How much is revealed about the storyline, characters etc in film openings?

The film opening is the first section of a film that you see, in this section you meet the main characters, the set for the film is shown and you tend to know roughly what sort of genre the film is going to be.

Within the film opening we find out lots of different information about the characters and the storyline. We find out who the main characters are and a bit of background information about them. For example in the film spiderman 3 we find out that the main character is Peter Parker (spiderman), we find out how his relationships are with people such as his girlfriend and his rival Harry with a fair bit of detail. We also get to see where they are living and the type of lifestyle that they live, for example we know Peter is a journalist and his girlfriend is an actress in a New York theater which seemed to be very upper class. We tend to find in films this is what most of the film openings tell you about characters, it gives you a background information on the characters.

In the opening of a film we also find out the beginning of the story line, so once again using spiderman 3 as an example, i will explain what we find out about the storyline in the film opening. In spiderman 3 we first 3 Peter walking through the streets of New York city watching himself on a big screen. This straight away tell us that the film will be set in New York. Also in the same film sequence we see Peter watching himself as Spiderman swinging from building to building, this tells us that the story is going to be full of action. Further into the film opening Peter goes into the theatre to watch his girlfriend perform, we also see that Harry is also in there watching the performance. Once the play is over we find out both Harry and Peter has bought Peters girlfriend flowers showing that Harry may have feelings for her, and then finally we see Peter running after Harry but Harry shrugs him off and shows that there is tension between the two, telling us they could be enemies further down the story. so overall the film opening tells us lots of detail about the storyline, it tells us what characters will get on with each other, where the film is set and also what sort of story it will be.