Biopics are top of the bill for ‘risk-averse’ cinemagoers

 Cinema audiences love biopics about real people such as Queen Victoria and Billie Jean King, because they are afraid of the unknown, one of Hollywood’s leading screenwriters has said.

Anthony Mccarten, who wrote the Oscar-nominated Darkest Hour about Sir Winston Churchill and dramatised the life of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, said at the Hay Festival that cinemagoers were increasingly riskaverse.

“We don’t go to the movies very much and we want to have a pre-existing brand that we’re already half way to being fascinated about” Mccarten said. “You go along because, ‘Oh, I want to see a film about Winston Churchill’.

“So I think it’s a way that we’re trying to seduce you back into the cinema by giving you historical figures. Where your appetite is already whetted for it, you’re half way to buying your ticket.” His next film is Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic of the Queen singer Freddie Mercury.