Most stories are fairly predictable to at least some degree. You meet the characters, and you may not know who is important, but you know they are in some way. You see locations and items that you just know are going to be an important part of the plot. And there's a degree of excitement in knowing that something cool looking is going to somehow be used later on. In Poetics, Aristotle denounced the "episodic" as the worst of all plots, where there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of events, so bungling it has been around a while.