Serious Business/Film

The Movie Hatley High, in which chess is very serious business
The new Disney Channel move Dadnapped is all about this trope, in which the main character's father is kidnapped by his fans.
The Wizard (film) plays with this trope in that in the world of the film, Nintendo is an integral part of the culture. Everyone knows it, everyone plays, and everyone's plugged in, to the point where "Video Armageddon" is greater than the Super Bowl. Interestingly, actual videogame tournaments would not become the absolute orgies of skill and entertainment as depicted in this movie until the rise of Major League Gaming and the Fighting Game based Evolution Championships about ten years later.
King Of Kong is about all the drama behind Donkey Kong world records. "Donkey Kong kill screen coming up..." There was even more serious business behind the scenes. Careful editing played up the rivalry and made a more obvious villain out of one of the players.
Hip hop street dancing is Serious Business in the film Step Up 2: the Streets. This is cemented from the very beginning with a ridiculously dramatic opening monologue. It gets worse within the first five minutes, where a subway prank involving dancing is reported on the news as though it was a terrorist attack! (right down to the subway being closed down)
Christopher Guest's line of Mockumentary comedies each deal with a different subject in this trope: community theater in Waiting for Guffman, dog shows in Best in Show, and folk music in A Mighty Wind.
We only get brief glimpses of it, but in the Bill & Ted movies, the music of Wyld Stallyns has become the basis for the entire society of the future, curing diseases, fostering world peace, and even improving people's bowling and minigolf scores.
Ballroom dancing is Serious Business for the characters in Baz Luhrman's Strictly Ballroom.
The Who's Rock Opera Tommy: Pinball is Serious Business! They even create a new religion out of it.
Will Ferell seems to have built his career around this trope: local newscasting in Anchorman, the fashion industry in Zoolander, fraternities in Old School, figure skating in Blades of Glory.
Speed Racer, of course, has automobile racing, which has become by far the biggest global sport and has a major impact on the prices of the biggest corporations.
Streetracing is handled thus in The Fast and the Furious series.
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is what the writers call "perhaps the first vegetarian horror movie." To keep some kind of tension, given that the monster is no threat to people, it turns out that everyone in town is insanely protective of their vegetables. For them, country fairs are serious business. "We're simple folk! It's all we have!" NB: In real life, competitive growing is sometimes taken quite seriously, and incidents of sabotage and theft are not unknown.
- The Expanded Universe gave this status to cheese and inventing, to the point where there are prestigious societies dedicated to both, they have their own dedicated newspapers and so forth. Both societies wrote to Wallace at different points asking him respectively to never, ever send them another invention.
The crowd is really unnaturally engaged during all of the debates in The Great Debaters, to the point that it's kind of distracting.
In the documentary "Please Vote For Me," a Chinese third grade class gets way too competitive over an election to be class monitor. It includes slander, threats and bribery. For third graders.
In Canadian Bacon, Canadian beer is Serious Business to Canadians. Casually mentioning that it sucks sparks a riot that almost escalates into a war.
In Crossroads, blues music is apparently serious enough to sell your soul to the devil for, and motivation enough to break self-confessed murderers out of custody. The selling your soul is a Shout-Out to blues legend Robert Johnson who claimed to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to play guitar so well.
In High School Musical, basketball is serious business. As is drama, at least in the mind of its teacher, if not in anyone else's.
In Bandslam, band competitions are "Texas high school football big."
The 2005 documentary Pucker Up, about five people travelling to North Carolina to compete in the National Whistling Competition.
Mildly averted in Blackball. The film itself is a spoof in which bowling is a very serious business. When the hero sets up a rivalry with the (60 year old) reigning champion and falls in love with his daughter, he wants to show her some of the magic and importance of bowling. Her response: 'I HATE bowling'. He more or less accepts this.
In Green Street (or Green Street Hooligans for Americans), a visiting American learns that association football appreciation is Serious Business in the UK, falling into a circle where it leads to brutal gang brawls, mutilation, and outright murder.
In Mean Machine and The Longest Yard, association football and American football are Serious Business to convicted felons. However, their primary motivation is actually to hurt the guards on the opposing team as much as possible.
In Hot Fuzz, everyone's obsessed with Sandford winning the Village of the Year contest, taking it to homicidal extremes.
School politics and Fraternities in most college movies are played to the hilt, such as in the Revenge of the Nerds films and Animal House.
Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story does this with professional paintball.
DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story parodies sports movies by making Serious Business out of a children's ball game played by adults.
Sometimes futuristic films will be set in a world where a bizarre game has replaced war:
- In the original Rollerball, wars have been replaced by a brutal form of roller derby.
- In Robot Jox, America and the USSR resolve land disputes not by nuclear war, but by gladiatorial combat between giant robots. The trope is almost inverted in the fact that the bouts are televised and treated like sporting events by ordinary citizens.
Both Free Enterprise and Trekkies believe that Star Trek is Serious Business.
Fanboys deals with Star Wars fandom.
Walter in The Big Lebowski has bowling. He's willing to pull a gun over a rules infraction, and he'll even break the sabbath to prevent a team member from quitting.
In Avalon (film), the game is so serious Ash makes a living out of playing it.
The film Celtic Pride about a couple of Celtics fans who kidnap the Utah Jazz star player so their team can win. In the end, all three men learn to just enjoy the game. That is until football season...
Bowling seems to be pretty popular for this trope, as Kingpin also did it, what with Bill Murray's character getting his young, upstart rival's hand shoved into a ball return through a "misunderstanding" with some gangsters... who also bowl.
Balls of Fury does it with ~~Ping-Pong~~ table tennis... In a ludicrously over-the-top way.
The Ten does this in most of its stories. Most of the plots are motivated by people obsessing over fairly ludicrous things. Of course, it might just be a statement on people taking religion overboard, but it gets pretty inane. For instance, certain segments hinge entirely on people obsessing over:
- A man half-buried in the ground after a skydiving accident.
- Cat Scan machines.
- A normal ventriloquist dummy.
The Mighty Ducks: The local newspaper not only covers the games of a bunch of 12-year olds, but features them with headlines, one including a dramatic "Face-Off" of the two coaches before the final game.
- That's nothing compared to the villain coach. During the game, he tells his team to intentionally hurt a player on the Duck's team due to him being on the Duck's due to re-zoning. Jesus Christ man, it's a game between 12 year olds. Most men buy flashy sports cars to overcompensate, not try to turn a pre-teen game into a blood sport.
  - Unfortunately Truth in Television applies here. Many parents and coaches involved in youth sports take it way too far.
American Psycho does this with a number of yuppy affectations, but most especially business cards. There's a serious rivalry in Patrick's firm about how good they look, right down to the subtle shades of white and the font. In fact, they're so serious, Patrick kills the people who have business cards better than him.
In eXistenZ, people are willing to commit murder over the titular video game. This was partly inspired by the trials and tribulations of the director's friend, Salman Rushdie. A major theme of the film is just how fanatically people can react to works of art.
In Mash, the priest lets the main character know that one of the others is severely depressed and considering suicide by stating "He said poker is only a game"
Duplicity plays this straight with the main plot; competition between two cosmetics companies is treated as Serious Business. Competition in the microwave pizza industry is dismissed as silly.
In Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, the comic relief characters Charters and Caldecott consider the game Cricket to be Serious Business.
A Christmas Story: Told from the perspective of a child, everything is serious business. When Schwartz issues a "double dog dare," then skips the "triple dare" to go straight to the "triple dog dare," the crowd of boys are suitably impressed by the gravity of the situation. In another vignette, Ralphie decodes Annie's secret message like it's a matter of national security.
Men At Work: Do not mess with another man's fries.
Gently parodied and lampshaded in Whip It; the protagonist thinks rollerderby is a huge deal, but it's mostly because she lives in a small town that she hates and has nothing else going well for her. Her team's coach is obsessed with winning, but the rest of the skaters have a more relaxed view, and when they lose the final, they still celebrate because hey! They made it from last place to the final!
Planet Terror: JT, the steakhouse owner, has a falling out with his brother, the sheriff, over his barbeque sauce recipe. Whenever they talk on the phone, the conversation turns to the barbeque sauce in under a minute. After they've both been shot, JT finally tells his brother the recipe, and the sheriff uses his dying breath to promise never to tell anybody the recipe.
In the DCOM movie Camp Rock 2 there's a song called "Don't back down," which makes a rivalry between summer-camps out to be incredibly serious business. It's hilarious until you realize it's not meant as a parody.
- Made even better by the lines:

We can't back down,
There's too much at stake.
This is serious
Don't walk away.

Wrist-cutting and being a ganguro in Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is treated like this.
God of Cookery is a film about a disgraced chef battling to regain his honour.
The film Akeelah and the Bee has a character named Dylan, whose father insists that he be Asian and Nerdy and beat the titular character in the national spelling bee by saying that if he comes in second place in anything, he'll be second place for life.
The sport Baseketball from the film Baseketball becomes serious business to many people very quickly, becoming one of the most popular sports in America only a few years after being invented by two drunk guys. And then the plot of the film is based around one of the team owners trying to make it Serious Business, trying to get the rules changed so making serious money is more possible.
The zombie film Hide And Creep has a precious moment of this toward the beginning, where one of the main characters enters a diner and orders Coke, only to find out that they only serve Pepsi. He then goes into a massive pro-Coke/anti-Pepsi rant, finally summing up that the diner was "like red China" for not giving the diners their choice of cola.
Jack Black's character puts it in exactly these terms in School of Rock: "Now, this is serious business here. We've got a mission. Putting on a great rock show is the most important thing. One great rock show can change the world."
Another Disney Channel example would be Alley Cats Strike. however, despite first guess, the Serious Business isn't so much bowling itself, but rather the rivalry between the city's two schools. Though in this case the True Companions are as bewildered by their schools behavior as anyone else would be.
The third Otto movie (from Germany). Two eco-freaks arguing whether a used teabag belongs into normal garbage or natural garbage. Otto solves the problem solomonically: The content of the teabag is natural, the teabag itself is non-natural, but then there's the question about what to do with the string, the attached paper and the metal clamp.
In Mystery Team Duncan's use of the word "fuck" is considered more distressing than two double homicides.
In Death to Smoochy, children's television seems like Serious Business, until you find out that it pales in comparison to the importance of ice shows.
Does anyone remember Rollerball?
In Tampopo, most of the characters treat the preparation, serving and consumption of food as serious business.
Morris: a Life With Bells On; Morris is very serious business...
Ingrid Bergman's marriage to Roberto Rosellini was so badly received that she was slammed on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
In A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, Harold's father-in-law (played by Danny Trejo) takes Christmas and especially Christmas trees very seriously. Naturally the tree he brought is destroyed by Kumar and the title characters have to go out and find a replacement.
Furry Vengeance would have the animals tormenting Brendan Fraser's character because they aren't going to take well of his plans of tearing down their forest for a development.
Robot boxing is very Serious Business in Real Steel.
Played first for comedy and then for horror in The Wild Hunt, in which a group of LARPers take the game far too seriously.
In Kill Bill, Hattori Hanzo invokes this trope by name while discussing Japanese pronounciation with the Bride.
Rad, a film where the entire culture of a town is built around BMX, is cited in Cracked.com's "The 4 Weirdest Lessons '80s Movies Really Wanted to Teach Us" as the most ridiculous example of a hobby that saves the world.