Don’t worry. I give you five genres that you, as a spec screenwriter, can still write that get released in movie theaters!
A question I get asked a lot is, “How does a good script become a bad movie?” The prevailing thought is that if it’s on the page, all you have to do is point the camera and get out of the way. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that. From actor rewrites to budgetary rewrites to a director shifting the script’s tone to miscasting… a lot can happen between great script and cameras rolling.
I bring this up because I loved the Ambulance script by Chris Fedak. It was such a fun ride with all these cool twists. Most action films are pretty bland, plot-wise. This one was constructed in such a clever way. So I was rooting for the movie. However, it did not do well this weekend, not even breaking 10 million at the box office.
That is not to say Ambulance is a bad movie. I don’t know if it is or isn’t. It seems to be getting good reviews for a Michael Bay film. But its failure at the box office is concerning considering that “theatrical” has become such an unknown in 2022. It feels like every movie’s success or failure is redefining the box office on the fly.
The first thing we have to take into account is streaming’s rise and theatrical’s fall during the pandemic, and how that reset audience’s expectations in regards to what they would and wouldn’t pay for. I lump both those in together because if they hadn’t happened at the same time, I believe theatrical would’ve weathered the storm. But because the streaming wars forced streamers to come up with bigger and better product to jack up those subscription numbers, along with people getting used to not going to the movies, it created a perfect storm scenario for a box office apocalypse.
I think people looked at “Ambulance” and they said, “Hey wait a minute. Didn’t I just see that action movie on Netflix for free that had a bigger budget and a bigger star in “Extraction?” Once you give people something bigger for “free,” they no longer value paying for it. I mean, hell, we even got a bigger budget Michael Bay movie on Netflix not too long ago, “6 Underground.” So why would you go to the movies and pay for a Michael Bay movie?
Another problem is the budget. The movie only cost 40 million dollars. Considering that the average Bay movie cost north of 200 million, the movie couldn’t help but look “Bay-light.” Why am I going to the movies to check out a small film by a filmmaker who makes big movies? Or, if that question seems too industry-coded, look at it from the average moviegoer’s POV. They see a trailer for a movie called “Ambulance” and all it contains is a bunch of shots of an ambulance car chase and it’s kind of like, “So what would normally be one scene in a Michael bay movie is now…… the entire movie?”
A third factor I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about is the fact that Bay’s style is starting to feel dated. The sweeping dolly shot at sunset where the actress or car is bathed in golden sunlight… it feels very 1999. You’ve got these newer action filmmakers, guys like Sam Hargrave, the Russo Brothers, Chad Stahelski, and David Leitch, who have a darker grittier more inventive style with much fresher action choreography. These guys are more interested in making you feel the visceral physicality of two men beating each other to pieces than they are making sure that every strand of those actors’ hair is in place.
This is a long way of saying, you see the Ambulance trailer and think, “What’s new here?” That’s what sucks about good scripts that don’t have their goodness baked into the concept. The goodness is in the way the story is executed. And you don’t know that unless you see the film.
What Ambulance’s failure says is that the mid-to-high range action movie may no longer be worthy of a theatrical release. Seeing as this is a screenwriting site, I’d like to discuss what this means for screenwriters and how you can adapt. Because what everyone fears is that theatrical has become, exclusively, a superhero industry. And that it’s only a matter of time before all the other genres slip down the slope into that large gargling mouth belonging to the streamers.
Let me alleviate those fears by first giving you some non superhero genres that still get theatrical releases and then giving you scripts written on spec that can still become theatrical releases. Because, as of this moment, there are still options. Let’s look at them.
NON-SUPERHERO MOVIES THAT STILL GET THEATRICAL RELEASES
Giant IP Action Movies – Fast and Furious, James Bond, Mission Impossible – With these movies, you have to give the audience a combination of 3 things – a big movie star, wall-to-wall giant set-pieces, and at least one major thing in the movie that people haven’t seen before that you can build a marketing campaign around. Mission Impossible is famous for this. They put Tom Cruise on the side of a plane while it’s taking off. To get into this space is tough because the first time you try to do it, you don’t have as much money as the established IP does. So you’re already at a disadvantage. We saw this with Uncharted. It was a boy amongst men and even though Sony put a lot of money behind the marketing, it only barely snuck into the “BIG IP ACTION MOVIE” conversation, with a 51 million dollar opening. Giant IP Action is probably the most competitive space in theatrical movies at the moment.
IP Horror – The reason horror is always going to be in the conversation is because 12-18 year olds love to be scared. And that demo, despite what some may say, is still showing up to theaters if the brand is big and exciting enough. IP horror has been a rather recent development as the Blumhouse formula made it seem like you only made a ton of horror movies for 5 million bucks each and hoped one of them broke out. But ever since The Conjuring and It, they’re sinking a lot more money into these films so that they feel more like events.
Animation Movies – Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks. These are always going to do well because they spend a ton of money and time on them. Because animation is something that can be manipulated up until the last second, they can test the sh#t out of these movies internally, figure out what’s wrong, then go back and fix them. With a regular movie, you’re sort of locked in once you finish production. Yes you can reshoot, but reshoots cost tons of money and don’t allow nearly as much flexibility as animated productions. Long story short, they don’t release these things until they know they’ll print money. That and parents want to get out of the house with their kids every once in a while and movies are one of the cheapest forms of entertainment out there.
Action-Comedy – Action Comedies are right on the brink of becoming streaming movies. I think Red Notice made the industry believe that was the direction we were headed. But as of now, if a studio loves an action-comedy idea, they’ll still release it theatrically. The more I dig into this, the more I think it might become one of the rare genres that live in both universes. Netflix may just act as a de facto studio in this case, releasing action-comedies to compete with theatrical action-comedies. Free Guy, Jungle Cruise, The Lost City, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Spy.
Biopics/True Stories/Book Adaptations – Hollywood loves to celebrate itself, and these are the three genres it does it with. Movies like House of Gucci, Spotlight, Little Women, Wolf of Wall Street. There’s a chance these could slide into the streaming universe soon but I’m not convinced it will happen. I don’t think the Academy wants all the movies it nominates to be on streaming. It should be noted that true stories can be written as spec scripts, so you could place them in that category as well. The only reason I’m hesitant to do that is because studios tend to like when you base your true story on a published work and most non-working screenwriters can’t afford to option those works. But it’s possible to find a great true period story that hasn’t been told before and just write it without any source material. If you can place on the Black List, like Spotlight did, some big people will take notice and, possibly, you get your script produced.
NON-SUPERHERO MOVIES THAT STILL GET THEATRICAL RELEASES THAT ANY SPEC SCREENWRITER CAN WRITE
Clever/Fresh Horror (A Quiet Place, Get Out) – The best bang for your buck option. Basically what you want to do here is focus on smartly written character pieces that center around family and then, for the majority of the screenplay, keep your monsters unseen. Let the horror come out of our imagination. That’s what both A Quiet Place and Get Out did, which is why they became phenomenons. Another thing about keeping these movies character-driven is that they’re cheap to make, which means more buyers. And if the idea is cool enough and you’re lucky enough to get a director who hits it out of the park, you get that big studio release. This is the genre where the most writers and directors come out of.
Guy with a Gun movies (John Wick, Nobody, Sicario, The Accountant) – This one may be confusing as I just said that mid-to-high range action movies are moving to streaming. But here’s the thing. “John Wick” is a formula studios are going to keep trying to replicate because a) the guy with a gun formula has been around forever so studios know that it works, and b) everyone outside of Disney is desperate to find new franchises and this is one of the best ways to do so because you don’t have to spend a ton of money on the first film so it’s a relatively cheap risk. Going back to Ambulance, if there’s one problem with that project, it’s that it’s not a clear “guy-with-a-gun” scenario. It’s not something you can build a franchise on. Another twist to note here is that studios have been trying to create the girl-with-a-gun genre for a while now and it just hasn’t worked. Kate, Gunpowder Milkshake, The Protege, Ava, Atomic Blonde, Proud Mary, Peppermint. I don’t know why these aren’t catching on. It could simply be that they’re bad movies. It could be that they haven’t found an “Angelina Jolie circa 2003” or “Scarlett Johansen circa 2012” actress that elevates these films. But the industry has cooled on girl-with-a-gun movies as a result. That’s not to say you shouldn’t write them. But I think the pendulum in this genre has swung back to the male side. And if you’re looking for someone to write for, Nicholas Cage is about to have a comeback moment where studios start putting him in big movies again. So start there.
Action Comedy (Free Guy, Jungle Cruise, The Lost City, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Spy) – Yes! We have a crossover here! Action-Comedy is one of the best genres that spec screenwriters can write because it’s one of the few genres that if you nail it, you get the full Hollywood treatment. You get the big stars, the big budget, the big marketing push. You could end up as one of the top 15 movies of the year with a smart concept. I just wrote in my last newsletter how the 80s and early 90s are filled with high concept movies that you can draw inspiration from. People under 35 don’t know that much about this era. So you have advantage if you’re older and know this time well. Cause these types of flicks were huge back then.
World War 2 Movies (Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, The Imitation Game, Flags of Our Fathers) – Sometimes I think the best advice I could give a new writer is to write a World War 2 script. There are just so many stories from that war and Hollywood never tires of them. They absolutely love that war. Not “love” it. But you know what I mean. And if I were you, I would look to create a contained time scenario in order to make it a really tasty spec. Someone just wrote one of these that I reviewed. I can’t remember what it was called (can any of you find it?). It was about a soldier who had to make it through a forest swarming with Nazis in a couple of hours to deliver a message or something. Something like that hits all the beats because you not only have the draw of World War 2 that Hollywood loves, but you have that tight clean exciting read by making it real-time.
Zombies/Vampires (World War Z, Zombieland, I Am Legend, upcoming Nosferatu, Let The Right One In) – I might get some pushback for this one because there hasn’t been a big zombie or vampire movie in a while. But you know what that tells me? THE NEXT WAVE OF ZOMBIE AND VAMPIRE MOVIES ARE COMING. These two genres never die, no pun intended. As is the case with every new iteration of these sub-genres, don’t bother writing them unless you a) love these movies, and b) have a fresh take on them. Cause in order to reboot a genre, you need to be the person with a new take on it. A quick concept trick on how to create “fresh takes.” If a genre has been really serious for a while, create a light/comedic take. If a genre has been really light/comedic for a while, create a serious take. That’s what Zombieland did on the heels of those Dawn of the Dead type movies and it became a phenomenon.
Bonus: Any Really Clever Premise – If you have a truly great idea or a truly ironic idea (Jurassic Park, Yesterday, Good Will Hunting, Source Code, The Hangover, Back to the Future, The Sixth Sense, Rear Window, Memento), these can get into theaters. The reason is that, when a truly great idea hits Hollywood, everyone in town gets excited about it, and they all start competing to work on it. So you end up getting an amazing director and an amazing actor and, if you do that, there’s no way they’re not releasing the movie theatrically. Since everybody thinks their idea is amazing, here’s a quick test. Send your logline to three people. If all three of them don’t say, “Oh my god, that’s an amazing idea,” it’s not an amazing idea. Or you can just come to me for a logline evaluation and I’ll tell you ($25 – carsonreeves1@gmail.com). That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. It’s just not a great idea and, therefore, it’s probably not theatrical-release worthy.
Let me be clear that there are always going to be exceptions. If you can write a script that wins over a revolutionary director like Darren Aronofsky, the Safdie Brothers, or the Daniels, yeah, you can be one of the rare lottery winners. Hell, that’s arguably what happened today. Ambulance won over Michael Bay, which means a script that normally wouldn’t get a theatrical release did. The only problem with this strategy is that you’re basically betting on the fact that one of ten directors in the world has the exact same interest as you do with your rare weird screenplay concept. If you have information on a director and know they’re looking for a specific subject matter and it just happens to be subject matter you love as well, writing that script makes more sense. But if you’re just hoping, you’re playing the lottery.
Just to be clear about today’s post, this is what you should write if you want to get a THEATRICAL RELEASE. It’s not necessarily the best way to break in. The best way to break in is, unfortunately, less glamorous and takes more time. You write a really powerful script that you’re extremely passionate about, hope to get on the Black List so that people learn your name, those people check out your script, you gain some fans, you get meetings with those fans, and you pitch them on adapting one of their projects. It’s a longer route but it’s the more common route.
I hope this helps!
REMINDER – THE FIRST ACT CONTEST DEADLINE IS MAY 1!!!
I need your title, genre, logline, anything you want me to know about the script, and, of course, a PDF of your first act. You want to send these to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line “FIRST ACT CONTEST.” The contest is 100% free.
What: The first act of your screenplay
Deadline: May 1st, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Include: title, genre, logline, extra info, a pdf of the act.
Cost: Free!
