Hollywood’s crusade to make it impossible to know when and where any TV show or movie is debuting continues. Apparently, Army of the Dead came out this weekend. If you’re like me, you were under the impression that Army of the Dead was a Netflix movie. You were also under the impression that Netflix movies debut on… Netflix. But not Army of the Dead, apparently. Army of the Dead debuted in theaters instead of on the service that produced it. Confused? When they said ‘streaming wars’ I didn’t know that the war was against us.
HBO Max isn’t doing much better. I was shocked when I opened the app this weekend and saw… “Those Who Wish Me Dead.” I had no indication that this movie was coming out. It appeared out of nowhere, as if by magic. Some people may think this is cool. But there’s a psychological component to dropping movies on audiences out of nowhere. They think the movie must be bad because they’ve been conditioned to believe that big important movies are hyped up beforehand.
Netflix, which drops movies out of nowhere all the time, arguably changed this belief. But now Netflix is debuting movies in theaters! So what the hell is going on?? And as long as I’m ranting about streaming, I finally canceled my Apple TV+ subscription. They didn’t have a single show or movie I’d rate above a “wasn’t for me.” The whole reason I got the subscription was for that cool looking sci-fi show, Foundation. It’s been two years and I’m still waiting for the first episode!
Luckily, we’re finally about to get real movies back. In two weeks, A Quiet Place 2 hits theaters. I’m definitely going to see that. And then a week later, I believe, Fast and Furious 9 drops. So I’ll be seeing that as well. I can’t remember the last time I went to the theater two consecutive weeks in a row. I can’t wait!
About a week ago, I told you guys that, in June, the CIA is going to be releasing a lot of UFO documents. The reason this is happening, strangely enough, is that some congressman slipped it into the last Covid Relief bill that the government had to do this. Not sure what aliens have to do with Covid but I’ll take it.
The CIA releases documents like this every few years and they’re always disappointing as they cover peripheral mundane UFO events that have zero value to the community. For example, in 1978, Popular Mechanics may have called the government for a question about a UFO article they were going to run. So the CIA releases the letter that the government official wrote to their boss. “Hey, Popular Mechanics wants us to comment on some UFO story. Would you like to get back to them or should I?” It’s maddening how unimportant the documents they choose to release are.
However, the rumor is that, this time, they’re going to be a little more forthright – that there may be a couple of videos that are better than anything we’ve seen before. I’ll believe it when I see it because stuff like the video below aren’t good enough.
This is the current video everyone’s jazzed about. But come on. It’s a black dot. I undertand that this was taken in the dead of night and the only way to record it was with infrared. But everybody seems to think it’s amazing that the UFO goes into the water. WOOOOWWWWWWW! It went it to the water!? Wow. I’ve never seen any piece of machinery fall into water before. Wow. Stuff like this isn’t going to cut it if UFOs are ever truly going to cross into the mainstream. So I’m hoping they release something good for once.
The reason I bring up UFOs is because HBO Max just optioned Leslie Kean’s bestselling non-fiction book, “UFOS,” for Bryce Kass to script. Kass’s credits are kind of lean. But he was hired by George Clooney to adapt the Norwegian film, Pioneer, about a man working on an oil pipeline investigating his brother’s death.
I’ve read “UFOs.” Kean takes a neutral look at a handful of the most famous UFO cases, such as the case of an Irani Air Force pilot who engaged in a dogfight with a UFO. One of the things that’s maddening about the UFO field is the way skeptics dismiss these cases without knowing anything about them. Skeptics literally told a man who was in a dogfight with an unknown craft that he had mistaken Jupiter (as in the planet 500 million miles away) for the craft. These guys will jump through any hoop to avoid having to accept the reality of UFOs. But I digress.
I have no doubt that this project sold because of the upcoming CIA document release. And I think the rest of the year, for the same reason, will lead to a hotbed of UFO and alien spec sales. Which is a reminder that the SCRIPTSHADOW SCI-FI SHOWDOWN deadline is September 16th. I’ll release more information about that after Comedy Showdown is over. The Comedy Showdown deadline, for those who don’t know, is June 17th and you can find out how to enter here.
A few other sales of note, recently. Tyler Marceca, he of The Disciple Program fame, just sold a script called Stay Frosty for over a million bucks!!!! Here’s the premise: “After miraculously surviving a bullet to the head, a man has to figure out who wants him dead and why. He needs to stop the assassin while still making it back home in time to spend Christmas with his son.” Once Wahlberg abandoned Disciple Program, the script didn’t have anyone to champion it and so Tyler basically had to start his career over again. Kudos to him for sticking with it. And he’s got one of the hottest directors in town directing, Sam Hargrave. Sweet.
Another big sale was the spec script “Valor.” Hey, look at spec scripts making a comeback! This one sold to Amazon. Here’s the premise: “After a marauding warrior from a popular video game dies in a freak accident, he is reincarnated in our world and discovers the god he’s always worshipped turns out to be a 13-year-old Asian kid from New Jersey adjusting to life with a single parent.” Screenwriters Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer aren’t totally new to the game. They made a little movie called “Plus One,” about a couple of friends who agree to be each other’s plus ones at every wedding they’re invited to that summer. The movie ended up being a breakout hit on the indie scene, nearly nabbing a 90% on RT.
And finally, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have optioned the book The Premonition, by Michael Lewis, about some scientists who warned everyone of a coming pandemic but were ignored. If Lewis’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the author of another “doomsday is coming” book, The Big Short.
Hollywood doesn’t really know what to do with the pandemic from a story perspective. There have been a few attempts to mine the pandemic for movies that did not turn out well. I think focusing on the lead up to the pandemic is probably a better way to go. So maybe this will work.
But here’s my issue with doomsday sayers. You can find 500 people in any field right now who are warning you that the end of that field is coming. So if you just go off the numbers, there are always going to be people who ‘warned’ us something was coming after it comes. What was different about The Big Short was that you didn’t just have a guy warning everyone about the housing crisis coming. He was so sure of it that he actually bet all the money he had on it. That’s how they found him. They followed the money to figure out who really knew this was coming.
I’m guessing there are millions of people who were trying to tell everyone that a pandemic was on its way. So I’m skeptical of this movie. But that’s Hollywood. Hollywood refuses to see something big and believe that a movie can’t be made out of it. Even if logic tells you that the last thing anybody is going to want to watch after a pandemic is more pandemic.
“Hey Debbie. What are you doing tonight?”
“Going out to a bar and celebrating the ability to socialize and interact with the world again.”
“What would you say about seeing a serious pandemic movie instead?”
“Sounds great.”
One FINAL thing. There’s going to be no Rewrite Article this week. Just keep rewriting. You should be on the third quarter of your comedy rewrite (pages 50-75). You’ve got about a month left so no slowing down! Write every day no matter how bad you feel. That’s how you make it a habit. That’s how you finish scripts. Good luck! :)
