The mood-cue approach seems to favor films that try to maintain a consistent emotional tone. Yes, filmmakers can shift tones effectively if they cue an audience to expect such a change (as A Day in the Country demonstrates), but navigating such a shift can be tricky (cf. The Lower Depths). It seems easier to take advantage of the emotion system's continuity. Once you establish a mood, you just have to keep pouring on a steady stream of congruent emotion cues, and you've got it made, it would seem.

But can a filmmaker simply keep adding cue after cue? We have seen how brief emotion and longer-lasting mood interact to support each other, but are there limits to an audience's ability maintain this consistency? Can a film's emotional appeal wear itself out by trying to evoke too much emotion over time? Again we must remember that different audiences have different expectations for the pacing of their emotion cues. An audience choosing to follow Stranger than Paradise cannot expect the same density of cuing they would from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But even audience members who have developed a taste for dense emotion cuing rely on the basic emotion system, and that network, like all systems, has its limits. Filmmakers must pace their emotion cues appropriately to maintain a consistent mood. Space the emotion cues too far apart, and the filmmaker is in danger of losing his or her audience's emotions.