10 Movies That Handled Large Ensemble Casts Really Well

Movies with large ensemble casts are challenged to balance the narrative among many characters, so each arc is compelling in its own right. While ensemble movies are allegedly just a movie with a large cast, there is a difference between a movie with a protagonist and a lot of supporting characters vs. a movie that is about a group. Ensemble casts have become more common in big-budget action movies with the rise of the superhero genre – but these do not all handle their cast well.

Story types that require the audience to know something about each character are well-suited to an ensemble cast. Movies that have no real overall plot and are essentially montages also work well. However, regardless of any narrative concerns, producers and audiences alike love to see movies rife with a multitude of A-listers and rising stars.

10 Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Biggest Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, & Matt Damon

The foundational concept of Danny Ocean’s original crew and the crews in the other Ocean’s movies is that everyone has a role to play and most of the tasks are dependent upon that person’s specific skill set. The recruitment montages and the scenes of the heist itself give each character a moment of screen time to introduce them and show how they contribute. The cast of Ocean’s Eleven is stacked – also including Andy García, Elliot Gould, and Casey Affleck – but the story inherently lends itself to an ensemble cast.

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9 Don’t Look Up (2021)

Biggest Stars: Leonard DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchette, & Meryl Streep

In the dark comedy Don’t Look Up, two astronauts discover that a comet on a collision course with Earth will soon destroy humanity. Don’t Look Up uses its large cast to depict how people of different professions and levels of power handle the imminent apocalypse from a public relations perspective. Ariana Grande, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Jonah Hill, and Mark Rylance all also appear. While Don’t Look Up has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 55%, audiences were able to enjoy the various A-listers playing different satirical figures, resulting in an audience score of 78%.

8 Magnolia (1999)

Biggest Stars: Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, & Philip Seymour Hoffman

Magnolia is a type of montage movie like Love Actually or Valentine’s Day, showcasing various characters’ mundane struggles. However, Magnolia opens with a narration explaining three coincidental events that took place in real life. This is meant to thematically introduce the idea of coincidence. What follows is a narrative about different people whose lives parallel each other’s in interesting ways, interspersed with other strangely coincidental events. Magnolia mainly focuses on two different men who are both dying from cancer, both have careers in television, and are both estranged from an adult child.

7 Cloud Atlas (2012)

Biggest Stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, & Jim Broadbent

Despite any weaknesses, Cloud Atlas balances its time among the actors and characters well. The movie depicts people across a span of 500 years whose lives invariably affect each other. The expansive cast also includes Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D’Arcy, Ben Winshaw, Jim Sturgess, and Bae Doona. Each actor has as many as four or five roles, which ties into the movie’s message about the interconnectedness of humanity.

Each actor is given enough time to showcase their talents in one role or another. Additionally, strategic cuts between similar scenes (e.g., one character is running for their life in the 1970s and another in the distant future) help the audience understand what multiple characters are experiencing at once. This way, the movie does not need to spend extra time on each individual.

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6 The French Dispatch (2021)

Biggest Stars: Benicio Del Toro, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, & Owen Wilson

The French Dispatch is more of an ensemble movie than The Grand Budapest Hotel or Asteroid City because of how it distributes its time among the characters. The latter two movies both use a story within a story structure to introduce at least two sets of characters. In contrast, The French Dispatch is about various journalists collecting stories for a magazine, each one being given their own segment of the movie. However, Wes Andersen attracts A-listers to appear in even the smallest roles in his movies, and a multitude of supporting characters appear throughout for a few memorable moments.

5 Knives Out (2019)

Biggest Stars: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, & Jamie Lee Curtis

Knives Out has protagonist-type characters, but the movie is advertised as an ensemble movie, hyping up its large cast. The narrative is only invested in Blanc’s investigation and Marta trying to hide her alleged crime. But it includes beats for each member of the Thrombey family, giving a sense of who they are and what they want. The audience isn’t necessarily supposed to like them, but every character’s motives are important, because Blanc is trying to understand who would have had reason to kill Harlan Thrombey. In this way, the whodunit narrative lends itself well to an ensemble cast.

4 Ocean’s Eight (2018)

Biggest Stars: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchette, Anne Hathaway, & Helena Bonham Carter

Ocean’s Eight’s ensemble cast benefits from the same plot elements as Ocean’s Eleven: The recruitment montage, and showing what everyone is doing during the heist itself. The preparation for the heist is interspersed with moments where more aspects of the characters’ personalities are revealed. Ocean’s Eight also adds another montage not seen in the original Ocean’s movie: The final sequence of what all the characters do with their money. This also reveals something about each of the characters’ sensibilities.

3 Pulp Fiction (1994)

Biggest Stars: Uma Thurman, John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, & Bruce Willis

Pulp Fiction has a comparatively smaller cast but structures itself like an ensemble movie. Subsequent ensemble movies likely derived some inspiration from Pulp Fiction, given its cultural impact. Pulp Fiction is evenly divided into smaller narratives that overlap with each other, creating individual storylines as well as a cohesive overall story. Additionally, Quentin Tarantino’s witty and bizarre writing makes every character memorable. Even Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, who only appear in the first and last scenes of Pulp Fiction, don’t seem like they have been slighted by the narrative.

2 The Avengers (2012)

Biggest Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, & Samuel L. Jackson

The ensemble cast of the Avengers movies grew beyond anything ever seen in cinema, but the first movie arguably handles it the best. Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame simply have too many characters for everyone to have a significant storyline. Whatever these movies lack in narrative, they make up for in shere spectacle, and the fact that most of the characters have more expansive personal storylines in their own movies.

However, The Avengers gives each character some time to share their misgivings about the concept of the Avengers, with hints about their backstories and personal relationships. They don’t even need extended individual scenes because the interactions among the main cast already highlight their personalities. The Avengers also benefits from most of the characters having their own movies, but it is possible to watch it as a standalone and still see satisfying character arcs.

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1 Love Actually (2003)

Biggest Stars: Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, & Bill Nighy

Love Actually introduces an impossible number of characters and actors within minutes and manages to give them all time to shine. Most of the characters are revealed to be connected in some way. The movie saves some time by showing everyone in their most dramatic moments of love and heartbreak. They are, after all, mostly regular people with regular problems and the audience can fill in the blanks of what they do in their downtime.

Love Actually is simply a movie about people navigating love and can randomly switch between characters because it doesn’t need to serve an overarching plot. As a result, Love Actually handles its ensemble cast better than most. However, it is also another example of how some narrative types are better suited to large casts.