Genre: Action/Vampire/Comedy
Premise: A family man uses the cover of being a pool cleaner in Los Angeles to hunt vampires.
About: Netflix is trying to recreate some John Wick magic. They’re going with the new industry trend of hiring a high profile stunt coordinator to direct. Put a B-level movie star in the lead role. Throw in a little mythology. And hopefully create something great. The film debuted on the streamer this weekend. Not surprisingly, John Wick alum Chad Stahlenski produced the film. He brought along young screenwriting superstar, Shay Hatten (who I’m guessing, with how many jobs he’s gotten over the last two years, is a billionaire at this point), to bump up the dialogue for an original script by first time screenwriter, Tyler Tice.
Writer: Tyler Tice & Shay Hatten
Details: 115 minutes

Day Shift is one of those scripts that comes across your desk and you think, “This is a movie.”

For those of you who wonder what I mean by that, a movie is something that can be marketed. That has a legitimate chance of being watched by a lot of people and therefore make money. It must feel larger than life. It must have high stakes. Two people on a road trip in Alaska – that’s not a movie. That’s a screenplay. Even if you were to make that movie – and sometimes they do turn scripts like that into movies – it’s still a screenplay at heart.

When you’ve got a pool cleaner who secretly kills vampires for a living? You’ve got a legit movie.

So when I saw this trailer pop up, I thought, “This is the perfect example of the kind of script you should be writing if you want to sell a screenplay.”

But there’s a weird thing about spec script subject matter that I’ve never quite been able to reconcile. Some of the things that help it become a movie are also, ironically, what sink it as a movie.

The main issue boils down to not having anything figured out beyond the marketable aspect of the script. The emperor has no clothes. Heck, he doesn’t even have underwear. That’s the feeling I got while watching Day Shift.

Day Shift follows 30-something, Bud, who lives in the San Fernando valley, and works as a pool cleaner, something his wife is none too thrilled about since they’re barely able to pay the mortgage and feed their 8 year old daughter. So Bud is feeling the heat to pick up the financial slack.

The thing is, Bud doesn’t really clean pools. He cleans the clocks of vampires. As in kills them. The pools are cover. He sneaks into the backyards of vampire home owners, pretends to do a little cleaning, then SHAZOW! He’s putting a silver bullet through your head. Or whatever they use to kill vampires. A wooden stake or something.

He then takes their fangs and sells them on the black market. The more prestigious the vampire fang, the more money he gets.

What Bud doesn’t know is that the last vampire he killed was some special vampire so now the vampire elite is after him. This forces Bud to re-join the “union” of vampire killers, where he’s paired up, “The Other Guys”-style, with a nerdy union accountant, Seth, and the two try to kill more vampires as well as avoid the elite vampires. Shenanigans galore follow.

Just to remind everyone, we have a HIGH CONCEPT SHOWDOWN coming up in December. So I hope you’re writing your high concept scripts as we speak. Day Shift would definitely fall under the ‘high concept’ category.

What: AMATEUR SHOWDOWN – HIGH CONCEPT EDITION
When: Entries due December 1 by 8pm Pacific Time
How: E-mail me your title, genre, logline, any extra pitch you want to make about why your script deserves a shot, and, of course, a PDF of the screenplay.
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Anything else?: You can start sending in your scripts right now!

But the script is a reminder that coming up with a high concept is half the battle. You then have to actually write 100 pages of story that execute that concept in an entertaining way. And what I’ve found is that a lot of writers feel like they did the hard work already by coming up with the concept and therefore half-a$$ the creative choices throughout the script.

Those choices in Day Shift were often fine, mind you. But no reader or audience member in history has ever gotten excited about “fine.” In my book, fine is worse than “bad.” Because at least bad creates some emotion, albeit negative. Fine doesn’t create any emotion at all. Everything about this movie was fine.

Take, for example, the creative choice of the “union.” It doesn’t fit into the movie. It feels forced. The mythology underneath it is not strong enough to support the choice. It just feels like it’s there because another movie did it and, so, maybe it’ll work in our movie too.

Never EVER think that way as a writer. Don’t do what other movies do. Other movies have their own set of problems. Your movie has it own culture, its own unique set of circumstances. So make decisions that are best for your movie only. I mean give me a break. You’ve got a Men In Black like secret organization for vampire killing. It was a dumb idea.

This movie works so much better if killing vampires is an informal thing. It’s fine if there’s a bigger network but the second you have this Steve Spielberg like organization, it took a gritty gnarly crazy cool job and buttoned it up. It made it lame.

I get that it gives us Seth. And Seth is, arguably, the best part of the movie. Especially (spoiler) when he turns into a vampire himself (which was the lone strong creative choice in the script). But there were other ways to team Bud up with a character like Seth that didn’t require some stupid underground organization that doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with your movie.

Another big issue with the film was that the main character was boring. And he shouldn’t have been. Tice and Hatten did everything you were supposed to do in creating Bud. He’s a poor guy trying to support his family who loves his daughter more than anything. Why aren’t we rooting for this guy?

This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. I’m not joking. I go to sleep wondering why some of these characters work and others don’t despite both following the same playbook. Bud is clearly likable. He’s a selfless person who wants to make a good life for his daughter. Why doesn’t he work?

The conclusion I came to was that he’s boring. A character still has to be a person. They can’t just be a combination of correct screenwriting choices. Save the cat. Be a nice human being. Care for a weaker character. Sure, those help. But your character still needs a unique likable personality. They need to feel like their own person. Bud doesn’t feel like anyone. He’s more vanilla than my Muscle Milk protein powder.

So remember that. Separate from the “likable traits,” make sure your protagonist has their own unique personality.

This is not a terrible movie. It’s just a forgettable one. Which is disappointing because I was hoping for more.

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

What I learned: Figure out who your characters are by asking ,“What would their ringtone be?” Seth is a nerdy by-the-book sorta douchebag. The reason his ringtone – Nicleback – is one of the funnier moments in the movie is because it perfectly encapsulated him. So when you’re trying to figure out what kind of funny a character in your screenplay is, ask yourself, “What would their ringtone be?” We don’t have to ever hear it in the film. But you should personally know it. By doing so, you’ll have a better feel for how to write that character.

What a weekend!

If there’s anything I learned, it’s that not even the best logline consultant in Hollywood can compete with a brain-trust of 100+ screenwriters. You guys killed it. I personally liked Katie’s…

A repressed war widow awakens naked in the snow on a military black site and must outwit her ruthless father’s vengeful soldiers when she realizes the carnivorous feline they are hunting is her.

And DG Burton’s best…

A repressed young widow awakens naked in the snow on a military black site and discovers soldiers have been torn apart, she has no memories of last night, and she’s being hunted by the Marines’ most ruthless general – her father.

Now if you could just come up with a logline to erase daylights savings time, I would pay all the money in the world to see that movie succeed! You certainly did better than the movies at this weekend’s box office. This was supposed to be the big Dune 2 opening weekend but the film, like many others, got pushed back because of the actors strike.

It’s so hard to promote a big movie when your stars can’t get out there and make headlines for you. I enjoy the backup plan – sending directors and writers out there – because literally everything they say is more interesting than what actors say. But you can’t deny the fact that, without actors to remind us that their movies are opening, the movies don’t seem as big.

Speaking of someone who’s a writer, director, AND an actor, Sly Stallone has been in the news a lot, with his docu-series premiering on Netflix. What’s interesting about Sly is that he should be one of the richest people in Hollywood. And yet the rumor is, he’s out of money. That’s why he agreed to this docu-series. It’s why he has that Kardashian like show about his family on Paramount Plus. The guy is hustling.

Most of this stems from the fact that he doesn’t own a single sliver of the Rocky franchise. You can’t really fault him for that. He notoriously stood strong when he made that Rocky deal, insisting that he be the star. Which, if he didn’t do, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t know who Sylvester Stallone was today. But he mistakenly didn’t obtain any of the rights to the film, which means he hasn’t gotten paid a single dime outside of his acting fee from the billion dollar franchise.

Still, the dude has 75+ IMDB credits. How are you struggling to pay your bills?? Seems like there’s some serious money mismanagement there.

The reason I wanted to bring up Stallone is that he recently revealed that his first draft of Rocky had a different kind of Rocky. Rocky was a brute. Rocky was a tough guy. Rocky beat you up and didn’t feel bad about it. It wasn’t until a lady friend of his read the script and cried to him that she hated Rocky because of how mean he was, that Stallone decided to change the character into the more lovable iconic character we know today.

His very first change, which was actually suggested by the friend, was that instead of beating up the guy who couldn’t pay his loan, he let him go. The guy even offers Rocky his coat to help pay but Rocky lets him keep it. From there, Stallone just paid more attention to how Rocky acted. He wanted him to be sweeter instead of meaner. As a result, an iconic character was created.

I wanted to highlight this because there’s this erroneous belief that you win “screenwriting street cred” by creating an unlikable character. But in this case, it is literally the thing that would’ve sent this movie down a path where we never would’ve heard of it, versus what it became, which is a billion dollar franchise.

And when we talk about likability, it doesn’t have to be like in Adam Sandler movies where the ten-cent screenwriters he uses have his character save 20 lives before he’s even reached the inciting incident to MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE you love him. With Rocky, he’s just an understated nice guy who cares about people. He’s not over the top about it. That’s just who he is.

Remember that going forward. You don’t need to have your character save the world for us to like him. He can just be nice! It’s not complicated.

Shifting focus from the movie world over to the TV world, I stumbled upon the latest trailer for a Marvel TV show. It’s a show called, “Echo.” Before I get into my thoughts on the trailer, I know one of the writers on Echo (who’s an AWESOME writer by the way – one of my favorite unknown writers out there). I am not blaming him or any other writer who gets hired to write a Marvel show. I would cash that same check in a heartbeat.

My problem is more with the state of TV in general. Cause when I saw this trailer, I didn’t feel anything. There’s a woman. She had a tough childhood. Now she’s some sort of fighter as an adult. There’s an intensity behind the presentation of her story and it looks totally fine. There’s nothing wrong with this show at all. But it doesn’t stand out in any way. It doesn’t MAKE ME WANT TO WATCH IT.

Echo is a symbol for where the TV industry is today. We’ve gotten to the point where it’s nearly impossible to stand out from the pack. If Marvel, which can afford to put 100 million dollars behind a show like this, can’t get anyone excited about watching it, where are we? We are in the most saturated TV market ever where every show feels the same in the sense that there’s nothing exceptional enough that you actually label it a must-watch.

This begs the question: How do you write a TV pilot in 2023 that stands out? Is it even possible?

As far as I can tell, there are several show-types that get interest. The most prominent are the IP shows that have passionate fan bases. I’m talking Wednesday on Netflix or The Last of Us on HBO. These are useless to aspiring screenwriters, though, because we don’t have access to those properties.

Then you have the high-concept stuff, like Squid Game, Yellow Jackets, or Stranger Things. These are super-expensive but, if you can come up with one, they’re great because they’re the only ideas that can compete with those IP properties. Unfortunately, their cost scares a lot of potential suitors away.

And, finally, you have the word-of-mouth shows, the shows that become hits because of how incredibly well-written they are. I’m talking about the White Lotuses, the Successions, and the Bears. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to strategize around writing one of the greatest shows ever. So it’s yet another arrow we can’t add to our quiver.

But there is one final category which, I believe, is the one that best gives an aspiring screenwriter a shot at writing a show that stands out. And I call it, “The Voice Show.” No, I’m not talking about spinning chairs and overly charming country singers and golden tickets. I’m talking about a show that demonstrates your unique voice. Some recent examples would be Fleabag, Euphoria, Atlanta, Severance, and Beef.

There’s something unmistakably unique when you read these pilots and it’s not as difficult to pull off as you may think. Having a distinctive voice boils down to identifying what it is about how you see the world that’s unique and leaning into that as aggressively as possible. If I’m a Korean-American man who suffers from anger issues, that’s a great starting point for leaning into my voice. Which is how “Beef” was conceived. That show is less about the story than it is about its creator. And how that creator, Lee Sung Jin, sees the world.

The second ingredient to writing one of these shows is to be weird. To be awkward. It’s fine to cover your everyday existence in these shows. You just can’t do it in an expected fashion. Every interaction Fleabag gets into in her show is awkward. There’s one point where she’s in a job interview and inadvertently propositions the interviewer, then is forced to backtrack. We’re all weirdos deep down. We have weird thoughts. We get in weird situations. LEAN INTO THAT WEIRD. That’s how you’re going to make your pages read different from everyone else’s.

The third ingredient to these shows is to take from your own life. You should be using your own life to power all of your writing, of course. But it’s especially important in this type of script because one of the easiest ways to stand out is to chronicle things that nobody else has seen before. And since your unique experiences contain a myriad of specific moments, you want to mine those moments as much as possible. In Fleabag, that heartbreaking Phoebe Waller-Bridge miscarriage dinner with her sister was, supposedly, based on real life with someone she knew.

The final ingredient to writing these shows is to be achingly truthful. When you’re writing big Hollywood movies, you’re often a slave to the plot. You have to have that big twist at the midpoint for example, so you dance around in your mind for a few days until you come up with that twist. You don’t do that here. You lean into the truth. If a character in the throes of drug addiction is confronted by her friends and family, you better have that drug-addicted character act truthfully. That approach led to one of the best episodes of Euphoria when Rue was confronted and she did what any addict would do in that moment. She RAN.

There has to be an element of rawness and realness on the page to truly stand out from the pack. And, unlike movies, which work better within the construct of sexy concepts, TV is more about character and, therefore, more conducive to this sort of writing. By the way, I’m not saying you can’t succeed by writing the next CSI or the next Stranger Things. All I’m saying is that if you want to write something that has the best chance at standing out from all the other scripts that these production houses and studios read? The Voice Script is the number one way to go.

Do you have one in you?

You may not know it yet.

But the movie industry is shifting radically right in front of our eyes.

This recent month has been a particularly shaky chapter in the ongoing seismic shift, as the past, present, and future are, like a big-budget movie, all colliding.

Let’s start with the past.

Black Panther 2 just limped over 400 million domestic this weekend. Next week it’s going to lose all its screens to Avatar 2. Which means it’s not going to earn that much more money. 400 million sounds like a lot… until you point out that the first movie made 700.

There’s a bigger issue here, though. Which is that Marvel Phase 4 was a bust, and BP2 the exclamation point. The quality of the movies in this past phase has gone down dramatically. This isn’t just my opinion. Go check out the ratings for the films over on Rotten Tomatoes. All the recent movies – Black Widow, Dr. Strange 2, Love and Thunder, Eternals – find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings.

While there is no one thing that has caused this, something I suspect is having a bigger influence on the movies than people realize, is the special effects. All of the special effects in these movies look exactly the same. Go watch the trailer for Guardians 3 and then Ant-Man 3, and tell me the movies don’t look exactly the same.

From what I understand – and somebody can correct me if I’m wrong – all the Marvel special effects are done separate from the director’s vision and are created by Marvel’s special effects team.

This means that directors are not getting to direct the most important scenes in their movies. That’s left to the special effects team. And those guys don’t have the level of creative vision that movie directors do. So, naturally, everything looks uninspired and samey.

This is a big deal because Marvel has been the only thing holding up the movie industry. Nobody’s going out to see movies that aren’t Marvel. So if Marvel doesn’t figure how to inject some life back into their films, we’re either going to have a dead industry or a wide open gap for some visionary to come in and fill it with a new direction for theatrical film.

That brings us to the present and the upheaval that’s going on with Marvel’s main competitor, DC.

James Gunn has taken over DC and he just made a huge controversial decision by axing Wonder Woman 3. Let’s take a second to acknowledge just hot brutal this town can be. One second, Patty Jenkins burst onto the scene with the unexpectedly fun Wonder Woman, whose success she uses to nab a Star Wars movie. Then, three years later, she’s been kicked off both the Star Wars and Wonder Woman franchises. That’s how quickly things can change here! You’re never safe!

Back to Gunn, who is making some tough choices due to the fact that DC has been a mess from the start. This whole weird decision to fractionate the franchise and create separate pockets of movies that don’t have anything to do with each other – it was a bizarre strategy. Gunn wants to unify everything and I, along with the rest of the fan base, say “Thank God.”

But now he’s got some tough decisions to make because what do you do with Batman? On the one hand, Reeves’ film did pretty well. On the other, you want to start with a fresh slate. If you bring anything from the past regime into the present, you risk bringing that faulty blueprint with you. You probably need to start from zero. But there’s enough Hollywood politics going on that this decision won’t be easy for Gunn. He doesn’t want to alienate the entire industry. So it’ll be interesting to see what he does.

In my opinion, everything starts with a good Superman movie. If you get that right, you can build off it. Go back to Superman’s roots. Don’t make him dark and mysterious like Batman. Make him like Superman. Fun. Optimistic. Kind. Fights for good. And then create a situation that makes it hard for him to be all those things. That’s Screenwriting 101. And as much as I love JJ Abrams, I’m begging Gunn to axe his Superman project. The last thing we need is some message Superman movie. We need to focus on making a GOOD Superman movie.

That brings us over to a topic I’m uncomfortably familiar with, which is the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars is on the cusp of going through a revolution of its own with the return of Bog Iger as Disney president. We know Iger, like Gunn, is rethinking his company’s strategy. And that could mean finally getting rid of Kathleen Kennedy, the current head of Lucasfilm.

I know this – people can say they love Andor all they want. Nobody’s watching the show. It’s not just absent from the Top 10 streaming shows. It’s absent from the Top 10 ORIGINALS streaming shows. That’s brutal. That means nobody’s watching this thing.

Luna’s ubiquitous expression would come to be known as “The Scowl of Boredom.”

And it’s very damning for Kennedy. Because it shows that she can’t get the fun Star Wars stuff right (Kenobi) and now she can’t get the serious stuff right. She’s never understood Star Wars. And she’s finally on the verge of killing it. The only thing holding up Star Wars at the moment is The Mandalorian. You might even go a step further and say the only thing holding up the franchise is Baby Yoda. That should be terrifying for Star Wars fans. Cause as much I love Baby Yoda, his character doesn’t have the weight to hold up an entire franchise.

Iger probably has a few more important things to take care of before he gets to Star Wars. But when he does, I pray that he cannonballs onto the reset button and gets somebody in there who understands Star Wars and cares only about one thing – making great Star Wars content.

Finally, we have the future. And the future starts next weekend with the release of Avatar 2. We – as in we the industry – need this movie to do gangbusters. Cause, right now, the box office is in flux. It hasn’t proven that it can get back to pre-pandemic numbers. If there ever was a movie that could change that, and also spring us into 2023 with optimism, it’s Avatar 2.

I know I’m going to be there Day 1, first showing, giant tub of popcorn on my belly. Okay, maybe I don’t eat popcorn. But spiritually, I’ll have a giant tub of popcorn. And I’m going to be rooting for this movie to be amazing and bring everyone back to the theater. Because Avatar is bringing something back that we haven’t had for a long time, which is a UNIQUE EVENT.

We get a new Star Wars show every month. We get a new Marvel movie every week. We don’t see these things as special anymore. But Avatar is special. The last one was 13 years ago. Not only that. But Cameron has SLAVED over this thing. Every single frame is going to be perfect.

Do we still need a good script for it all to matter? Yes. But you can’t say Cameron hasn’t done the work. He wrote out 800 pages of notes for the overarching story and disseminated them between a team of five writers who then went off to write the scripts. And, unlike Marvel, and the rest of Hollywood, Cameron didn’t start shooting until the scripts were ready. So whatever story we get, it won’t be through lack of effort.

I also think that if Avatar 2 does well, it will change the industry. Cause Avatar doesn’t fit the current model of making movies. So if it’s good and if it kills at the box office, maybe the industry starts trying to make some new original franchises, and does so by working on them for years as opposed to 18 months. Make the movie great, not decent.

I’m so pumped for this film. I’m bursting at the seams. Just five days left. It’s going to be so cool!

What’s that old saying?

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?

No. That’s not it.

The grass is always greener on the other side?

Maybe.

I’m trying to say something about why Black Adam didn’t do well at the box office.

There have been a lot of critiques of superhero movies as of late. They say that they all feel the same. They’re all lowest-common denominator entertainment. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

While there are definitely issues with Marvel and DC movies, sometimes it takes a superhero flick outside of that space to help you realize just how much better those movies are. While technically part of the DC universe, Black Adam is its own thing. And it’s so generic that nobody went to see it.

This has surprised no one except for the film’s creators.

How did they get it wrong?

We always say that the key to a successful idea is to make one tweak to the formula. Give us “the same but different.” If you spoke to The Rock or anyone working on this film, they would’ve proudly said that’s exactly what Black Adam did. The title character is a superhero who kills people. He’s not all good. That’s what makes him and this movie different!

For this reason, we should all be running out to theaters to watch this film because it’s a unique twist on the superhero formula.

But we aren’t.

Why?

In my newsletter (e-mail carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get on), I talked about the importance of telling the TRUTH as a screenwriter. If you lie to the reader, they’re done with you. Cause if the reader can’t trust that what you’re saying is real, why would they continue to subject themselves to more lies?

The Rock tells us, in the trailer, that he kills people. That he’s not good. But does anybody watching the trailer truly believe that? Do they believe that he’s bad? Not a chance.

First of all, if you were really bad, your movie wouldn’t be rated a safe and cozy PG-13. And, if you were really bad, you wouldn’t have cast The Rock in the lead role. Everybody knows that the Rock has an image to uphold. They all know that he’ll never do anything that bad. So we all know you’re lying to us.

Right there, you’re done. You’re done before we even got to the theater because we know you’re lying. If you were serious about what Black Adam was saying, you would’ve cast Tom Hardy, Christian Bale, Idris Elba, or Michael B. Jordan. You wouldn’t have cast the sweetest most caring guy in Hollywood who actively cultivates a family-friendly brand. You would’ve given the movie an R-rating. You would’ve given us a much darker film, which we would’ve seen in the trailer.

We all know The Rock is going to be The Rock in this film. So the only thing you could claim as different in your movie, you neutralized with the casting. Maybe this is for the better. With James Gunn taking over DC, you get the feeling that he’s going to make a lot more Suicide Squad type movies and a lot less Black Adams.

Yet another high profile piece of fiction was also shown the exit door recently. Westworld got canceled at HBO. I hear a few people complaining about this online. How could you cancel Westworld? Pretty simple. It originally had 12 million viewers an episode. Now it has 4 million.

Maybe you can rationalize that drop with a White Lotus budget. But you can’t rationalize it with a Westworld budget.

Look, I’ve said this a dozen times already. You could see Westworld falling apart mid first season. You could see that they didn’t really understand their mythology. And every episode since then has shown the mythology getting sloppier and sloppier.

It’s the same deal as the Rock telling you he’s a bad guy. We know you’re lying. We know, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, that you don’t really understand this world. And I’m not saying world-building is easy to do. It’s painstaking to flesh out mythology that can support 6-8 seasons of television.

Which is why I tell writers, you gotta do the hard work and figure this stuff out ahead of time instead of putting it off. Cause readers have a sixth sense. They can feel when you’re trying to figure things out on the fly.

One of the reasons the original Star Wars trilogy was so good was because George Lucas’s first Star Wars screenplay was 200+ pages and included all three movies. It wasn’t until people kept pestering him to cut the script down that he finally focused on just the Death Star storyline and took the Emperor stuff out.

Therefore, when it was time to make a Star Wars sequel, he already knew all the mythology surrounding that sequel because he’d written it into the original script.

Naturally, we saw what happened when Lucasfilm took the opposite approach in the most recent trilogy. They tried to figure it out on the fly and that resulted in bizarre moments such as Rey being a Palpatine, Han Solo coming back as a Force ghost, and Snoke being some sort of test tube clone.

You don’t want to f**k with mythology, guys. It’s unforgiving, particularly later in your story when your world and rule-set have to be airtight. And just to reitnerate. You can’t fool the reader. If you’re shaky on some rule or some piece of your mythology, I guarantee you the reader will feel it.

Since it’s been light offerings at the movies, I’ve been looking for films to watch at home and have been frustrated with the options. I know some of you are gung-ho about Terrifier 2 but I suspect that the only terrifying that would happen if I saw that film is how terrified I would be to admit it.

By the way, looking for films to watch is impossible in 2022. Rotten Tomatoes is hit-or-miss. Sometimes I’ll use “Decider.com.” But there’s no place I can just go and they give me three great suggestions. And even after 20 minutes of intensive research, there are always movies that these supplementary sites miss. So since you don’t have any confidence that they’re giving you all the films, you stop going to them.

I mean, did you know there was a film out with Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke – two great actors! I didn’t. But apparently there is! And it just came out this month! There’s a movie, Causeway, starring an Oscar winner, that just came out. No one’s aware it exists. There’s a movie from the former head of Pixar, the guy who invented Toy Story no less, called “Luck.” Nobody knows about it.

There’s a war movie called “All Quiet on the Western Front” that just came out a week ago. Nobody’s seen it! Just four years ago, every war movie that came out would get a giant marketing push. This one debuted with a whimper. Like a lot of content these days, I have no idea it’s out until it shows up on my Netflix home screen.

You have a film from a filmmaker WHO JUST WON AN OSCAR (for his movie “Green Book”) called “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” You could take a bullhorn to the intersection of Hollywood and Highland and ask if anyone knows about the film. They’d all tell you they have no idea what you’re talking about.

Granted, some of these movies aren’t good or aren’t made for broad appeal. But you’ve got stuff like 13 Lives, which is a great movie on Amazon Prime, that is just sitting there in digital obscurity. You’d have to look for it to find it. But since no one knows it exists, you don’t even know to look for it in the first place!

This is a growing trend and something I’m worried about. I suspect that the years of 2019 to 2026 or 7 are going to be known as the Graveyard Streaming Years in Hollywood. All of this content is being made that immediately disappears. Is that not devastating?

There’s a show right now called Shantaram, which is based on a novel that sold six million copies. It’s got a legit lead actor in Charlie Hunnam. And it’s got insane production value, as it’s shot on location in Mumbai. Five years ago, this show would’ve had an insane marketing campaign. There would be so much awareness of it. Yet nobody seems interested in letting you know the show exists. Including Apple, who made it!

Lou, Blonde, Day Shift, Senior Year, Rosaline, a Fletch movie, Outer Range, Tokyo Vice, The Sandman, Maid, Black Summer. These are only recent shows or movies that have come out and that you’ve never seen because nobody’s told you they exist. They have been banished to digital purgatory. It’s more terrifying than Terrifier 2.

I almost feel like there should be an entertainment version of the SEC that makes sure that films and shows get a minimum amount of exposure so that people know they exist because it doesn’t make sense to spend 100 million on something and let it die on a below-the-fold 4th line of suggestions on your streamer’s home screen.

We shouldn’t be feeling like we’re all missing stuff just because it’s not being marketed properly. I don’t know if anybody else feels this way but I certainly do.

The good news is, we’ve got a big one next week. In fact, we’ve got tons of big movies coming our way. This is one of the best times of the year for film buffs. I’m curious how they’re going to balance emotion with entertainment in Black Panther 2. If they go too heavy on Boseman’s death, the movie might be a sad experience. I still want to have fun here. But this film is coming at just the right time. We need something big that everyone is talking about. Those releases unify the movie-going public. I’ll definitely be reviewing it Monday.

In the meantime, what the heck should I watch???

It is 6pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 1, as I am posting this. That means you have exactly SIX HOURS to get your first act in for my First Act Contest (11:59pm Pacific Time!). I’d love to see you enter so hurry up and finish!

Okay, it looks like my review of Everything Everywhere All At Once created a cosmic level of interest about the film as everybody rushed to the theater and, in a first since the pandemic began, a wide release film made MORE money than its previous weekend, taking in 5 million dollars. The film has now grossed 35 mil, which is HUUUUUGE for an indie film. Go out and see it if you haven’t already.

I don’t think “Everything” is going to pull off that feat two weekends in a row, unfortunately, as this Friday we get our first giant release of the summer, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. I have to give it to Marvel. I was planning on skipping this one. Despite enjoying the first film, this one felt like small potatoes compared to the recently released Batman and Spider-Man movies.

But now there are supposed to be all these cameos and darn it if I’m not a sucker for superhero cameos! Marvel is so smart. This is exactly what they used to do in their comics and they’re bringing it to the movies and gosh golly I can’t lie. It’s working!

But let’s be honest. What pushed me over the edge was the Avatar 2 trailer. Smart on both Disney’s and Cameron’s part to keep the trailer a theaters-only experience. I know it’s going to piss off the Gen-Zs and the Gen-YYs because they’ve never had to go to a theater to see anything in their lives, especially movies. But this movie is going to be a mega-event so you want to treat it that way from the start: Avatar 2 is a THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE.

I’m surprised, however, to hear people throwing shade at Cameron. They say nobody cares about Avatar anymore. They say it’s become a joke. Let me educate you people really fast: NEVER EVER DOUBT JAMES CAMERON. Ever. You lose every time.

Cameron had the entire Hollywood trade industry and Los Angeles media doing everything in their power to sink his Titanic production. Every day they gleefully tapped away on their IBM typewriters, betting it wouldn’t just be a failed movie, but that it would actually take down 20th Century Fox, the studio itself!

The funny thing is that they weren’t just wrong. They were as wrong as you could possibly be. They predicted it would be the biggest bomb in history and it literally became the biggest hit in history.

Flash-forward to Avatar and the infamous footage-screening incident where journalists crowed that they’d just watched a live-action adaptation of The Smurfs. Yeah, um, didn’t turn out too well you guys either, huh, as I’m pretty sure Avatar is, currently, the biggest box office hit of all time. Not even a film with all the superheroes in the world could dethrone it.

Probably the biggest surprise about Avatar 2 is that it’s actually coming out THIS YEAR. December 16th. It’s happening. An actual Avatar 2 movie is going to be available. Wow.

That’s not to say I don’t have questions. I didn’t think any of the underwater scenes in Aquaman looked very good. To set an entire movie underwater… I’m curious how that’s going to look visually and if the viewer is going to tire of it. Because moving around in water is slower, right? So is everyone going to look like they’re moving in slow motion the whole movie?

Or is there going to be a Gungan-like underwater city that people and Na’vi can walk around in?

I guess I’m going to defer to myself here. NEVER EVER DOUBT JAMES CAMERON. We’ll leave it at that for now. But I’ll surely have more to report to you next Monday.

The other big news in the industry is what’s happening at Netflix. The honeymoon is definitely over. We saw the first tangible evidence of that last week when they cancelled one of their high-profile (and high budget) shows, Space Force.

From a screenwriting perspective, the tale of Space Force is a fascinating one. Because, if you remember, the White House announced its assembling of the real Space Force on a Monday. And then two days later, Greg Daniels announces a deal with Netflix for a Space Force show.

The rumor is that Greg and Steve Carrell bumped into each other in the Netflix lobby, talked about the Space Force news like everyone else was doing at the time, mentioned how it would be funny if that was a show, then decided to go up and pitch it to the Netflix execs right then and there. It was famously bought right away, with Carell getting a million an episode, and off they went to make it.

I fault both parties here but I fault Daniels and Carrell more because they’re the ones who know that writing is hard and that ideas need incubation periods. They need to be tested. They need to feel just as exciting in a month as they did on the first day. And they need to be more than just an idea.

Space Force is one of those classic bad ideas disguised as a good idea. For any idea to be good, it can’t just sound good. There has to be a plan of execution in place. You have to see if the story has legs beyond the smile you get after hearing it.

Another classic bad idea disguised as a good idea was Flatliners. It’s a great high-concept pitch. A group of medical students try to find out what lies beyond life by killing (flatlining) themselves. Unfortunately, there’s nothing beyond that pitch. You flatline yourself and… what? No matter what you come up with, it’s stupid.

Space Force never had legs. And that’s because they never thought about the legs when they pitched it. If you haven’t seen this show – I mean wow – it’s bad. I’m talking really really horrible. I’m talking aggressively unfunny. The biggest problem with it is that they had no idea what to do with Carrell’s character. It was unclear who he was or what was supposed to be funny about him.

The reason The Office was such a great show is because it was built on the perfect character – a boss who badly wanted to be liked by his employees. 90% of the jokes were built around that premise. Space Force didn’t have a clear comedic angle for its hero so there were no jokes to build around him. This left the writers languishing, looking for jokes inside every corner and behind every crevice they could find, which is why the humor felt so desperate.

On top of that, it’s not clear what the show even is. It’s supposed to be parodying the real Space Force, except nobody’s heard anything about the real Space Force since the week it was introduced, which means the show is just making up a fictional random version of Space Force based on nothing. It’s hard to imagine people who’ve had as much success as Daniels and Carrell making a mistake this big.

Luckily, there is a lesson for screenwriters everywhere to take from this: Don’t rush an idea. Don’t spend three months writing a screenplay for an idea you just came up with yesterday. You need time to see if you’re still excited about the idea a month from now. And you need time to flesh the idea out. See if there’s an actual story to tell.

The cancellation of Space Force is symbolic. For years now, Netflix has been flexing their might to everyone, saying, “We have so much more money than you, we don’t care if 100 million dollar investments don’t work out.” They even went a step further with the second season of Space Force and said, “We’re even going to renew a 100 million dollar show THAT NO ONE IS WATCHING! That’s how powerful we are!”

To finally put the kibosh on Space Force is Netflix finally admitting, “Our model does not work.” But I’d say its cancellation signifies something even worse. One of the big reasons everyone wanted to work at Netflix in the first place is that they let you do your thing without interference. There was no development. No notes. It was just: Go mad!

But what they didn’t realize by doing this was that they were establishing a reputation as a place you didn’t need to bring your quality ideas to. Once you establish that a place says yes to whatever you think up, regardless of quality, you get situations like two people in the lobby coming up with an idea on the spot and actually believing they can sell it to you ten minutes later.

Since they know nobody is going to check their shit later on during development, they know they can literally get away with pitching an idea that has zero legs, hoping they’ll be able to “figure it out” later. Which is exactly what Space Force feels like when you watch it. It feels like everyone, from the writers to the actors, is desperately trying to figure out what the show is. That always happens on some level. But it happens way less when a show has been through the development ringer and all the show’s worst qualities have been stripped away.

The industry is struggling to understand what all of this means. Agents, creators, and writers are not happy because the Netflix gravy train has been shifted over to a maintenance track. Just about everyone else, though, is cheering as loud as they can. Netflix is seen by rivals as pure evil and this giant hiccup confirms what many of them believed, which is that Netflix has zero IP and, so, sooner or later, that would catch up to them, and, in the process, confirm that the legacy studios aren’t the dinosaurs they were assumed to be.

I’m not sure what to make of this either. I mean, am I really all that thrilled that the side that gave us Sonic 2: Tails and Sonic Unite won a round? Am I really all that thrilled that Netflix has less money for writers? Not really.

But as a spectator, I’m definitely curious what happens next. We shall see!