Predictability isn’t the enemy of engagement; poor structure is. Repetition isn’t laziness; it’s ritual.

People talk a lot about storytelling in marketing. You’ll hear it in every strategy meeting, from every brand consultant, every creative director who once half-watched a TED Talk and came away with, “We need to tell better stories.”

But almost nobody stops to ask what that actually means. What is a story? Why does it work? Why does it move people? And what does it have to do with selling software or shampoo?

Storytelling isn’t a garnish for marketing — it’s the meal. It’s how human beings make sense of chaos. It’s the glue of civilization. We tell stories to explain, to connect, to sell, and sometimes just to stay sane. Every culture on earth has evolved its own myths, yet they all share the same archetypal patterns. As Robert McKee says, story is “the currency of human consciousness.”

And that’s where we’ll begin — with McKee himself — before taking a very sharp left turn into the Final Destination franchise, and then somehow, inevitably, into a therapy session about why I watch the same movie a hundred times when I’m under stress.

(What started as a piece about marketing storytelling has now turned into the cinematic equivalent of my inner life. You’ve been warned.)

The Dean of Storytelling

Robert McKee is the dean of story structure. His book Story is the Bible for screenwriters and the secret syllabus for anyone who actually wants to understand how narrative works. I attended his seminar years ago. It was part sermon, part autopsy, part masterclass in emotional manipulation. He dissects stories the way a surgeon dissects a heart — clinically, reverently, and with the occasional expletive.

McKee’s most enduring idea is that great stories aren’t about surprise; they’re about inevitability. The audience doesn’t need to be shocked — they need to feel that every beat, every twist, every heartbreak had to happen. The power is not in what happens, but in the sense that it couldn’t have happened any other way.

That’s true for Casablanca, Breaking Bad, and, oddly enough, the Final Destination films.

The Comfort of Death (and Other Predictable Pleasures)

The Final Destination movies are built on a single idea: you can’t cheat death. Every film opens the same way. Someone has a premonition of a massive catastrophe — a plane crash, a highway pile-up, a suspension-bridge collapse — panics, saves a handful of friends, and then spends the rest of the movie watching fate clean up the mess. One by one, death crosses names off the list.

It’s an absurdly repetitive structure. But here’s the thing: it works every time.

I discovered the series through the most recent entry, Final Destination: Bloodlines. Something about the mid-century modern aesthetic of the trailer pulled me in. I expected pulp; I got philosophy with jump scares. I went back and watched them all — Final Destination as bedtime stories for adults who enjoy being toyed with.

And here’s what struck me: you always know what’s going to happen. They all die. Even the hero who “sees” the future. Especially the hero. But still, you can’t look away. You flinch when the coffee mug teeters. You wince at the loose screw, the puddle, the unplugged hairdryer. And even though you know that the thing you’re staring at isn’t what’s going to kill them, you can’t help but watch.

That’s not just horror. That’s structure doing its job.

Why Predictable Stories Still Work

McKee describes the inciting incident as the moment that “radically upsets the balance of forces” in a character’s life. In Final Destination, that’s the vision — the flash of doom that gives the illusion of agency. It introduces the story’s central conflict: man versus fate, the illusion of control versus the certainty of consequence.

Each death sequence becomes a tiny, perfectly structured story arc:

1. Setup: an ordinary scene — a kitchen, a gym, a hair salon.
2. Expectation: an obvious danger is telegraphed — a frayed wire, a dripping faucet.
3. Gap: that danger fizzles; something else goes wrong.
4. Payoff: the inevitable arrives from an unexpected direction.

It’s the McKee formula, beat for beat. Predictable, yes — but not boring. Like a symphony or a joke, the repetition of form is what makes it satisfying. The pattern is the pleasure.

The real story isn’t about death; it’s about the inevitability of consequence. And that inevitability, paradoxically, is what makes it comforting.

Repetition as Ritual (or, Why I Watched Independence Day 300 Times)

We like to think we crave novelty, but what we actually crave — especially when we’re stressed — is reassurance. That the universe is predictable. That chaos can be contained. That, in the end, the story will close its loop.

I learned this about myself years ago. In the late ’90s, while trying to raise money for OpenCola — my early AI start-up back when “Bayesian algorithm” still sounded like witchcraft — I watched Independence Day every single night for a year. I didn’t always make it to the end, but it was there, waiting. The same dialogue. The same explosions. The same victory. It was my metronome.

Later, during a rough career transition, I went to Disneyland every day for 300 days straight. Call it madness, call it method acting for entrepreneurs, but repetition gave me the illusion of control. It reassured me that, somewhere in the world, the monorail still circled the Matterhorn and Jeff Goldblum still saved humanity.

So when I say Final Destination comforts me, I mean it sincerely. It’s not the gore — it’s the guarantee. No matter how chaotic things look, the system will self-correct. Fate will win. The universe still works. And somehow, that’s soothing.

At this point, what began as a stern essay about the importance of storytelling in marketing has clearly become a therapy session about my coping mechanisms. I’m fine with that. McKee would probably call it the emotional truth of the narrative.

The Reassurance Loop

That word — reassurance — is worth lingering on. Because that’s what story really provides. Not novelty. Not information. Reassurance.

Every time we tell a story, what we’re saying is: This has meaning. The characters act, the world reacts, and things happen for a reason. That’s what keeps us watching. Even horror films promise a kind of safety — the reassurance that there’s order in the universe, even if that order is cruel.

And that’s the lesson marketers forget most often.

Brands chase freshness like a drug. New logos, new slogans, new “bold rebrands” that die on the vine because they’ve severed the ritual. We forget that people don’t fall in love with change. They fall in love with patterns that endure.

What Advertising Can Learn From Death

The best campaigns understood all this long before we could diagram it.

• Mr. Whipple forever pleading, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin,” as shoppers squeeze away.
• The Maytag repairman, terminally lonely because the machines never break (at least in commercials).
• The Marlboro Man, endlessly riding toward the same horizon.
• The Trix Rabbit, perennially thwarted.
• Entire decades-long series—from Pink Panther to Road Runner—built on the delicious doom of inevitability.

Each is its own Final Destination: the end is predetermined; the joy is in the choreography. Repetition isn’t boring; it’s reassuring. It tells the audience the universe makes sense, that actions have consequences, and that they can relax into the pattern.

Modern marketing often confuses variety with creativity and novelty with meaning. We toss characters, lines, and looks the instant they become familiar. In doing so, we deprive audiences of a deep human pleasure: returning to a beloved structure to watch it play out with fresh dressing.

The McKee Takeaway (for Marketers and Mortals)

So here’s what I’ve learned from Robert McKee, from the Final Destination series, and from a lifetime of watching the same movies far too many times:

• Predictability isn’t the enemy of engagement; poor structure is.
• Repetition isn’t laziness; it’s ritual.
• Inevitability, handled with craft, is the most powerful emotional engine we have.
• And sometimes, reassurance is the highest form of storytelling.

In a world that feels increasingly random, a well-told, well-structured story — even one about death, fate, or toilet paper — reminds us that cause still leads to effect, actions still have consequences, and that maybe, just maybe, the universe still has a script.

And that’s the ultimate comfort:
that the ending, however grim or glorious, was always meant to be.