, coupled with his vulnerability and naivety portrayed in a dark way, therefore setting the precedent that the film will be unhinged, much like the character.
Inciting Incident
Film openings usually have some sort of backstory, or at least a setup of what's to come. Audiences have the time and comfort to ease into the film they chose to view, but with films that open with inciting incident, that case is quite the opposite. It's like a shot of adrenaline, beginning the film with a moment or event that creates the disequilibrium and sets the plot on its course.
I'm sure you've seen many more of these kinds of openings than you can remember, for example, the popular film Knives Out (2019) dir. by Rian Johnson, which begins with (spoiler alert!) the dead Harlan Thrombey being discovered in his room by his housemaid, Fran. The film revolves around Harlan's sudden death, after which the web is unravelled by our main character, Detective Benoit Blanc.
Flash Forward
A Flash-forward scene takes place in the present / current timeline of the film, after which the following scenes, or sometimes even the entire film take place in the past. These then follow the events that lead up to (and explain) that particular moment in the present. This non-linear narrative technique, although complicated can be a great source of entertainment and set a film apart from the rest.
This is used in the film, "Uncharted" (2022) which begins with Tom Holland's character, Nathan Drake, suspended from a cargo plane, leaving audiences wondering why - which is explained throughout the rest of the film.
Day in the Life
Here is yet another type of film opening, where the film introduces the audience to the main character, some of his/her important features and personality traits and what their normal day usually looks like before the conflict of the film changes this equilibrium. A day in the life sequence is either eventful and exciting or just an ordinary and uneventful day.
We can take one of my personal favorites as an example: the animated DreamWorks film, "Shrek" (2001) which begins with what the Ogre's regular day at home looks like, and him enjoying every second of his solitude with Smash Mouth's "All Star" playing in the background. He scares the angry townspeople away happily as well until the sequence ends, where the disequilibrium begins (following Todorov's theory).
So, that's it for my take on the types of film openings. For my next post I'll be analyzing a film opening, so keep an eye out for that. See you in the next one!
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