Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
Architects or advertising executives. Sometimes lead male is one and lead female is the other.
I think it was one of the writers on Cracked that opined it’s because those are the only jobs screenwriters partially understand. They’re people who pitch ideas to customers, kind of like screenwriters do with scripts. So you get a lot of main characters that have a weirdly large amount of down time, a looming deadline to present an idea for an ad campaign or building to your boss and the three executives your boss is kissing up to. Is it the moment of triumph for our main character, has our main character had a change of heart that he can’t run a greenwashing campaign for ExxonMobile anymore because hippy dippy love interest got to him, and now his previous life is going to fall apart and he’s going to start over as a shop owner in a small town or something…
I’ve noticed that a lot of the women in rom-coms are bakers.