This writer took over the town for a week. What can we learn from her?

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Two parents will do anything they can to help their son get into Yale, his dream college since he was a young child.
About: Sophie Fleur de Bruijn recently sold a romantic comedy spec that is said to be the best rom-com script in forever. I’m trying to get my hands on it (if you have it, please send it to me here: carsonreeves1@gmail.com). In the meantime, this is the script she wrote right before it, which appeared on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Sophie Fleur de Bruijn
Details: 111 pages

Reese for Heather?

The less glamorous but far more common path to success for screenwriters is this: they write a script that’s good enough to get noticed but not quite good enough to sell. That first script puts them on the industry’s radar. Then, when the next script arrives, people are already paying attention. And if that one delivers, everyone wants it.

That’s what’s happened with today’s screenwriter. She wrote today’s script, Early Action, that got her on the Black List. And then last week she went out with a romantic comedy spec that many are saying is the best romantic comedy script in five years. And 40 different companies wanted it. I didn’t even know there were 40 companies who could buy a script but much like a legitimate critique of Backrooms, let’s look past that detail.

Today, I want to take a look at the script that put Sophie on the map and got the industry paying attention. Attention that ultimately helped her sell her next script. By studying what worked, you can apply some of the same principles to your own writing. Let’s jump in, shall we?

Heather and Richard are young parents to Oliver, a kid who only wants one thing in life. To go to Yale for college. The barely middle class couple have secured a house in a really amazing neighborhood because the house had a gruesome murder in it. This has allowed them to get Oliver into the best schools in the country, which will bolster his chances of getting into Yale.

Cut to several years later and Oliver is in his senior year in high school. In an extremely confusing plot point that I still don’t understand, an angry teacher at the school released the GPAs and colleges that all of the kids in the school applied to, which has caused all of the parents to be really really angry.

As best as I can understand, this leads to Heather and Richard learning that five other seniors in the school are also applying to Yale. And apparently Yale only chooses one kid from this school, which means that Oliver’s application has to be better than those five kids. And since that teacher exposed all the students’ applications (I think), Heather and Richard are able to read the other five students’ applications and realize that their son’s application doesn’t measure up to them at all.

So they find Lance Latham, a guy whose only job is to get rich kids into prestige colleges. Lance tells them that there’s very little Oliver can do to beat these other kids. His only shot is writing an essay for the ages. He needs a story that will bowl the Yale admissions team over. So, Lance says to the parents, make sure he has a great story.

Heather and Richard take this to mean they need to create a series of crazy events (deliver a baby from an actor pretending to be in labor in a stuck elevator, have Richard pretend to be choking in a restaurant) that will give Oliver something to write about. But all of the staged events go wrong for one reason or another.

They finally go for the whopper — pay some people to kidnap their own son. This traumatic event will surely lead to the best essay of the six applicants and win Oliver his coveted dream spot at Yale University. Unless something goes wrong, of course.

Okay…

Where should I start?

Let’s start with the setup. If you have to move mountains to set up your story, then your idea is too complex. The amount of events that need to happen here (there’s a strange meltdown at the school as students’ info is leaked, the parents realize Oliver has a tougher road to get into Yale than they thought, they go to the fixer guy who explains to them how applications work and what they’re up against and what the best course of action is which eventually leads to him saying make sure he has a great essay, then they study all of his competitors essays, and then they sneak in and learn that Oliver only has two sentences so far in his essay, and then they start planning a series of faked events so their son has more material to write this essay) — The amount of shit we needed to trudge through just to start the movie was WAY WAY WAY TOO MUCH!

It reminded me of that dreadful screenplay for Will Ferrell’s and Amy Pohler’s movie, The House. I remember that script well because fifteen different things needed to be explained and connected in order to come up with a believable scenario by which the characters would open up a casino in their house. It was awful. And of course the movie was awful too.

Let me give you the setup for the hottest movie in town right now. A guy wishes the girl he’s in love with falls in love with him too and then she becomes obsessed with him. THAT’S IT. THAT’S THE SETUP.

Audiences don’t like to connect 82 dots just to get your movie started. If that’s what it takes to get to the meat of your story, you’ve got way too much going on and you need to seriously simplify it.

Then, after all that work just to set up the story, the faked events the parents come up with DON’T EVEN MAKE SENSE. They give an actress a balloon to put under her shirt and put her in an elevator with their son and have the elevator stopped and the girl pretend to be in labor so that Oliver will deliver a baby. BUT THERE’S NO BABY!!!! What happens when he actually tries to deliver it???? Of course the scene ends with him passing out before that truth can be revealed.

Then our writer creates this scene of the dad choking at a restaurant in the hopes that their son will give him the Heimlich and “save his life.” That’s your plan for writing a great essay on a Yale application??? I once gave my dad the Heimlich at a restaurant??? This movie doesn’t even make sense!!!

The problems with the script don’t stop there. We don’t even spend any time with Oliver! We spend all our time with the parents. Oliver is the one trying to get into school. He’s the reason we’re supposed to be rooting for everything here yet we barely know him. Literally the only thing we know about him is that he wants to get into Yale.

And on top of all this, this is a very weak premise. This movie idea doesn’t fit into any known lane that Hollywood makes movies in. I suppose it’s a comedy but it’s not a comedy lane that has ever been done before. So, why would people go watch this?

So, what’s going on? How is this writer getting so much heat? Well, despite all of this, the writing itself is amusing. It’s even occasionally funny. There’s a scene, for example, where they’re not-so-lightly encouraging their son to change his pronouns to they/them, pretending to have no ulterior motives at all, and a couldn’t-be-bothered Oliver insists he’s fine with his regular pronouns, irking his parents to no end, who continue to push their pronoun agenda all the while pretending they’re okay with whatever he decides. There’s a lot of stuff like that that definitely made me chuckle.

And I think that in spite of being really bad at the mechanics of writing a screenplay, the writing itself is very fluid and effortless and… it’s hard to quantify the last part but the best way to describe it is that I felt good while reading this script. There’s something very positive about the way Sophie writes that I liked.

There was a time on this site when I experimented with two ratings at the end of every script review, one for the script and one for the writer. The problem was that so many of the ratings were the same that I gave that up. But, for this script, I would give a worth the read to the writer and a wasn’t for me for the script.

And maybe what happened with this rom-com she later sold is Sophie just came up with a much simpler idea. The thing about writing screenplays is, each concept leads you down a new path that you haven’t experienced before. And you don’t know what kinds of concepts work best when writing screenplays until you’ve written a bunch of them. And one of the lessons you eventually learn is that simpler concepts work best. So maybe Sophie’s rom-com idea is just really simple. Maybe she learned that lesson after this. Or maybe she just got lucky and stumbled into it. It can happen.

I suppose if you average these two ratings (one for writer, one for script) together, they end up right between a ‘wasn’t for me’ and a ‘worth the read’. So I have to decide which rating to give and I think this writer is good enough that I can bump this up to a ‘worth the read.’ But it’s a very weak ‘worth the read.’

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Good comedy writers use parentheticals strategically. I always tell writers to avoid parentheticals unless they genuinely add something to the line. This is a great example of one that earns its keep:

LUANN (CONT’D)
Thank you. Diane is gonna kick my ass. She teaches kickboxing on weekends.
(with profound importance)
The 9:00AM slot.

Notice that the joke isn’t actually in the words, “The 9:00AM slot.” On the page, that’s just a piece of information. The comedy comes from Luann treating that detail as if it’s the most important revelation imaginable, which comes from the parenthetical.

A reckoning is upon us.

Genre: Horror
Premise: An architect who’s been burdened with running a small town furniture store discovers an endless series of rooms running underneath his store.
About: The backrooms started as a picture of a real room of yellowed walls that looked both depressing and terrifying.  Reddit started writing nosleep articles about it and the lore became more and more expansive until people started making videos of this picture on Youtube — turning it into a never-ending maze of this awful piss-yellow sad endless series of walls and rooms. 17 year old Kane Parsons was the Youtube creator who got the most views from his Backrooms videos. His version was the creepiest and most imaginative. Now, here’s the interesting thing. Nobody owned the rights to the Backrooms IP. It was created publicly. But A24 was still terrified of putting millions of dollars into this property only to later find out that someone owned it and wanted compensation. So, if you read between the lines, A24 would not have preferred to hire a 20 year old director. It’s just not done for a major film. Too risky. However, Kane could use all of the lore that he created in his videos, which provided a legal safety net for A24. So, that’s why a 20 year old is directing such a giant film. The writer of the script, Will Soodik, has written for several high-profile TV shows, including Westworld.
Writer: Will Soodik and Kane Parsons
Details: 110 minutes

People have asked what I think of this new wave of young YouTubers taking over the movie industry.

You want to know what I think of it?

I LOVE IT.

I love it love it love it.

You know why? Because this is the first time in I can’t even remember how long that something fresh and exciting is happening in Hollywood. I’m actually going to go into this more in my Friday article, where I discuss how and why this is happening. But I think it’s great. People are talking about movies again and that’s a great thing. Cause they weren’t talking about them for a long time.

Now, when it comes to Backrooms, I’ve been a fan of these videos since they first popped up on Youtube. My first thought when I saw them was, “When is this going to be a movie?” Cause it was so obvious that it could be one. Well, that time has come.

Clark is a newly divorced failed architect who is slumming it up running a large crappy furniture store in this 1990s set story. When he can’t figure out where his way-too-large electric bill is coming from, he looks into the circuit breaker in his basement, which leads him to an invisible doorway that takes him into the backrooms, a never-ending connection of yellow-walled generic rooms.

Clark starts exploring the rooms and is baffled by just how expansive and random they are. He then gets a couple of his younger employees to come with him and document the experience. The trio then sets out to go deeper into the backrooms than Clark has ever gone before, and that’s when things get strange.

Some sort of unseen creature grabs the cameraman. Clark then gets split up from his second employee. And eventually he falls deeper and deeper into the backrooms until he’s lost.

We then cut to Mary, who we met earlier in the film. She’s Clark’s therapist. She goes looking for Clark. Cause that’s what therapists do when their patients don’t show up for a session. She goes to his furniture store, finds the basement, finds the secret entrance to the backrooms, and goes in herself. She eventually finds Clark. But poor Clark has kind of gone insane. And now Mary has to escape him and find her way out of… the backrooms.

There are so many weird things about this movie. Something that nobody is talking about is that this is a movie for 20 year olds yet they cast a 50 year old man and a 40 year old woman in the leads. Maybe they knew the youngsters would show up but still needed the old guard and that’s why they cast these two? Still a strange choice.

Getting to the story here, I thought the first 40 minutes was pretty good. It’s a little clunky at times, which I’ll discuss in a second. But the weirdness of these backrooms and the introduction into that world is exciting. You both want to know and don’t want to know what’s around the next corner.

However, the longer you stay in this world, the clearer it is that the director has only a slightly better idea of what this place is than you do.

This is actually important. Because when you do any sort of world-building in screenwriting, you need to understand your mythology 100%. The reason The Matrix is a classic is because the Wachowskis spent 10 years refining that mythology. Not by choice. But because their project kept getting rejected. But that ended up being a good thing cause it forced them to continue thinking about and building the world they were setting their story in.

Kane Parsons maybe understands 40% of the Backrooms mythology. And, keep in mind, he did not create this world. He built on what others had created. So, it makes sense he’s not sure what it is.

The reason all this matters is because a story like this needs its mythology to be 100% solid for it to fire on all cylinders. Because the whole deal is the backrooms. If there isn’t an understanding of what’s going on there, then the entire experience is going to be running on fumes and guesswork. Which is exactly what happens.

The interesting thing here, though, is that the backrooms are so trippy and so weird that they can kind of withstand some of this weak scaffolding. Mythology schmamolgy as long as there’s some trippy looking robot creature peeking its head out from one of the crevices in the walls.

But that then puts the pressure on the characters and the storytelling itself. And, ultimately, that’s where The Backrooms falls apart.

There’s a scene in the first act where, after a long day, Clark is in his bed, watching TV, about to go to sleep. And then we pull away and we show that Clark is actually still at the store. He’s using one of the for-sale beds to sleep in that night and has pulled up one of the televisions, I guess, to watch before going to bed.

It’s a cute little gag.

But there’s a deep tissue problem with this moment. We’re not exactly sure what it means. Does this mean that Clark lives here at the furniture store? There’s a moment earlier, during his therapy session with Mary, where he mentions that his ex-wife lives in their house now. But the indication is that that happened a while ago. So, surely, he’s rented an apartment since then, right?

Or hasn’t he?

Okay, let’s say he hasn’t. Let’s say he’s living here. Well, he has employees. Do his employees know this? Or does he hide it from them? Does he get up every morning an hour before they show up and hide the evidence that he sleeps there?   That information — the information that would actually tell us something about this character — is never shared with us.

Think about what the cost is for not clarifying this.  Those are two completely different characters — one who is okay with his employees knowing that he lives here after work and one who hides that from his employees. The first one doesn’t give a fuck. The second one feels ashamed. Two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CHARACTERS. If you want to construct a strong clear character, those details matter A LOT. But we’re never given that information.  Or any information like it.

But you wanna know what?

I don’t think Kane Parsons knows the answer to that question. I don’t think he cares. He liked the bed gag. That’s all he cares about.

Now, you may say, “Carson, you’re looking into this way too deeply. People aren’t going to this movie for character development. They’re going to be creeped out by the backrooms.”

I agree with that. That’s what today’s “what l learned” section is about.  The problem is, the third act is about how the backrooms are part of Clark’s psyche! Mary is walking into Clark’s head. We are literally in the character’s head. Which means the entire script is dependent on the character development being A+. And the director hasn’t even established who this character is.

So, you’re watching this final act and you’re going… what’s going on here? Absolutely nothing about Clark’s descent into madness is earned cause we barely know anything about him.

And, again, the movie sort of covers it up with the effective creepiness of the tall pirate monster chasing Mary. That’s the power of the Backrooms. Is that every time a glaring screenwriting issue pops up, the backrooms says ‘look over here!’ and you stop focusing on it.

With that said, I still think they left a ton on the table with the backrooms. There are much better backrooms moments online (on YouTube) than what they gave us. That was what I was looking forward to the most — seeing stuff that I hadn’t seen on Youtube. This is the big screen baby. Give us something bigger.

But a lot of this was rehashed stuff you could already see online. There wasn’t a single new backrooms moment where I said, “Oh wow. That’s cool.”  Nor did it seem like they were looking to create that moment.

So, all in all, this movie wasn’t for me.

But what I say next might surprise you. I don’t think anything I just said matters. Yeah, the character development here wasn’t even half-baked. It was quarter-baked. But maybe that’s what makes the movie feel fresh. I remember watching Phantasm as a kid and a lot of it didn’t make sense. But it stayed with me my whole life. Cause it was weird and unpredictable and unsettling. And I think the teens and 20-somethings who see this film will leave having had a similar experience.

And I think that may be part of this larger movement going on with these Youtube filmmakers that is getting people back to the theater. The very fact that they AREN’T doing it the Hollywood way, or the Scriptshadow way, is what’s helping them stand out. I’m going to talk about that a lot more on Friday.

For Wednesday, I’m going to take a break from horror and review a script from that new female writer who had 40 companies chasing down her rom-com script last week. I’m not reviewing her rom-com. But I’m reviewing the script she wrote before that. That should be fun.

Seeya then!

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

What I learned: Like I always say — whatever it is that people are coming to your movie for, make sure that that thing works. If it’s comedy, the majority of your focus should be on making sure the script is funny. If it’s a thriller, the majority of your focus should be on making your script fast and exciting. If it’s a horror movie, your focus needs to be on scares and creepiness.  If you succeed in providing the key thing that the audience came to experience, the script can withstand a surprising amount of weaknesses. And I think that’s why Backrooms is doing so well. Its character development sucks. But it’s consistently creepy throughout. And since that’s what people are coming there for, they’re mostly leaving satisfied.

Should be there in less than an hour.

This was one of my favorite newsletters to work on. I document finding the Ember Knight script, the writers signing with Kaplane/Perrone and how you can be the next screenwriter to make that leap. I interview the writers and push them on why they decided to write such a long script. I also take a look at one of the hottest movies to come along in a long time. The way this film is performing at the box office is insane. And what I found out about the director’s father is going to surprise a lot of screenwriters, as I think it’s a big reason the movie is doing so well. So, if you’re not on the Scriptshadow Newsletter List, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send it to you.

Yesterday, I took on Hollywood. Today, I take on Indie-land

Genre: Drama
Premise: A happily engaged couple are thrown a curveball a week before their wedding when one of them admits to something shocking about their past.
About: The Drama got a lot of pushback when it first came out as it was marketed as a mainstream romantic drama. But people only realized that it was an uncomfortable psychological dark comedy once they paid for their ticket. Writer-director Borgli is becoming known as the “Reddit Thread” director, as he seems to build his premises around questions that would generate healthy Reddit threads. In this case, would you marry your fiancé if you learned they were a school shooter? Borgli broke into the indie mainstream space a couple of years ago with his Nic Cage movie, Dream Scenario.
Writer: Kristoffer Borgli
Details: 1 hour 45 minutes

I haven’t been keeping up with the latest season of Euphoria because the whole experiment felt bizarre from the start. The show disappears for four years then comes back with a giant time jump? From a screenwriting perspective, that’s a recipe for disaster. That said, people are definitely talking about it. The reviews have been rough, but social media happily belly-dances after every episode.

Even though I skipped the new season, I did check out The Drama, starring Euphoria’s Zendaya, along with Robert Pattinson, and I honestly can’t remember the last time a movie frustrated me this much. If you’re looking to experience pure cinematic irritation, this thing delivers.

The movie follows Charlie, an insecure British man, and Emma, the woman he falls in love with, after an awkward coffee shop encounter. Their relationship progresses quickly. They get engaged and we jump to one week before their wedding. Then, during a night out with friends, someone asks the question, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Everyone gives uncomfortable answers, but Emma reveals that, as a teenager, she once planned to shoot up her school before deciding not to go through with it. Charlie initially thinks she’s joking. When he realizes she’s serious, the entire movie becomes about whether he can still marry her.

And here’s where the movie completely falls apart for me.

Technically speaking, this is an intense dramatic dilemma. Finding out your fiancé once considered mass murder is obviously high stakes. But drama is not just about stakes. Drama requires relatability. We have to emotionally understand the situation we’re watching.

This premise is so extreme and so bizarre that it breaks the connection between the audience and the characters. Most people can relate to discovering an uncomfortable truth about someone they love. Very few people can relate to wondering whether their fiancé almost committed a Columbine. The idea is so far outside normal human experience that the movie never figures out how to ground it emotionally.

I may not live on a desert planet farming wind and trading dewback saliva, but I understand Luke Skywalker wanting a bigger life for himself than being a farmer. That’s relatable. I have absolutely no frame of reference for deciding whether to marry someone because they almost became a mass shooter. The movie spends two hours trying to convince us this is an emotionally accessible drama, and it never gets there.

You can actually see this problem in Zendaya’s performance. For most of the movie, she looks lost. Nothing feels anchored. Nothing feels lived in. It honestly feels like rehearsal footage at times.
What’s interesting is that the second we get to the actual wedding, her performance becomes believable. She finally feels like a real person. And I think the reason for that is simple. Weddings are real. The tension there is human. The emotions are recognizable. Suddenly the movie is operating in a space we understand.

I honestly think director Kristoffer Borgli realized this too, which is why he tries to cover up the first three quarters of the film with film school gimmicks. Endless jump cuts. Time jumps. Fake future scenes. Multiple takes of the same moment. Charlie practicing his vows via voice over while we cut to different timelines. It’s all the kind of flashy artsy bullshit that screams, “I just time-traveled back from NYU circa 1997,” while adding nothing to the story itself.

And then something funny happens. With only a few scenes left before the wedding, Borgli stops doing all of that nonsense and just tells the story normally. And immediately everything improves. It’s almost shocking how much better it gets.

There’s a particularly strong sequence where Charlie has a breakdown at work and confides in a married female co-worker. The emotional spiral escalates and he ends up almost having sex with her before pulling away in horror at what he’s doing.

That setup becomes important at the wedding because the co-worker and her husband are both there, turning the entire ceremony into a ticking time bomb. Has she told her husband? Is she going to tell Emma? Is this all about to explode publicly?

That’s actual dramatic writing. You establish a bomb then force the audience to sit in anticipation of it detonating.

In fact, the wedding section is so much stronger than the rest of the movie that I honestly suspect Borgli originally conceived this as a short film or a contained wedding story and then expanded it into a feature later. Because suddenly everything becomes focused. Planned. Controlled.

There’s a scene during Emma’s father’s speech that perfectly demonstrates this. The father starts talking about Emma growing up, his time as a cop, a missing rifle, Emma’s anti-gun beliefs. Every detail makes Charlie more uncomfortable.

Now here’s the screenwriting problem Borgli faced. Real parent wedding speeches are long. But the only parts of the speech that matter here are the parts escalating Charlie’s anxiety. So Borgli cleverly has the DJ equipment malfunction immediately after the important information is delivered. The speakers pop (sounding like a gun going off), everyone gets distracted, and when we return to the father, he says, “I have more to say, but I’ll save it for later.”

That’s good screenwriting. It’s problem-solving. The writer found an elegant way to extract only the relevant material from the situation without bogging the rest of the sequence down.

We get another strong moment with Emma’s friend Rachel, who learned about Emma’s school shooting fantasy alongside Charlie. When Rachel gives her wedding speech, we’re terrified she might expose Emma in front of everyone. Again, that’s real tension. The audience is squirming because they understand the social danger of the moment.

The frustrating part is that none of this care exists in the earlier sections of the screenplay. Everything before the wedding feels random and underdeveloped. For example, in that ‘almost sex’ scene at the workplace shortly before the third act, that’s the first time we’re shown Charlie’s work! With just 25 minutes to go in the movie! And we don’t even know what he does still! We see him at work but nobody tells us what he does! That’s basic foundational character work you’re screwing up.

This is the kind of thing that exposes weak screenwriting immediately. If you don’t understand the fundamental pieces of your characters, the audience feels it. The script starts floating instead of standing on solid ground.

I was literally talking to a writer about this during a consultation today. He’d written a deeply damaged main character, yet he’d barely thought about the character’s parents. But most emotional damage originates with family. If you ignore that foundation, the character’s pain feels fake because the scaffolding underneath it doesn’t exist.

That’s exactly how The Drama feels for most of its runtime. Like it skipped the foundational work and jumped straight to the fun stuff the writer wanted to feature, like this famous wedding photo scene where they’re getting their pre-wedding photos taken despite the fact that their relationship is falling apart. People have mentioned that as a highlight of the movie. I found it to be on-the-nose myself. But the point is, that shouldn’t be your only goal as the writer, to write those fun scenes. You gotta get the blood & sweat annoying stuff down first.

And then there’s the ending. Massive spoiler here.

The movie spends its entire runtime hinting that something catastrophic is going to happen at the wedding. At one point, it even flashes forward to imagery suggesting multiple guests have been shot and killed. So naturally we’re thinking: Does Emma snap? Does Charlie snap? Is the wedding going to become a massacre?

And then… nothing happens.

Which leaves you sitting there wondering why the movie spent so much time building toward an explosion it never intended to deliver. It ultimately feels like confirmation that Borgli never figured out how to connect the pre-wedding movie to the wedding movie.

The result is a bizarre mash-up of genuinely strong dramatic writing trapped inside a much weaker, self-conscious art film. Sometimes impressive. Often unbearable. Never fully cohesive.

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

What I learned: We all love writing the scenes that we thought about when we first conceived of our idea. Like the wedding photo scene here. But the scenes that make a script work are the workhorse ones, the ones that establish your characters, establish the plot, set up a situation we can relate to. Those foundational pieces are what’s going to make your script feel genuine and real.

Jon Favreau swung for the fences with his first Star Wars movie and not a single person who’s watched the movie realizes it.

Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure
Premise: The Mandalorian and Grogu team up with Jabba the Hutt’s son to take down a local mob boss in the dangerous Outer Rim, then must battle a couple of gangsters who want this trio out of commission for good.
About: There has been much discussion about how this movie will do this weekend. Would it have the worst Disney Star Wars opening ever, besting Solo? Its 4-Day holiday weekend haul is looking to be just north of 100 million, which means it will come down to the wire with who takes the crown.
Writer: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Noah Kloor
Details: 2 hours 12 minutes

Almost everyone you talk to who has seen The Mandalorian and Grogu gives the same review. “It was bland.” “It was vanilla.” “It was a side quest.” But what none of them realize is that Jon Favreau took a gigantic swing with this screenplay. He tried to make one of the best Star Wars movies ever. So, why is nobody acknowledging that? And did he actually… you know… succeed?

Before we get into that, let’s talk about Disney’s beautifully calibrated marketing campaign for our beloved Star Wars duo.

For starters, Star Wars has always gone to its secret bag of tricks in regards to its opening weekend box office. Their movies always come out on a big holiday weekend. Therefore, they get to report the non-official number for their movie’s opening weekend gross ($100 million??) instead of the actual number ($80 million??) for the Fri-Sun weekend.

The most egregious use of this was during The Last Jedi. If I remember correctly, they opened on Christmas, which was a Wednesday. So they counted Wednesday through Sunday for the opening weekend numbers and, as a result, were able to hyper-inflate how much money the movie made.

But that’s old school cheating. New School deceit is what Disney did Thursday, which is to pre-empt the expected backlash for the film by planting a story in The Hollywood Reporter where they claimed it was impossible for The Mandalorian and Grogu to lose money.

The theatrical box office for this film, they claim, is insignificant. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a commercial for Disney Plus and will therefore bring all sorts of new people to the service. In addition to that, Grogu is a super toy and worth a billion dollars all on his own. So, you see, it’s impossible for The Mandalorian and Grogu to not make money.

Look, I think there’s some truth to the fact that Disney Plus subscriber sign-ups and Grogu toys factored into Disney green-lighting this movie. But let’s be real here. The folks who went to see this movie are people who already had the service. And the Grogu toy sales are heavily weighted to that first season, when he became part of the zeitgeist. But come on. Grogu is not a hot toy anymore.

I think the bigger story here is why does Disney think they need to take over The Hollywood Reporter to defend a film before it’s even come out? If you think you’ve got a winning film, you don’t need to preemptively defend it. So, it’s a little suspicious.

The truth is that Disney has become hyperspace sensitive about Star Wars because they haven’t been able to figure it out. I don’t think the franchise is dead, like a lot of these doom and gloom influencers insist it is. But there’s no doubt it’s become “just another thing” rather than “THE thing.” And if they want to make it “THE” thing again, there’s a lot of course correcting that needs to go on.

Just like Han Solo said to Luke in the original Star Wars when Luke tried to jump to light speed, “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, kid! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”

Now, here’s the irony. Jon Favreau attempted to enter the precise calculations with his first foray into feature film Star Wars. But the result is yet another example of how challenging screenwriting really is.

Mando and Grogu are helping the New Republic take down the bad guy terrorists in the outer rim, where lots of nefarious stuff happens. They’re tasked with finding the mysterious “top” terrorist, which will require them to help the Hutt Twins find their nephew, Rotta the Hutt, who has disappeared. Rotta is the son of dead mob kingpin, Jabba the Hutt.

They eventually find Rotta on some planet, where he’s been forced to fight gladiator battles to pay off a debt. When Mando shows up to rescue him, Rotta says he doesn’t want to be rescued. He’s only got one more fight anyway. Leave him alone.

After that final battle goes haywire, Mando learns that Rotta doesn’t want to go back to his aunt and uncle (the Hutt twins) because, as the son of Jabba the Hutt, he’s a threat to their throne. He’s pretty sure they’re going to kill him. But Mando, being a bounty hunter, emphasizes that he’s “just doing a job” and doesn’t care about any of that.

So, after some adventurous set pieces with Mando, Rotta, and Grogu, Rotta is returned to the twins. The twins then decide to kill Mando because…. Well just because. Mando survives their giant pet snake attack, but just barely, as he was poisoned during the battle.

As he and Grogu escape into the forest, Mando passes out due to the snake bite, and it looks like he’s going to die. This leaves Grogu all on his own and, for the first time, he will have to figure things out by himself. He ends up lucking out, as some local alien fish farmer gives him the snake antidote. So, Grogu is able to save Mando’s life.

Once he’s back on his feet, Mando decides they have to kill the Hutt twins and save their buddy, Rotta. So the two arm up and bombard the Hutt Twins’ swamp castle. I think you can all assume what happens next (they win). The End.

All right, let’s get to it.

Why am I saying that Jon Favreau tried to write the best Star Wars movie ever if everyone’s saying the movie is blander than unscented hand lotion?

Favreau tried to write an all-time great character in Rotta the Hutt. The fingerprints of it are everywhere. Rotta is his Michael Corleone. He’s the son of this great big powerful presence. He has no interest in working for the family. He just wants to go do his own thing and get out of his father’s shadow.

We’re talking about a Hutt as a key character in this movie. You could argue that he’s the main character. Mando has no personality and never changes. Grogu is too juvenile to arc in any compelling way. This leaves Rotta the Hutt as your major character arc in the movie. Which is why Favreau got the hottest actor in town, Jeremy Allen White, to play him. Cause he wanted to win an Oscar for this character.

So, why didn’t it work?

Well, part of the reason is that, on the page, you can make an alien work. Because nobody’s seeing any images yet. But, on screen, you have no idea how it will turn out. Hutts have notoriously just sat down in Star Wars movies. They don’t have to move which helps make them more believable. But once you start moving them around, especially as much as Favreau did, every bit of CGI weakness is amplified. There were basic close-up shots of Rotta in this movie where his eyes were warped in weird ways.

The reason this matters is because if things are even slightly off, the suspension of disbelief is broken and all those endless hours you spent creating this deep intense tragic character arc go out the window because we look at this creature and he looks dumb. He doesn’t look real.

But let’s say they somehow pulled off the technical side of this character. It still wouldn’t have worked because we don’t want a Hutt character arc. Hutts are meant to be simple creatures. I actually thought the Hutt twins were the best thing about this movie because they served that original purpose that Jabba the Hutt served. Which is that they were big, they were intimidating, and they instilled fear with their words. When those two spoke, it felt like old fashioned Star Wars.

But when Rotta is racing around in a hot rod car throwing out zingers like Adam Sandler, it totally betrays the original concept of these creatures. They were meant to be placed on big slabs of concrete, to tell people what to do, and to be evil. That’s it. No car races. And no arcing. Hutts don’t arc.

Not every character type is meant to have a redemption. Some are created to be one-dimensional and that’s fine! If you want a character arc in your movie, create better characters in Mando and Grogu. They’re the centerpieces. They’re the ones you want to arc. But because you screwed up their creation, you’re now hampered with these issues that can’t be overcome. And the feature treatment really puts a spotlight on that.

I mean, your main character WEARS A MASK. That doesn’t seem like a big deal but think about it for a second. We don’t get to see the expression of our main character for 99.9% of the running time! That’s INSANE. What other movie has done that? I don’t think any movie in history has done it. If you want to point to a reason why people aren’t connecting with this story… you don’t need to look much further than that!

Another big issue with the movie was the lack of stakes. The goal here is to save Rotta the Hutt. What happens to the galaxy if Mando and Grogu fail at this mission? Nothing! This is what I’ve been saying with Star Wars shows. They’re impossible to make work because the stakes are so low.

The Star Wars creative team will clap back, “No. These shows are exploring the characters. Making you care about these people and these aliens. They’re not about big stories. They’re about small intimate ones.” But the problem is that they’re *not* making us care. Mando is such a boring character. The only contribution to his character’s likability is that he takes action. But his personality is drier than a Tattooine beach. When has any well-liked main character throughout time had a weak personality?

The final big mistake the movie made was that the story engine dropped out for the last 30 minutes of the film. The Mandalorian is half-dead and Grogu is sitting around hoping that changes. It’s actually a very interesting sequence because we’ve had another similar sequence to compare it to early this year, in Project Hail Mary.

Nearly the exact same thing happens. In Mando and Grogu, Mando looks to be dead and Grogu has to wait and babysit him. And in Project Hail Mary, Rocky looks to be dead and Grace has to babysit him.

Despite both sequences stalling the movie at the same time, Project Hail Mary’s sequence is a highlight while Mando and Grogu’s sequence has the audience checking their watches. Why? What’s the difference if they’re the exact same plot development?

THE DIFFERENCE IS THE CHARACTERS.

Grace is full of personality and easy to love. Rocky has even MORE personality than Grace and is even EASIER to love. Not only that, but they did a great job carefully setting up that moment with Rocky being dead. They made a point to set up that this alien species looks the same whether they’re asleep or dead. So, we truly don’t know what’s happened to Rocky or if he’s going to survive. It’s a sequence where we’re all on the edge of our seats.

Mando is such a poorly conceived character (low vibration, no personality, always wears a mask so we can’t connect to him expressively) that it doesn’t affect us if he’s in danger. That’s why I always say, before you write your script, make sure your 2-3 major characters are very strong. Cause if they are, you can make a ton of script mistakes. But you can’t do the opposite. A good plot cannot survive weak characterization.

Another realization I had while watching this movie was how drawn out everything was. One of the many genius things about Star Wars was how punchy it was. It felt like the entire team would sit in the editing room and debate FRAMES. Not seconds, mind you. But, “Can we cut a frame here so we can move to the next scene faster?”

Go back and watch Star Wars. It’s extremely punchy. The end of every scene is almost like a cliffhanger that then JUMPS to the next scene. Luke spots Threepio in the back room and Threepio says R2 is gone. Lucas would just HOP right into tomorrow with Luke and Threepio shooting across the desert in their landspeeder. The scenes would pop into each other like that.

Here, it’s like somebody’s falling asleep in the editing bay every once in a while. We’ll linger on with a scene well after it’s finished. And those needlessly extended moments add up. It creates this lazy lingering feeling that a summer movie is not supposed to have.

What Favreau probably knows deep down is that these characters aren’t meant for a feature film. They’re not big enough. Because I was trying to think of what a better plot could’ve been. But then I realized, “It doesn’t matter.” You could write 100 different plots for these two and they’d all land somewhere in the middle. Cause the characters just aren’t big enough to carry the high stakes world of a feature film.

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

What I learned: Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Trying to turn a Hutt into a tragic character was such a miscalculation on many levels. Hutts were literally designed to be bad. They look that way because they’re bad. I’m not saying that turning a Hutt tragic and giving him some big character arc is impossible. Anything is possible. But if a creative choice has a .01% chance of succeeding, here’s a tip: Don’t try it.