These days nearly all major Hollywood productions follow a
variation on the three act structure developed starting in the
1970s by screenplay theorists like Syd Field. It's a formulized
pop variant on what mythologist Joseph Campbell called The
Hero’s Journey, and it's the framework for just about every
major blockbuster of the last three decades.  In the first act,
we meet our hero in the midst of his everyday life. He has an
opportunity to change his life which, after a bit of debate, he
decides to pursue. In the second act, our hero is tested.
Somewhere in the middle he experiences a great success, and the
stakes are raised. But the victory is false, and things get
progressively worse until the hero reaches his lowest point.
Hitting bottom spurs a period of reflection that helps the hero
to truly understand who he is, which eventually leads to a plan
to achieve victory using all that he has learned—a plan which he
successfully enacts in the third act.  In recent years,
screenwriter Blake Snyder has divided