Someone quickly throw me a movie line

What do you want from the movies this year?

Cheaper tickets? Smarter superheroes? One love story and five Oscar films to watch?

Personally, I’ll settle for a good line.

You know, the kind that instantly surpasses the image she created. It’s repeated, it’s referenced, it’s repeated, it’s misquoted, and eventually it’s so ingrained in our brains that we can barely communicate without it. “Show me the money!” “Make my day.” “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

That memorable lines have evaporated from the film is hardly a revelation. When the American Film Institute compiled its list of the 100 best movie quotes in 2005, there were only 21^St The Century Quote made it onto the list. It would be the words “My darling”. The Lord of the Rings: The Two TowersReleased in 2002.

Film has since become eloquent. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal noted that Keanu Reeves only speaks a total of 380 words John Wick: Chapter 4. Reeves, according to the protocolsays John Jurgensen, an average of four words per line of dialogue.

“Closest to a slogan?” writes Jurgensen. “‘Yes.'”

But big movie lines have never been about eloquence. In fact, some of the best were hauntingly austere, almost abstract, like those elliptical jazz song titles, “Now’s the Time” or “Don’t Be Like This.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger and his famous writers The Terminator-James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd and William Wisher – didn’t even need a noun to remember “I’ll be back.” (For the record, it was number 37 on the AFI list.)

In reality, great movie lines are less written than discovered. They are found art – something that audiences, for their own reasons, draw from the sometimes abysmal jumble of words that find their way into a script. It only happened in 2010 battle of the titanswhich strangely held a cultural touchstone when Liam Neeson as Zeus thundered, “Unleash the Kraken!”

T-shirts, angry cat memes, allegations of voter fraud followed, not because the film’s four writers wrote cinematic poetry, but because viewers laid down their line with layer upon layer of unexpected resonance. Why did this happen? Who knows. You might as well ask why we remember “Get the Cannoli”.

The sad thing is that we, the viewers, have lost the happy habit of collaborating with screenwriters to make something big out of their often humble lines.

If you look closely, the resource is still there. This line of Everything everywhere at once– “The universe is so much bigger than you think” – has potential. (And maybe the title of the film.) It’s probably no less profound than Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates. But I don’t think we’ll see it on the merchandise at a next-gen Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Company in thirty years.

The audience just didn’t get the words, just like they didn’t take lines from them Top Gun: Maverick or avatar: the way of water, two films with much higher ticket sales than Everything everywhere.

But maybe this year. It can happen. Audiences can shine on an innocent movie line and make it great. “You had me at hello.” “There’s no crying in baseball.”

I hope.