Many of the greatest media pieces produced in the western world follow the simple structure of Freytag's Triangle. They have an exposition, climax and denouement. The beginning of a story introduces your characters and the world they inhabit. This part of any story begins to build suspense until you reach the climax. The climax is the height of the story where the emotional energy of the story is dispersed and settles into the Denouncement. At this point, any character that is affected by the climax should have changed in some way.
When these steps are followed, the writer completes the contract they had with the consumer and the consumer is left feeling satisfied. However, should the writer fail to complete these steps xe is breach of contract and ends up hurting xir story. A good example of this is Batman Begins.
During the movie, Christian Bale's character Bruce Wayne begins as a young man who had lost his way and managed to get arrested halfway across the world. He is rescued by Ra's Al Ghul and trained to become his heir. He is then put to the test and asked to kill someone, which he refused to do. Up until this point, the movie follows most of the rules in Freytag's Triangle. It has introduced the characters and the world they live in while also generating suspense but continues to keep that suspense bottled up.
So instead of a Freytag Triangle, we get something like this:
By the theory of the triangle, the movie is doomed to fail but is saved by it's comic background and action sequences.
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