5 Oddly Specific Movie Tropes Hollywood Is Obsessed With Right Now

2. An Establishment Full Of Criminals

justice league superman spider-man homecoming opening
Global Road Entertainment

With movies like Suicide Squad and Venom pushing anti-heroes and villains into protagonist roles, it's now considered cool to make a movie about the bad guys.

While this could be considered a trend or trope in its own right, it's not quite as specific as the current raft of movies that decided to feature a hotel/other similar establishment that's built specifically for criminals, or one that just happens to feature a ton of bad people all at once.

Tarantino's The Hateful Eight finds a gang of kooky scoundrels all gathered together in a snowy lodge. They're not all criminals, but none of them are very nice people, and they're all capable of - and definitely do - bad things.

Hateful Eight
Weinsteins

This year's Hotel Artemis felt very similar; the entire movie was about a criminals-only hospital run by a judicious nurse (played by Jodie Foster). Like The Hateful Eight, it featured a gang of wildly different, very bad people all shoved together inside a single building, with predictably violent results.

In addition, both John Wick movies feature a hotel called The Continental, a location built specifically for assassins, thugs and other shady individuals to rest up, stay safe and prepare for their next assignment or two.

John Wick chapter 2 the continental
Lionsgate

And the icing on this trope-heavy cake is the upcoming Bad Times At The El Royale, which is about - you guessed it - a hotel that houses several sinister guests. Obviously, with the film being unreleased we can't say anything more about it, but the trailer makes it seem like a cross between The Hateful Eight and The Continental.

To add to this pile, there's also an in-development TV show specifically about The Continental, and if you really want, you can throw the Hotel Transylvania series in here too.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.