noun

• A book, film, or other creative work produced solely to make the originator a living by catering to popular taste.

  More example sentences

  • ‘They may as well have called it deep six, because the film plummeted into a predictable pastiche of previous potboilers.’
  • ‘As art, it was essentially a potboiler, refusing any commerce with physical or psychological detail.’
  • ‘A make-belief potboiler, the film has grossed over a crore in a week.’
  • ‘Already listed in his CV are such early potboilers as a novel linked to the New Avengers TV series.’
  • ‘It topped the Publishers Weekly annual bestseller list that year and was turned into a Hollywood potboiler (starring Jean Simmons and Victor Mature) in 1954.’
  • ‘It's a fast paced film with a solid screenplay, a masala potboiler.’
  • ‘As for the story, it is a potboiler in the tradition of the best film noir.’
  • ‘Meanwhile, his twin brother Donald is writing his own screenplay, a shameless potboiler that has no pretensions of art, but every intention of wealth.’
  • ‘Patel, known for playing the mushy girlfriend in romantic potboilers, said the complaint had been made by airline staff to save themselves.’
  • ‘He could easily have checked his facts, but did not bother to because so far as he was concerned the Holmes stories were potboilers.’
  • ‘Is she publishing those stories, those potboilers about her love and madness?’
  • ‘Monet might have had to turn out potboilers but Degas, a man of independent means, never had to paint to pay for his supper.’
  • ‘Indian films are everywhere, and not just the potboilers.’
  • ‘It is not one of the usual Bollywood masala potboilers; it is an Indian film with just the right amount of spice and garnish that emerges as a real treat.’
  • ‘He learnt Italian in order to research the book, written in the style of a detective potboiler.’
  • ‘Thirdly, and not least importantly, the novel lives up to the advertisement of being a potboiler and not just another placid semi-documentary history of the Kashmir imbroglio.’
  • ‘Here was an unserious, part-time author having it all and more for a potboiler!’
  • ‘There have been not one but two cinematic political potboilers to hit the silver screen in the past year.’
  • ‘Are we to compete with the Western potboilers flooding the Indian market?’
  • ‘The material from the two Faust treatments is perhaps less convincing, and Berlioz's arrangement of The Marseillaise at the end the disc is an unnecessary potboiler.’