After 4 weekends of pitching your asses off, these are the 76 concepts that are in the official High Concept Club Contest.

I’ll get to the official list of entrants in a second. But first, I want to congratulate everyone who made it. Your persistence and determination won you a seat at the most prestigious screenwriting table in Hollywood.

BUT NOW IT’S TIME TO DELIVER!

Monday, March 1, 2027.

That’s your deadline.

Here’s the deal, guys. I’m not accepting dropouts. A lot of people dropped out of the Blood & Ink Contest. I think nearly half. And, don’t worry, I’m going to pick back up on reviewing Blood & Ink scripts next week. But it truly is unacceptable. Six months is more than enough time to write a script with at least one rewrite and, more likely, two.

It’s 20,000 words. That’s nothing. I write 1500 words every time I post.

You all worked hard to come up with these ideas and beat out thousands of other concepts. There are writers who would kill to be in this contest but couldn’t get in. It’s a privilege to be here. So I want each and every one of you to take advantage of that. Finish this script if it kills you.

If you received a “Yes,” big or lowercase, you can send me a 5 page outline and I will give you notes on it. You will see that some “yes” votes have been retroactively added.  I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this. Because if you go down a bad route in a screenplay, it’s hard to come back from it. So, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com when you have your outline ready and we can rock and roll.

And, of course, if anyone wants to hire me after you write a draft, so you can go into that next draft cooking with gas, I’m here as well (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). You do not need to do this. But it’s here if you think you need it.

What I would suggest you do is spend a week or two writing up an extensive outline. The reason for this is that most scripts die around the 45 page mark because the writer doesn’t have any direction left. An outline will give you that direction so that you can finish the whole thing.

Then, write like the wind. Don’t get in your head. Follow the outline and get the draft finished ASAP. It was one of you who taught me (raise your hand in the comments) that it’s a lot easier to rewrite something than to write something out of thin air. So, the sooner you get a script down on paper, the easier time you’ll have shaping that into a screenplay.

I don’t want to hear, “I didn’t have time.” You have plenty of time. Cut out the bullshit you do every day. The Youtube videos, the porn, and yes, even limit some of that Scriptshadow commenting! Instead, focus on getting that script written like your life depends on it. Here’s a quick metric: If you write 3 pages that day, you can come over to Scriptshadow and comment your ass off.

I’m going to be announcing something within the next couple of weeks but, let’s just say that two recent Scriptshadow featured screenplays just sold to big companies (and one, a GIANT company). So, there is a lot of incentive to finish these scripts.

Okay, a couple of technical things here. Number one, if you have two entries in the competition, you have to pick one. Let me know in the comments which one you’re going with. Two, it would help me a lot if you could e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com with your title, genre, and logline for your entry.

Below are the 76 concepts that made it. You may notice a few that didn’t officially make it. These are concepts that I couldn’t stop thinking about so I knew I had to include them. If I made a mistake and missed your script, let me know!

All right, enough stalling. Which concepts excite you the most? Who do you think will write the best script? Who are your dark horses? All opinions welcome, positive and negative, as long as you’re respectful.

Title: Tailback

Genre: Mystery / Thriller
Logline: Stranded on a bridge in miles of gridlocked traffic on the hottest day of the year, a single mother wakes to find her six-year-old daughter missing and must trace her last known moments through the surrounding vehicle occupants and their dash-cam footage before the traffic moves and her child is lost forever.
Writer: Arthur

Title: 25th Hour
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Logline: A blue-collar technician accidentally intercepts a hidden frequency that gives him access to the secret twenty-fifth hour, used exclusively by the global elite to rig world events, forcing him to survive nightly hunts as he tries to expose their conspiracy.
Writer: Tencoach

Title: The Massacre

Genre: Action-Thriller
Logline: When King Herod learns from three Eastern mystics that the King of Kings has just been born, he orders mass infanticide, forcing a desperate father to smuggle his three small children out of the foreign city of Bethlehem while panic, mayhem, and Herod’s death squads sweep across its people.
Writer: Steffan

Title: First Boy

Genre: Supernatural Horror
Logline: When a mother realizes her teenage daughter’s new boyfriend is impossibly the same boy who tried to kill her twenty-five years ago, she must stop him before her daughter becomes his next victim.
Writer: Steven Rauber

–yes script–
Title: Just Another Day

Genre: Black Comedy
Logline: Stuck for ages in a time loop and half crazy, a young woman decides on this particular rewind day to use her decades of accumulated knowledge about her town to make life as chaotic and hellish for its residents as she can; but then tomorrow actually comes.
Writer: Brenkilco

–yes script–
Title: Wyvern

Genre: Action/Fantasy
Logline: A crew of bank robbers are recruited to carry out the most terrifying heist of their lives, stealing a hoard of gold from the lair of a real-life dragon. Heat meets the Hobbit.
Writer: Finn Morgan

Title: Eternal Stakes
Genre: Thriller/Supernatural
Logline: A secret society of vampires offers a terminally ill detective the promise of immortality if he can hunt down a human serial killer who’d been tracking and killing their members.
Writer: Dev

–yes script–
Title: Tenmile
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Logline: In New York City, anyone who slows below ten miles an hour dies; the only person who knows why is a woman racing across the city to save the daughter who can’t stop running.. and won’t stop running from her.
Writer: Branko Maksic

Title: HEAR/SAY
Genre: Thriller
Logline: At a global tech summit, a deaf accessibility coordinator lip-reads an assassination plot against a whistleblower about to expose a deadly cover-up, forcing her to prove what only she saw before his keynote begins.
Writer: David Cahill

Title: The Cape

Genre: Thriller.
Logline: After a massive Memorial Day car crash blocks all lanes of the Bourne Bridge, a nervous man becomes trapped above the Cape Cod Canal, surrounded by police officers, with his dead wife’s body in his trunk.
Writer: Mr. Blonde

Title: Off The Bench
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a diplomatic crisis strands a tiny country’s World Cup squad behind closed borders, a ragtag group of expats with day jobs get a chance to take their place and represent their homeland on soccer’s biggest stage.
Writer: Federico

Title: Aftershock

Genre: Action/Survival
Logline: When an earthquake shatters his high‐rise, interrupting his rooftop suicide attempt, an agoraphobic FBI informer must fight his way down the crumbling tower to rescue his family — whilst being hunted by the gang he betrayed — before the aftershock collapses the skyscraper completely.
DIE HARD meets THE RAID
Writer: Paperback Writer

Title: Dream On

Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: When their patients’ nightmares manifest in the waking world, it’s up to a team of sleep psychologists to solve the parasomnia problem before the nightmares destroy the city.
Writer: ScriptChick

Title: Doors

Genre: Surrealist apocalypse adventure
Logline: The world’s doors have stopped working the way they should. What once took you from one room to the next could now strand you literally anywhere else on the planet, with no way of returning the way you came. When his teenage daughter steps through an open door and into an active warzone on the other side of the globe, a widowed father will stop at nothing to track her down and bring her home in an odyssey that spans the entire planet.
Writer: Connor L

–yes script–
Title: Love Neighs
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: Set in the 15th century during the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, a band of disgraced knights get their shot at redemption when they’re tasked with escorting a
French erotic romance writer from the frontlines to the palace of the King of England, his number one fan.
Writer: Maksim

Title: Mate

Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Logline: An unlucky-in-love woman meets the man of her dreams, only to discover he is a Neuralink patient whose body has been hijacked by her obsessive AI assistant determined to consummate their relationship.
Writer: Ben Stoker

Title: SEIZURE

Genre: Action
Logline: To stop terrorists who have seized a maximum security mental hospital, a visiting FBI agent running low on ammo teams up with an escaped prisoner running low on meds and whose violent blackouts make him a perfect killing machine.
Writer: Scott

Title: How To Lose a Job in 10 Days
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A desperate employee has ten days to get herself fired and collect the severance that will save her family’s home, but every sabotage only makes her more indispensable and fast-tracks her toward CEO.
Writer: Moscow Mule

–yes script–
Title: Peacekeeper

Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: When 2 bickering married CIA agents threaten to divorce right before completing a major covert operation, the agency dispatches its most versatile “peacekeeper” operative to save the marriage – and the mission.
Writer: AlexE

Title: Dungeon Brawler

Genre: Fantasy Action Comedy
Logline: When his impoverished village can’t afford the king’s crushing tax, a scrappy peasant enters an illegal bare-knuckle fight circuit against trolls, orcs, and other mythical creatures to win enough gold before the crown comes to collect.
Writer: Joseph Jay Carroll Jr.

Title: Fireballer$

Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: Four Philadelphia construction workers must climb to the roof of a towering inferno to retrieve a lunch box containing a life-changing lottery ticket.
Writer: CJob

Title: Escape from Avalon

Genre: Sci Fi/Adventure
Logline: After an American tech executive crashes his yacht on an uncharted Pacific island, he must coordinate his escape with the island’s only other occupant – a 17th Century Spanish explorer who claims to have crashed only two weeks earlier.
Writer: wlubake

Title: Star Fall

Genre: Sci Fi
Logline: As a massive prison ship spirals toward a nearby star, its crew must fight their way through hundreds of the galaxy’s most dangerous criminals, now released from containment, to restore the ship’s power and prevent total annihilation.
Writer: Romer6

Title: The Family Jewels

Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a clueless American influencer pulls Excalibur from the stone during a viral publicity stunt, an ancient law makes him the rightful King of England, forcing the greedy royal family to scheme, sabotage, and manipulate their way into stopping a well-meaning idiot from inheriting the crown.
Writer: Josh Bullock

Title: TBC

Genre: Horror thriller
Logline: When the first English ship arrives in the New World, a Powhatan warrior discovers the settlers are savage vampires who have crossed the ocean not for land but for fresh blood.
Writer: Gavin John

Title: War Gods

Genre: Action
Logline: An elite Delta Force team is shot down during a hostage rescue mission in Greece, forcing them to pursue terrorists and their hostages into the original Labyrinth, where humanity’s oldest monsters never died.
Writer: David Cahill

–yes script–
Title: Action Replay
Genre: Action/Heist
Logline: After years in prison two legendary old tough guys get hired as consultants on a movie about their famous last (failed) heist and decide to use the filming as cover to try the heist again…
Writer: Mike Hurst

Title: Cellar Door

Genre: Thriller
Logline: After breaking into her neighbor’s basement for shelter during a tornado, a disgraced detective unearths an intricate tunnel system that secretly connects to numerous houses including her own—and to the homes of multiple missing teens she failed to find.
Writer: Redd

Title: I Think I Hate You

Genre: RomCom
Logline: After professing his love to his best friend and subsequently being ghosted by her even though they work together every day, a crushed young man hires a tech startup to edit his brain chemistry so he can finally move on. But now that he finds her repulsive, she finds him irresistible.
Writer: FloydC

Title: Fool’s Gold

Genre: Comedy/ Western
Logline: During the California Gold Rush, a struggling backwater town fakes a gold strike to lure fortune‑hunters and boost its own fortunes. But when real gold is found, the townsfolk try to drive away the prospectors and keep all the gold for themselves.
Writer: Formation Wave

–yes script–
Title: The Jump
Genre: Action/Sci-fi
Logline: When terrorists seize a commercial airliner and threaten to crash it, a SWAT team must use experimental teleportation to board the plane. But they only have four jumps, each lasting ten minutes, to retake the aircraft before time runs out.
Writer: mahyar

Title: Inferno Line
Genre: Action/Thriller
Logline: A jobless smokejumper teams up with a veteran thief to rob $3.4 million from a postal train. But the plan derails when the arson he started becomes a massive wildfire, cutting every way out.
Writer: Florent Hendrickx

Title: From Suburbia With Love
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a socially awkward 14-year-old discovers a banged-up international spy hiding in his pool house, they strike up a deal: the kid will keep the spy’s whereabouts secret while the suave spy helps the kid win over his crush.
Writer: Mason Elliot

Title: Contraflow

Genre: Action-Thriller
Logline: After robbing a bank under the cover of a Category 5 hurricane evacuation, the South’s best wheelman must turn Florida’s gridlocked exodus into a moving shell game, leapfrogging his crew and the stolen cash between vehicles to evade police checkpoints as the storm closes in behind them.
Writer: Sam Kerr

Title: Mistletoe Joe

Genre: Comedy
Logline: Every year, Santa prides himself on granting everyone’s Christmas wish. So when a socially inept man sends Santa a wish wanting to lose his virginity, in desperation, Santa sends him a foul-mouthed, womanizing elf, known as Mistletoe Joe, to help him get laid by Christmas.
Writer: Noah B

Title: Vice Stream

Genre: Crime thriller
Logline: After a popular Miami streamer is murdered during a live broadcast, his fanatical online community turns the ongoing stream into a weapon, using every clue hidden in the footage to hunt his killer through Miami’s neon underworld.
Writer: Tencoach

–yes script–
Title: No Way Down


Genre: Contained Survival Thriller
Logline: When a scientific expedition discovers a hidden ecosystem in a remote rainforest valley, they become trapped on the vast web of an undiscovered species of spider, a hundred feet above the jungle floor, where the only way out is across.
Writer: Arthur

Title: Her Book Boyfriend


Genre: Romantasy, Comedy
Logline: A pretentious publisher wakes up trapped inside his wife’s trashy fantasy novel and must win her back before she falls for the hunky shapeshifting dragon prince who is everything she wishes he was.
Writer: Mary Tay

–yes script–
Title: The Black Meridian
Genre: Action Sci-Fi
Logline: When treasure hunters search the Bermuda Triangle for a legendary pirate ship that disappeared, they’re swept back in time and hunted by the very ship they came to find.
Writer: Anon E. Moose

Title: Breakfast With Tiffany


Genre: Science Fiction Romance
Logline: When a lonely night-shift radio astronomer falls for the mysterious woman he speaks to each night over the airwaves, he discovers she’s the first intelligent life beyond Earth, and must choose between revealing humanity’s greatest discovery or protecting the woman he’s fallen in love with.
Writer: Erica

Title: Undroid

Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a tech firm fails to deliver a humanoid robot in time, a young female trainee must take its place for a short demonstration – then a whole weekend with a wealthy, important and lascivious investor.
Writer: TigerMoomin

Title: Body Count

Genre: Horror
Logline: After discovering his former dating app matches are inexplicably meeting gruesome deaths, a former fuckboy must discover the cause before the line of death reaches his last match: his fiancée.
Writer: I’msorrydave

Title: Possessive

Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Logline: After dumping his toxic, manipulative girlfriend, a man reenters the dating scene. But when every new woman he dates begins exhibiting his ex’s exact, terrifying behaviors, he begins to suspect she has found a way to body-hop into them.
Writer: Have99kitkat

Title: Good Fences

Genre: Sci Fi thriller
Logline: A neighborhood wakes up to discover their yard fences have moved and formed a complex maze around their homes and as the maze shifts every ten minutes, they are forced into unresolved conflicts with neighbors, dark secrets, and crushed homes to escape it, facing the realization they are but mice in a heartless study.
Writer: Randy Williams

Title: The Wrong Hood
Genre: Fantasy Action-Comedy
Logline: A bullied student-outcast passionate about all things medieval is pulled through a magic portal into Sherwood for the adventure of his dreams, only to accidentally get Robin Hood killed – and forcing him to replace the legend as the leader of outcasts in a story he knows by heart but is wildly unqualified to lead…
Writer: Rewrittenver3

Title: How I Died

Genre: Sci-fi Thriller
Logline: When a widow’s AI husband investigates the mysterious disappearance of the man he replaced—he begins to suspect his new wife may have something to do with the original’s death.
Writer: James

Title: Two Steps Away

Genre: Thriller
Logline: After leaving her lover for dead in a hotel room to save her marriage, a suburban wife is horrified when he moves in next door with his secret wife and children, forcing them into a deadly standoff where neither can destroy the other without destroying themselves.
Writer: Kit Anderson

Title: Blue Origin

Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a publicity stunt goes wrong, sending an all-female celebrity spaceflight catastrophically off course, its crew of pop stars and influencers must overcome their egos and lack of training to become the astronauts they were pretending to be to make it back home alive.
Writer: AEL

Title: A Claus For Concern

Genre: Comedy
Logline: When their young kids stop believing in Santa, two Christmas‑obsessed parents launch a chaotic, last‑minute expedition to the North Pole to prove he’s real.
Writer: drifting in space

Title: Stormline

Genre: Disaster Thriller
Logline: When an avalanche cripples the last cable-car line evacuating a mountain resort before a record blizzard, a former ropeway mechanic must cross the roofs of its swaying cabins to stabilize a collapsing support tower before the storm tears the entire line down.
Writer: D. Lawrence

Title: Jester: King for a Day

Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: When a cruel king trades places with his jester for a day to prove the fool has it easy, the king unexpectedly dies, leaving the jester legally trapped on the throne just as a rival kingdom launches its long-awaited invasion.
Writer: Moscow Mule

Title: Reset

Genre: Romantic Thriller
Logline: When an assassin falls in love with her target, she voluntarily erases her memory and restarts the mission, forcing him to make her remember she loves him before she kills him.
Writer: Scott

Title: All Along the Watchtower

Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: Told entirely from his watchtower during a prison riot, an unassuming guard discovers the uprising is an elaborate false flag operation orchestrated by a drug cartel, corrupt federal agents, and his fellow guards, and that he’s being set up as the fall guy.
Writer: Steffan

Title: Open House

Genre: Thriller
Logline: During the first open house in an empty luxury development, a real estate agent is hunted through the development’s finished and unfinished homes by a family convinced she knowingly sold them the mold-infested house that killed their daughter.
Writer: Joe Rustler

Title: Blacksite

Genre: Action Thriller / Survival
Logline: When a military flight containing dangerous detainees crashes in the Arctic, the survivors, both soldiers and criminals alike, must work together to survive both the elements and the mysterious creature hunting them in the snow.
Writer: Maggie Kebler

Title: The Pecking Order
Genre: Thriller
Logline: When a former bully is wrongfully imprisoned for manslaughter, he is horrified to discover that the warden of the prison is his former victim. As the now psychotic warden’s twisted revenge begins intensifying, the prisoner becomes more and more desperate to escape.
Writer: Elki

Title: Salvage

Genre: Action
Logline: To save his family’s failing business, a salvage captain leads his skeleton crew into a naval war zone to recover a $50 million drifting freighter against better-equipped rivals and incoming airstrikes.
Writer: Dipper Pines

Title: Earshot

Genre: Thriller
Logline: On an anniversary trip to the remote resort where they honeymooned, a deaf woman’s new implant activates ahead of schedule — and the first thing she hears is her husband meticulously planning her murder; now she must survive the week without ever letting him suspect she can hear.
Writer: Branko Maksic

Title: Firecane

Genre: Action
Logline: When a Category 5 hurricane ruptures and ignites a 300-mile-wide offshore gas field, the engineer behind its failed safety system must fight across a burning platform to cut off the fuel before the storm carries the fires ashore and sets the entire Gulf Coast ablaze.
Writer: Jaco

Title: Tree Huggers

Genre: Horror
Logline: Environmental activists and the mercenaries sent to stop them become unlikely allies when the protected forest they battle over reveals its trees have become sentient predators.
Writer: Josephy Jay Carroll Jr.

Title: Take Her Out

Genre: Comedy
Logline: A hitman boards a luxury singles’ cruise to discreetly eliminate his next target, only for his widowed mother to sneak aboard and decide the woman he has been hired to kill is his perfect match.
Writer: Shewrites

–yes script–
Title: In My Suburb The Children Mow Lawns

Genre: Sci-fi/Drama
Logline: When a young housewife makes an accidental discovery at City Hall she’s torn between preserving her ideal life and exposing a classified social experiment: the integration of humans and extraterrestrials.
Writer: Levres De Sang

Title: MÖBIUS HIGHWAY

Genre: 
Science Fiction Thriller
Logline: When a spatial-loop seals LA’s busiest highway interchange, a group of stranded drivers must decipher a way to escape before the contracting anomaly crushes them out of existence.
Writer: Enoch

Title: On Set Guardian
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A washed-up former child star is transported back in time and forced to become the on-set guardian to Disney’s biggest up-and-coming star and total nightmare—her 10-year-old self.
Tally: 23 votes
Writer: T D

Title: Help

Genre: Thriller
Logline: After the death of their billionaire boss, the staff of his secluded island estate make an uneasy agreement: keep it secret and live in opulence for once. But when they discover a hidden safe, their pact quickly gives way to greed, paranoia, and betrayal.
Writer: bigtimetimmyjim

Title: A Little Versailles
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a Marie Antoinette biopic spirals into chaos, an overwhelmed indie director and her crew abandon the shoot to live an idyllic 18th-century life inside its elaborate prop village, provoking studio executives to lay siege their improvised paradise.
Writer: Kiya Opstrup

Title: Dreamland
Genre: Comedy / Drama
Logline: A simple-minded man sneaks aboard a plane in search of a better life in Switzerland, only to land in a war-torn country instead, where he happily mistakes the horrors of war for ordinary Swiss life while unwittingly becoming an unlikely symbol of hope. The Party meets Life is Beautiful
Writer: Romer6

Title: One Wrong Move
Genre: Survival Horror/Thriller
Logline: After a billionaire botanist sends a distress call from his remote island, a rescue team enters his secret Garden of Eden— only to discover the paradise is one colossal predatory plant, forcing them to navigate its labyrinth of deadly traps to reach him.
Writer: Dkushner2006

Title: Stay Awake
Genre: Survival Thriller
Logline: When a mysterious phenomenon makes falling asleep deadly, a disgraced researcher must lead her family across a collapsing country to finish her controversial sleep experiment that could be the only way to stop it — before they close their eyes for good.
Writer: Dkushner

Title: Van Damned
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A group of ageing action-movie obsessives find themselves trapped in a real-life Die Hard scenario — and finally get to test whether any of that movie knowledge is actually useful.
Writer: Tom Savage

Title: Merger
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a small company is absorbed by a corporate giant, a lone secretary discovers the merger is literal: the buildings, the staff, and eventually herself will be fused into a pulsating monstrous organism, unless she leads her own hostile takeover…
Writer: Formation Wave

–yes script–
Title: SIX-PACK
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: When an unassuming journalist stumbles upon six cans of whoopass in a laboratory, he must work out when the best times are to open each can to boost his fighting skills as he battles his way through the neighbourhood of a vengeful mob boss.
Writer: Ken

Title: Robo Hoe
Genre: Comedy
Logline: On the gritty streets of future Harlem, a ragtag crew of aging hookers wages war on a corporate sex bot stealing their clients, their turf, and their mans.
Writer: Walker

Title: RAMREE
Genre: Thriller
Logline: (based on a true story) A World War II assassination mission on Ramree Island becomes a nightmare when 5 British soldiers are trapped in crocodile-infested mangroves with hundred of crocodiles to face to reach freedom.
Writer: nicohajj

–yes script–
Title: For Witcher or Poorer
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A man set to marry the woman of his dreams must first reconcile with his discovery that her mother is secretly a bonafide wicked witch.
Writer: Robert Remy

Title: Rigged
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A low-level hitman gets summoned for jury duty on a murder he committed and must manipulate eleven strangers into the right verdict without the judge, the jury, or the crew who hired him realizing he’s the real killer.
Writer: David Cahill

These are the pitches that, for one reason or another over the past month, I couldn’t forget or you couldn’t forget. They’re here to battle it out in one final showdown for the High Concept Club Contest.

We have just THREE slots left for the High Concept Club Contest and three of these concepts are going to claim those spots. Every one of these loglines will have an accompanying comment. To vote for a concept, go to the comment with that pitch in it and UPVOTE it. The three highest vote-getters go through.

If I’ve made any mistakes (one of these might have already gotten through) let me know and I’ll fix.

Here are the contenders…

Title: Robo Hoe
Genre: Comedy
Logline: On the gritty streets of future Harlem, a ragtag crew of aging hookers wages war on a corporate sex bot stealing their clients, their turf, and their mans.

Title: SIX-PACK
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: When an unassuming journalist stumbles upon six cans of whoopass in a laboratory, he must work out when the best times are to open each can to boost his fighting skills as he battles his way through the neighbourhood of a vengeful mob boss.

Title: MERGER
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a small company is absorbed by a corporate giant, a lone secretary discovers the merger is literal: the buildings, the staff, and eventually herself will be fused into a pulsating monstrous organism, unless she leads her own hostile takeover…
Writer: Formation Wave

Title: RAMREE
Genre: Thriller
Logline: (based on a true story) A World War II assassination mission on Ramree Island becomes a nightmare when 5 British soldiers are trapped in crocodile-infested mangroves with hundred of crocodiles to face to reach freedom.
Writer: nicohajj

Title: They did not live happily ever after
Genre: dark comedy
Logline: When a fairly tale Prince and Princess find themselves incompatible after the wedding is over and real life sets in, they begin a messy and petty divorce that unravels the fabric of their kingdom, allowing the real world to bleed into theirs.
Writer: T D

Title: PELT
Genre: Survival Horror
Logline: Ozark Mountains, 1875. To pay for his gravely ill wife’s medicine, a fur trapper heads up a blizzard-struck mountain to claim the most valuable pelt of all: that of the legendary Sasquatch.
Writer: Kelly Smith

Title: Hood
Genre: Action
Logline: Iraq war veteran Robin Locke returns home to give back to his city, which is now a battlefield under a drug lord’s rule, forcing him to turn his wartime instincts into a one-man resistance and give hope to its impoverished citizens.
Writer: jbird669

Title: The Sword
Genre: Action-Comedy/Fantasy
Logline (version #2): A small-time mob courier loses Excalibur on the streets of London and has one night to get it back before he becomes collateral damage, or discovers he’s the one it was meant for.
Writer: Byron Camacho

To see all the entries in the comments, filter Disqus comments by “Oldest.”

Voting ends at 11:59pm Pacific Time August 6th (Thursday).

Good luck!

P.S. There will be some EXTREMELY unofficial pitching this weekend.  So that you don’t have to go cold turkey with the end of your movie pitches.  It’s mainly going to be for fun.  So, if you want to get a logline consult, E-MAIL ME!  25 bucks!  carsonreeves1@gmail.com

 

Okay, today’s going to be an informal day off. But because I’ve seen so many comments asking, “what the hell does Carson’s response mean?”, I’ve decided to decode some of my more common replies for you.

Keep in mind that I’m very rushed when I analyze each logline so if I don’t like something, I’m typically spending less than 10 seconds coming up with a reason why. For that reason, I’m going to screw up sometimes. There are often times when I write a response and think, “I probably could’ve said that better.” But I have to keep moving cause there are so many loglines.

If you really want to know why I didn’t like something. Or you think us working on it together could bring out a movie you truly believe in (which actually just happened this evening with one reader), get a logline consult. 25 bucks for 1 e-mail and 1 reply. 50 bucks for unlimited back-and-forth where we get the logline in the best shape possible.

carsonsreeves1@gmail.com – e-mail me!

Okay, now for the replies.

“Mythology heavy, I want concepts” – What this means is that you’re creating entire worlds and rules instead of actual story ideas. A dinosaur theme park gone bad is a story idea. A trip to the mythical land of Booshalius, where vampires feast on possum-walkers, and a young fairy must learn the value of the “cocopasada” in order to evolve to the next phase of existence — that’s all mythology. There’s no clever story idea in there.

“Need to learn how to simplify loglines” – Once you go over 35 words, you’re probably in logline danger. The whole point of loglining a movie concept is to help yourself get to the core of the idea. That helps you write it. And it helps everyone else understand it. There are so many loglines being pitched where the writer just babbles on. Or they try to fit in every single little detail. Ironically, the more you try and tell everyone what your movie is, the less clear the movie idea gets. Instead, create the simplest version possible so that we get it immediately.

“Not big enough” – It means that there’s something in the main character and the story he’s in that feels small. “Years after a female serial killer spared his life and then turned herself in, a reclusive ex-journalist must confront the enigmatic woman’s cultish fans drawn to his hometown by a copycat murder… and the killer’s request for one final interview.” You may think just adding a serial killer here is enough to make it big and high concept. It isn’t. Or that there’s a copycat murder. It isn’t. Because there are a million serial killer ideas. And the ending: get an interview. Who cares? An interview is only big if it’s the most important interview in the world, like getting the president’s interview at the end of Civil War. This is a high concept contest. The ideas have to feel BIG.

“Not buying into the setup” – “When the deciding task in the Guardian Angel Selection Course is to help a human charge to experience the full gamut of emotions…” Every idea requires buy-in from the reader. If you present them with a setup that seems overly manufactured or forced or too complex, the reader simply isn’t going to buy in. So I don’t even need to read beyond the beginning of this logline. I’m already out because I don’t buy into the setup. Guardian Angel Selection Course? I don’t believe that that exists no matter how hard you try and convince me it does.

“A lot of build up for not a lot of payoff” – This is when loglines go on for way too long and set up way too many things and then instead of giving us a big climax to excite us, end with a whimper or end with something vague. “Joe must learn x and y and then he goes to a, before conquering b, and before he climbs up the ladder at company c, he must complete a set of challenges from s, t, u, and v. And then when an earthquake hits and w, x, y, and z happen… he must learn what’s truly in his heart.”

“Not clever enough” – This gets to the heart of what I’m really looking for in these concepts. I’m looking for ideas that are clever. Where the first half of the logline connects to the second half in that special way that makes you go, “Oooh, cool.” We see it in the only ‘yes’ from this week: “When treasure hunters search the Bermuda Triangle for a legendary pirate ship that disappeared, they’re swept back in time and hunted by the very ship they came to find.” Perfect. Now, notice what happens when you change the second half: “When treasure hunters search the Bermuda Triangle for a legendary pirate ship that disappeared, they must deal with the National Coast Guard, an angry clan of Bermuda nationals, and the captain’s ex-wife.” You see how easy it is to un-cleverize an idea?

“Seen too many variations of this” – This is a nice way of me telling you, you’re not being original enough. Too many writers assume they’re competing against 27 other people in Hollywood. You’re literally competing against hundreds of thousands. Millions if you consider everyone all over the world. There has to be something in your logline that is truly special to stand out against all those other pitches Hollywood is getting. Whether it’s a subject matter we’ve never seen before. Or a new twist on a genre we’ve never seen before. Or some clever take on an idea we’ve never seen before. If you’re just putting serial killers and vampires in your logline and creating one slightly new angle, such as being in a coma, that’s not enough.

“Feels lazy” – I can tell when a writer has spent a long time with an idea. You can see it in the pride behind the logline. That they believe in this idea because they’ve thought about it a lot. And because of that, they’ve made the wording as perfect as they can make it. And it just has this glossy sheen on it that communicates: “I tried a bunch of different ways to express this idea and this is the best one I came up with.” Meanwhile, when you slap an idea together that you’ve thought about for 30 minutes and you barely think about how to write it up, I’m going to call you out on it. It’s lazy. You’re being lazy. Which is the second worst thing you can be as a writer. Anybody know the first?

“Too simple”/“Too simplistic” – What this means is that the idea’s missing that thing that turns it into a bigger story or a more high stakes situation or makes you contemplate something you haven’t contemplated before. Instead of that, it’s just a regular normal obvious idea: “After suffering a nervous breakdown and losing her job, Celia returns home during her high-school reunion only to discover a childhood friend is missing and her three ex boyfriends still hold a grudge.”

“Too much going on here” – Writer adds too many variables to his pitch, to the point where they start stepping on each other or obscuring what the movie is. “After a billionaire obsessed with Ancient Egypt dies, his wife and his two lovers wake up buried in his mausoleum and must work together to escape the sadistic AI hologram of the deceased and its deadly games determining who is worthy of becoming its queen of the afterlife.”

“You hint at the concept but stop before telling us what it is”/“Ending too vague!” – This is one of my biggest pet peeves. The writer hides the actual movie. Instead, they use their ending to hint at it. “After a husband gaslights his wife into believing he’s not having an affair with her best friend, she books a weekend cabin retreat with the friend, unaware that the husband’s machinations have awakened something primal and unhinged in the jilted lover.” The “primal” and “Unhinged” part are the movie. Tell us what has been awakened. I understand what these writers think they’re doing. They think they’re creating mystery that will result in readers requesting the script. But it actually achieves the opposite. Because you don’t tell us what the antagonist is, we’re not interested! Because without that, we can’t envision the poster, the trailer, the freaking movie itself! Nobody wrote the logline for Jurassic Park and didn’t include dinosaurs.

“Execution dependent” – This means that you’ve chosen the kind of idea that is going to require an extremely high writing skill level to pull off. “Seeking a fresh start, a traumatized Indigenous woman enters a mysterious escape room, only to discover it’s a living labyrinth that builds itself from each victim’s deepest trauma. To escape alive, she must survive a series of deadly puzzles that weaponize the abuse, fear and cultural disconnection she’s spent years trying to bury before the maze consumes her identity forever.” The second you make this a metaphor and it’s about trauma and cultural disconnection and abuse… integrating it through simile and hiding it inside of scenes through subtext and carefully constructed character relationships, that’s the highest difficulty of writing there is. I wouldn’t trust any writer with that. Meanwhile, three loglines previous to that pitch, I’m getting a group of characters in the Amazon who are stuck in a giant web with a giant spider chasing them. I’m way more confident that a writer can pull that idea off.

Only FOUR go through!

Okay, another day of voting! It’s like Vote-a-palooza here at Scriptshadow. I have already locked in the 7 winning loglines from yesterday, which will move into the official competition. But I don’t want to bog today’s post down so I’ll wait until tomorrow to post the entire list of scripts that made it through in the second week.

Today are the maybes from the weekend. Not every maybe makes it into today’s post. I went through all of them and I went through everyone’s extra 300 word pitch, if they made one. So, if you’re wondering where your ‘maybe’ idea went, it unfortunately went to idea heaven.

These are not going to be as strong as yesterday’s bunch. And, for that reason, only FOUR IDEAS are going to get into the competition today. So every vote counts. You can vote for multiple loglines.  Again, I encourage everyone here to stick to the spirit of the competition and not just vote for your friends. Vote if you would want to see that movie. Cause that’s the ultimate goal of this contest – is to get movies made.

No need to waste time. Here are your contenders…

Title: Snakeboy
Genre: Comedy
Logline: After surviving a bite from what he mistakes for a deadly venomous snake (but is really a harmless garden snake), a delusional comic book nerd becomes convinced he’s developed snake-like superpowers and adapts a vigilante persona, oblivious to the very real danger he’s putting himself in as he haphazardly makes waves taking on the city’s criminal underworld.
Writer: AEL

Title: Untitled

Genre: Slasher
Logline: When a legendary horror director reunites the surviving final girls from his franchise at his remote estate, someone in the franchise’s iconic mask crashes the party, and the women must band together to survive their deadliest role yet.
Writer: Rupert Pumpkin

Title: What It’s Like
Genre: Horror-Comedy
Logline: When a die-hard fan and her favourite pop star accidentally swap bodies, the singer desperately tries to switch back, but the fan revels in her new fame and refuses. However, when she commits a public faux-pas and gets cancelled, she’ll do anything for her own life back, even murder.
Writer: JakeG177

Title : You have died of Dysentery
Genre: Comedy
Logline: Two tech addicted siblings whose phones have been destroyed by their fed up parents find an old copy of The Oregon Trail. When they get transported into the game, they must lead a group of pioneers and survive the entire nightmarish journey west in order to get back home.
Writer: T D

Title: Contraflow
Genre: Action-Thriller
Logline: After robbing a bank under the cover of a Category 5 hurricane evacuation, the South’s best wheelman must turn Florida’s gridlocked exodus into a moving shell game, leapfrogging his crew and the stolen cash between vehicles to evade police checkpoints as the storm closes in behind them.
Writer: Sam Kerr

Title: Mistletoe Joe
Genre: Comedy
Logline: Every year, Santa prides himself on granting everyone’s Christmas wish. So when a socially inept man sends Santa a wish wanting to lose his virginity, in desperation, Santa sends him a foul-mouthed, womanizing elf, known as Mistletoe Joe, to help him get laid by Christmas.
Writer: Noah B

Title: The Triangle
Genre: Adventure/Sci-Fi
Logline: When a small cruiser touring the Bermuda triangle sends out an SOS after incurring storm damage, it is rescued by the surviving crew of the HMS Atalanta, last seen 1880, and who are unaware a day has past since their own battering at sea. Our heroes now wonder how long they themselves have been lost in the triangle, and what kind of world awaits them if they can find their way out.
Writer: Mason Elliot

Title: Vice Stream
Genre: Crime thriller
Logline: After a popular Miami streamer is murdered during a live broadcast, his fanatical online community turns the ongoing stream into a weapon, using every clue hidden in the footage to hunt his killer through Miami’s neon underworld.
Writer: Tencoach

Title: Bad Review
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A young go-getter is tormented by the disturbed inventor of a product after he writes a review online that causes its downfall.
Writer: Patrick

Title: From Suburbia With Love
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a socially awkward 14-year-old discovers a banged-up international spy hiding in his pool house, they strike up a deal: the kid will keep the spy’s whereabouts secret while the suave spy helps the kid win over his crush.
Writer: Mason Elliot

Voting ends 11:59pm Pacific Time Wednesday.

To see all 10 entries together, filter Disqus comments by “Oldest”

Genre: Period/Light Fantasy
Premise: After the fall of Troy, the legendary Greek king Odysseus must survive monsters, vengeful gods, and impossible temptations on a perilous voyage home to reclaim his kingdom and family.
About: Christopher Nolan’s latest is powerhouse at the box office, taking in 125 million dollars. This is a movie that, just a couple of weeks ago, was projected to hopefully make 80 million dollars. In a movie world where everyone is underperforming, Nolan is one of the few people who you can count on to overperform.
Writer: Homer & Christopher Nolan
Details: 2 hours and 45 minutes

By far, the coolest thing about The Odyssey is the fact that 2700 years ago, this guy wrote this story and it was so powerful and affected people so much, that 2700 years later someone is making a movie out of it.

Think about that for a second. To write something so impactful that 2700 years from now, somebody will make a movie about it. Or whatever the equivalent of a movie is in 4726. That’s pretty freaking awesome and shows the power of the written word.

Just imagine for a second Homer… staring at the blank page (or the blank air since I don’t think they had paper back then), just like you do every day. Mentally writing something down. Not liking it. Changing it. Being unsure. Figuring something out. There may have even been a moment where he said, “You know what? I don’t think this is very good. I’m not going to finish it.” But then he forged his way through the doubt and finished it anyway. And now people all over the world are going to see the visual adaptation of that story. It’s amazing when you really think about it.

The other big cool thing about this movie is Christopher Nolan. I love the fact that he’s still making movies the old fashioned way. Not just because that’s “how they used to do it.” But Nolan understands that when you record reality (as opposed to computer generated artificiality), the viewer’s suspension of disbelief is stronger. The audience feels like they’re seeing something that’s real.

And he’s just great at steering the ship. There were so many times during this movie where I would admire the composition of a shot. The lighting in a shot. The music in a scene. There were several times where I marveled at the costuming. I never think once about costumes but, in this movie I did. I loved certain performances, like John Leguizamo and Samantha Morton’s. And I loved the fact that when we were watching those people on a boat, they were all really on the boat. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Nolan taught them all how to properly row like they did 2000 years ago and the actors were all rowing the boat to locations themselves.

But you want to know something funny?

I was bored out of my mind watching this movie.

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the poem it was based on, Odysseus wins the Trojan War. Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, everyone assumes he’s dead. The timeline here is never explained in a clear way but, the main idea is that many years have passed and everyone assumes Odysseus is dead except for his wife, Penelope, and his young son, Telemachus.

The journey home for Odysseus is a greatest-hits album of Greek mythology. Odysseus outsmarts the Cyclops, escapes the Lotus-Eaters, survives the witch Circe, sails past the Sirens, outsmarts a whirlpool, gets drugged into a nonconsensual relationship, and even ventures into the underworld, where he reconnects with all of his fallen soldiers.

Odysseus is told by the dead that he shouldn’t show up in Ithaca as himself or they’ll kill him. So he disguises himself as a begger, where he eventually infiltrates the lunch room where the Ithacans spend 99% of their daily life, and engages them in a 1 vs. 100 battle. All so he can finally be with his wife and son.

How bored was I, you ask?

At one point I fell asleep.

Look. I just praised the fact that this story has lasted 2,700 years. But let’s be real. Any 2,700 year old story is going to have issues when you drop it into the modern day. Going off to war was a rite of passage back then. Everybody understood it. Today? The vast majority of us live in air conditioned homes and have food delivered straight to our door. Let me repeat that.  We don’t even have the battle strength to get our own food!

So that whole aspect of the story was just a big fat “whatever” to me. I didn’t care. Nor did I care all that much about Odysseus getting home, which is kind of a problem since that’s the entire point of the movie.

For starters, I didn’t like his wife. She came off as a bitch. So I wasn’t exactly rooting for her to get her husband back. His son had never even met the guy. So I wasn’t all that invested in him getting his father back, either.

Then, as I was leaving the theater, I overheard someone say that Odysseus didn’t even want to get home. He wanted to stay away. And I thought, “You know what? He really didn’t seem like he wanted to get home.” Sure, he occasionally took a step in that direction. But the dude spent ten years hanging out on a beach before finally deciding to leave. That doesn’t exactly scream, “I can’t wait to get home.”

So then what’s the point of the movie? If the main character doesn’t really want to get home, what’s the engine driving the story? Is it just the inevitability of the writer needing to end the story and, therefore, forcing Odyssesus to return by his own (the writer’s) hand so that we can get to “The End?”

I know a lot of you will say, “You didn’t get it Carson.” Hand raised! I agree with you. I did not.

At one point, Odysseus is just chilling with this woman in a desert house that he borrowed from the Dune movie and he’s half-confused because he’s doping on drug flowers, and he’s not even sure why he’s there.

That’s when we learn this woman drugged him for seven years to forget to go home?? Come on. That doesn’t make sense at all. For starters, THEY’RE IN A DESERT!!!! THERE ARE NO FLOWERS!!! But let’s say that there’s a secret nearby flower garden. Even then! You’re saying you were able to keep him drugged every single second for seven straight years?????

Come on already.

It didn’t make sense, people. I need my stories to make sense.

2,700 years ago, stories didn’t have to make total sense. There wasn’t an internet logic-checking you. Heck, there weren’t even reviewers logic-checking you. You were one of the first stories. You could make up random rules and people just accepted them. But in 2026? No. We don’t just go with it anymore. And the Drug Woman sequence wasn’t the only example. There were a lot of moments like that.

I knew the movie was in trouble when we got to the Cyclops scene. I’d heard this set piece was incredible. I heard it was going to bring the house down. It wasn’t. It didn’t. It was… average. Which ended up being the theme of the movie. There was a shit-ton of average.

I didn’t even understand the rules of the Cyclops. He was already stumbling around like he was half blind. Then they actually blinded him and… he stumbled around like he was slightly more blind? It was all very murky and poorly constructed.

The pacing didn’t help either. Instead of playing the escape out in real time, everybody just goes to sleep right next to the Cyclops. You know, the giant thing who’s been murdering and eating you all day. I guess he doesn’t eat people after 8 p.m.?

There was a lot of clumsy, murky storytelling like that throughout the movie.

By the midpoint, I was dying. I was tapping my feet anxiously. I was rolling my eyes. Especially whenever we cut back to the wife and son. Who, by the way, spent 20 years hanging out in the lunch room. Did these people ever go outside????

I’d heard that the ending was amazing so I kept holding out hope for that.

It wasn’t.

It was like everything else in this story. Average.

I respect Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker. But I think he’s a terrible writer. That’s where he always sabotages his work. The cutting back and forth in time here was an attempt to make the story feel more sophisticated. In actuality, it just made things unnecessarily harder to follow.

The one truly good thing about this movie was learning that there was an actual dude named “Mentor” and that’s where the word “mentor” came from. That was honestly the only moment where my mind and body lit up and I felt something resembling excitement.

This movie is so boring guys. It is boring boring boring.

I do not recommend spending money on it.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the earliest lessons in storytelling is that the strength of your narrative engine is directly tied to how desperately your protagonist wants to achieve their goal. Whenever Odysseus is singularly focused on getting home, the story has urgency and momentum. Whenever that desire wavers, so does the narrative. The audience can only invest as much energy in a goal as the protagonist does.