I want to take yet another opportunity to convince the unconvinced that Wonka is a great movie. It’s REALLY good, guys. I think ALL screenwriters should watch this movie SPECIFICALLY if you like writing big-budget stories. Writing big-budget screenplays is the most unfulfilling job there is for a screenwriter because the studios don’t let you do anything. You have to stay very close to formula and any creative risk you take, they force you back towards the middle.
The only time I’ve seen studios let writers loose on 9 figure budgets was with Marvel. When Marvel was hitting a home run every time out, the development oversight got less and less rigorous. They felt the script didn’t even matter at that point. That gifted us the awesome Thor: Ragnarok. Of course, that leniency ended up doing them in because then we got The Eternals, Doctor Strange 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder, big screenplays that took lots of creative risks, many of which failed.
Wonka doesn’t take any gigantic risks but it takes all these smaller ones and knocks every single one of them out of the park. For example, a weaker screenwriter would’ve brought Wonka into town and had him stay at a random cinematically beautiful apartment while he attempted to build his chocolate empire. Good screenwriters know that there’s no conflict in that. You’re not pressuring your hero enough.
So King invents this nifty idea where Wonka gets trapped inside this evil Inn that he’s never allowed to leave. This creates a dramatic question that injects constant conflict into the story. If Wonka can never leave, how does he build his empire? The answer is he has to get creative. He has to find ways to escape. He has to find ways to get all his work done even though he’s snuck out all day. All of this creates a much more robust and active storyline where pressure is constantly being placed on the hero.
Pro Tip: The more pressure you can place on your hero, the better.
Wonka nails every single one of its subplots as well. In most of the scripts I read, the subplots are filler. You can tell that the writer doesn’t really care about them. They know they need to fill up space and, therefore, they add the requisite number of subplots to do so. Good writers don’t write subplots to fill up space. They write them because they care about them. A character subplot may not be as big as a protagonist subplot. But it can be just as fulfilling.
That’s what we get with Noodle’s storyline. It’s a story we’ve seen a million times before. A kid is searching for direction in the absence of having a mother or father. But there’s something about the way King writes where he gets us invested in these characters no matter how familiar their storylines are. Here, he makes Noodle likable in such a simple way. Noodle’s entrance into the story has her trying to warn Wonka away from this Inn. That’s the thing about likability. It’s often created within simple actions. If you have someone trying to help our hero, we’re obviously going to like them!
But it isn’t just that with Noodle. It’s finding the perfect balance between sad but not so sad that we don’t want to be around her. Cause that can happen. You create a character who’s in a bad situation in life and they’re such a downer about it that we get annoyed by them. Noodle is sad because she doesn’t have parents and she’s stuck in this Inn. But she’s still upbeat and game for doing anything exciting, which is how she forms her friendship with the more risk-taking Willy.
Go see this movie, people. It’s got like a million screenwriting lessons in it.
The other movie that’s surprising people with its longevity is Anything But You. Hollywood is DYING for the rom-com to make a comeback. They’re so cheap to make that a revival would print money for th industry. So why haven’t they made a comeback yet? Kate Hudson has a theory. She made headlines recently for saying that male actors don’t want to be in rom-coms. Rom-coms aren’t “cool.” There may be some truth to that. The only way to make these now is to identify a very particular type of actor – one who MIGHT become a star but there’s just as much of a chance that he’ll amount to nothing. You take a chance on them hoping female audiences like him enough that your movie becomes a rare hit. I’m sorry but you’re not going to get Paul Mescal or Jacob Elordi in your rom-com because they’re shooting towards stardom. They’re not interested in light and fluffy. But you might get Glen Powell. He was in the biggest movie of the year a couple of years ago, Top Gun: Maverick. He just wasn’t the star. So you take a chance on him and hope he delivers.
And it worked. Because Anyone But You has now taken in 43 million dollars. That’s A LOT for a romantic comedy in 2024. A LOT. Not only that, but its ticket sales went UP from the previous weekend (10 million). No other movie came close to that other than The Iron Claw, and for that movie it was easier cause it’s not making nearly as much money overall. Throw in a big side salad of Sydney Sweeney and you’ve got a formula for success.
As for this Night Swim movie, I have mixed feelings about it. Night Swim finished in second place this weekend, behind Wonka, with 12 million bucks. The movie will turn a profit. I mean all they had to pay for was a swimming pool, right? How much does it cost to rent a swimming pool for 2 weeks? 200 bucks a day? Times 14. 2800 bucks. That’s how much this movie cost to make – $2800. So it’s already up $11,997,200.
Here’s the thing, though. On the surface, this looks like a stupid idea. They built an entire movie around a pool. M. Night Shalayhamn could’ve taught these guys a thing or two about what happens when you do that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything has been done in horror. You have to take chances with your concepts if you have any shot at standing out. You can’t have killer dolls all the time. The nice thing about Blumhouse’s model is that you can take chances on concepts like this.
They took that shot and it’s going to make them money. It’s not going to be a hit. Blumhouse won’t be threatening the town with the prequel to this one, “Luke Warm Jacuzzi,” or a sequel, “Olympic Sized Pool Grand Reopening,” or a spinoff, “Old People With Questionable Bladder Doing Laps.” If anyone’s going to do a pool sequel, they need to go back 200 years to find out what resulted in that Native American graveyard in Poltergeist. But Night Swim is going to keep Blumhouse’s lights on for a month or two, giving them time to find their next M3GAN or Get Out.
The lesson from this weekend’s box office is my favorite lesson to regurgitate: A great script pays off. When Wonka opened to mild box office numbers, everyone wrote it off (including me). But the movie is SO WELL WRITTEN that everyone is telling everyone else how good it is. That is 100% because of the script. So keep writing, people. Cause if you do, there’s no reason why this kind of success can’t happen to you.
