Good screenwriting protagonists, Marvel eliminates flashbacks, and Star Wars leaps headfirst into the Sarlacc Pit
I believe there’s a good screenwriting lesson to take from this weekend at the box office.
Both Heart of the Beast and Primetime did solid, with 20 million bucks each. But, for screenwriting success, it actually doesn’t start at how your movie performs at the box office.
The real success of a screenwriter is getting either a big actor or a big director to attach themselves to your project, because it shows that you write material that the best of the best in the industry want to be involved in.
What’s the connection between Heart of the Beast and Primetime?
Main characters that possess WEIGHT. Main characters that move the needle.
Chris Hansen in Primetime is bizarre, complicated, and ambitious. There are angles to play here. Contradictions. Weirdness. Ego. Drive. It’s not a surprise that one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood wanted to play him.
Heart of the Beast’s main character also has weight. But the weight is simpler: He’s ACTIVE. He is one of the most active characters you will ever see onscreen. Actors love active characters and audiences love active characters. A dude doing shit. Trying shit. Making decisions. Moving moving moving. It is very hard to make a boring character who is extremely active.
So, when you’re writing your next screenplay, keep that in mind.
And it builds some irony into today’s Mish-Mash Monday because I now want to move into the anti-main-character. I’m talking about the kings of the ensemble, gigantic franchises Marvel and Star Wars.
Avengers: Doomsday is coming.
And Kevin Feige wants to make sure that in the weeks leading up to that film, you forget all of the mistakes he’s made in the last five years.
That’s led him to one of the best choices he’s made in a while. Which is re-releasing Avengers Endgame. You know how a toxic ex can weasel their way back into your life by becoming that sweet nice version of themselves you fell in love with? They immediately make you forget all the bad times. That’s what Kevin Feige is doing here.
But those bad times were pretty damn toxic.
The Marvels.
Brave New World.
Black Widow.
Dare I say it? The Eternals!
But if I’m being honest, he deserved it. For five years there, you placed diversity as the number one determining factor for making a movie. And it nearly destroyed your franchise, which, before that decision, was more bulletproof than the Incredible Hulk.
Making a good movie is almost impossible. There are too many things working against you. Your number one priority should always be: come up with a great concept and then write a great script. If you try to go about it in any other way, you’re going to fail.
The low point was The Marvels. There may not be a project in Hollywood history that put the blinders on the people working at a studio more than that one. That they thought it was a good idea is so far beyond any rational argument I could make for it.
And to Marvel’s credit, after that movie, they did some soul-searching. Namely: Are we making this movie because we genuinely think it’s going to be good and people are going to love it? Or are we making it so the New York Times pats us on the back? The Marvels is probably why Blade got canceled.
Speaking of mega-franchises, did anybody hear this Star Wars news over the weekend?
That Jon Watts is going to direct a Rey Skywalker trilogy written by Simon Kinberg?
Let me start off by saying, do you remember when Star Wars directing announcements were exciting?! JJ Abrams at the height of his powers directing. Taika Waititi at the height of his powers directing. Guillermo del Toro directing a Jabba the Hutt movie. The Daniels eyeing a Star Wars movie. Josh Trank, when he was the hottest young director in Hollywood, directing a Boba Fett movie.
Now we have Jon Watts.
And I have no issues with Jon Watts. Having directed three Spider-Man movies, he certainly understands spectacle. But has Jon Watts ever gotten anybody excited that he’s attached to a project? I certainly haven’t ever met anyone who’s uttered the words, “Holy shit. Jon Watts is directing!”
Jon Watts who, by the way, has already directed Star Wars material, as he created the Disney Plus series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. The show was cute. It weakened as it went on. And it left almost no cultural impact. So you’re bringing in someone whose contributions aren’t going to feel fresh and whose general impact on Star Wars we already know. That’s not how you build excitement for a movie. It’s like me saying, “I’m investing in this exciting new restaurant that’s going to blow everyone away with its fresh take on food. The chef? Guy Fieri!”
But he’s not even the least interesting thing about this new trilogy. Simon Kinberg is writing the thing! Simon Kinberg, when he is at his BEST, is an average screenwriter. And newsflash, he’s rarely at his best. His work got so spotty that the guy hasn’t had a produced feature film credit since 2019. And that was Dark Phoenix. Before that was X-Men: Apocalypse. Before that was the 2015 version of Fantastic Four. That’s the one that everybody calls the worst superhero movie ever made.
The Star Wars franchise is Princess Leia in A New Hope. It is in dire need of saving.
Are we really betting that Simon Kinberg is our Luke Skywalker? Because I’m more inclined to call him Bib Fortuna.
I want you to think about this for a second because it really does show you just how misguided Lucasfilm has become. They want to create a new $750 million trilogy that will span six years. And after everything that’s gone wrong over the past decade, the three people they’re betting on to put Star Wars back on the map are Jon Watts, Simon Kinberg, and Daisy Ridley.
Really?
That’s the team??
That’s your billion-dollar plan to make Star Wars feel like STAR WARS again???
How insane are the people over there if anyone even remotely thinks that a single Star Wars fan will get excited about this? You can already see the creative board meetings. “And then we’ll bring Mark Hamill in as a force ghost!!!” And they’ll all clap and think they’re genius.
They’ve so lost the plot over there that it’s not even fun to make fun of them anymore.
If there’s any good news to this at all, it’s that I don’t believe these movies have any chance at getting made. Everything about the project seems suspicious.
Simon Kinberg has supposedly been working on this trilogy since 2019. So he’s been writing a Star Wars trilogy for 8 years despite the company going through major philosophical changes several times during that timespan?
Jon Watts has been in the Lucasfilm fold for three-plus years, already produced a show, and they’ve only just now decided he’s going to direct this film?
One of Lucasfilm’s longest in-development projects has been the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy Star Wars film, which oddly also centers around Rey.
David Filoni, who’s now in charge of Lucasfilm, has never expressed any overt like for the character of Rey. You can hear him wax poetic about 30 different Star Wars characters. But Rey is not one of them. So he’s now hitched his ride to a Rey trilogy??
Everyone knows that the direction of Star Wars will very much be formulated by how the public receives next summer’s Ryan Gosling Star Wars film, Starfighter. If that movie does well, they’ll build the future of Star Wars around it. If it doesn’t, they’ll likely scrap everything in development and rethink their strategy.
And here’s the biggest kicker of all: THE MOVIE HAS NOT BEEN GREENLIT. They’ve been burying that tidbit in the articles in order to make the announcement look like a bigger deal. But if I had to make a bet, Jon Watts has been attached to this film since Skeleton Crew and some reporter finally sniffed that attachment out and now it’s being packaged as recent news.
Star Wars fans are starving for great Star Wars. But they’re not going to get it until a competent person is placed in charge of Lucasfilm, they start picking A-list directing and screenwriting talent as opposed to B and C level. And they do Pixar levels of story development where they put their scripts through the ringer until they become great.
This new trilogy, with this level of talent attached, would absolutely put the nail in the coffin of the Star Wars franchise.
