This might seem like an odd topic for the weekend box office but I want to talk about Y2K. Y2K is a movie that came out this weekend in wide release. The film, which was produced by A24, took in just 2.4 million dollars.
The film was written and directed by Kyle Mooney, who made a name for himself doing funny little sketches on YouTube. His offbeat humor eventually landed him a job on SNL, which he wrote for and starred in for 7 years.
Y2K is about the panic in the hours leading up to the year 2000. Once they get to midnight, all hell breaks loose and the electronics start attacking the people.
Other A24 movies, such as Civil War and Heretic, pulled in much bigger opening weekend numbers. So, why didn’t this one do well?
Here’s the answer.
An unclear subgenre.
We talk about genre all the time. But we rarely talk about subgenre.
A subgenre is the branch from the genre tree that you’re writing in.
For example, if you look at the Thriller genre, you have the subgenre of Action-Thriller (Taken) as well as the subgenre of Slow Burn Thriller (No Country For Old Men).
Each subgenre has its own rules, its own set of audience expectations. If you provide an audience with a subgenre they’re unfamiliar with, there’s a good chance they’ll have no interest in seeing your movie.
So, in horror, you have the killer mask subgenre (Saw), the monster-in-a-box subgenre (Alien), the zombie subgenre, the vampire subgenre, and the possession subgenre. Within each subgenre, there can be further subgenres, all with their own templates, their own sets of rules and expectations.
When I look at the trailer for Y2K, the first question that comes to mind is, “What subgenre is this?” I’m not sure. And if I’m not sure, I’m not checking out the movie.
Y2K is more of a Black List script.
What I mean by that is it’s a script that takes risks, that’s offbeat, that has a unique voice. It is also a script that has no job of becoming a movie. And this is where a lot of writers get confused. They assume that any script that’s good should become a movie. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Some scripts work only as scripts (they’re fun to read). But movies are a different beast. Movies must be cinematic. They must have movement. They must feel larger than life. They must have stakes. They must have conflict that isn’t your everyday casual conflict. Movies need to be BIGGER in every way.
Let me give you an example. The Will Ferrel movie, “Everything Must Go.” Great script. GREAT script. It was about this guy whose wife kicked him out, threw all of his stuff on the lawn, and locked him out. He had nowhere to go. But there was this quirky rule in the county that you can have a yard sale for up to 48 hours. So in order to stay at the house, he puts all his stuff in the front yard and calls it a yard sale.
It was a really fun character exploration. Cause it wasn’t just about trying to stay in the yard. He also needed to learn to let all that physical stuff go, so he could, of course, mentally move on. I loved that script.
The movie, however, was cinematic torture. Being contained to that yard killed a lot of the momentum that was on the page, momentum generated by sparse description and tons of dialogue. The character work, which was so good in the script, seemed to suffocate due to a visual palette that amounted to a wide shot of the yard and a close-up of Will Ferrel’s face.
The lack of any cinematic punch required the central performance to carry everything, and Will Ferrell was out of his depth in his first big dramatic role. That movie taught me a lot about which scripts are movies and which scripts need to remain scripts.
If you look over there at my Top 25, you’ll see a screenplay titled Dogs of Babel. It’s been there for 15 years and still hasn’t been made. Why? Because it’s not a movie. It’s a script. It’s slow and, also, static. As the writer himself would later tell me, “It’s too weird to get made.”
The smaller quirky movies that *do* get made are often a roulette spin. You never know which ones are going to hit and which ones aren’t.
So then why even write a weird offbeat script? What’s the point? The point is that weird offbeat scripts, when done well, get passed around a lot. You don’t sell the script but you arguably come out of it better. You now have all these people who like your writing and are therefore potential business contacts for future writing jobs.
In fact, one of your best screenwriting strategies is to write a personal script that highlights your unique voice. A lot of people end up reading it. You take meetings with them. You ask if they have any projects you would be good for. Try to get a job. Even if you don’t get any jobs, contact those people every 3-6 months to gently remind them that you’re still there, and ask again if they have anything you’d be good for. Keep doing that over and over again and you WILL get writing jobs.
As much as I hated that stupid Harness script, that’s a good example of what I’m talking about. A unique screenplay. Very intense voice. Took some chances. People remember those scripts, allowing you an opportunity to turn that into writing assignments.
But what you don’t do is make those scripts into movies. The very weirdness that makes them cool on the page is what makes them unfit for the big screen. They don’t feel like movies because they don’t fit into any understandable subgenre for audiences.
The only time these movies see the light of day is when a writer uses the cache of that weird script to get a bunch of assignment work, becomes a big successful studio screenwriter, and then (and only then) do producers say, “We should make that first script of his.” A great example of this is Passengers, by Jon Spaiths. It was a weird offbeat script that lots of people loved (I wasn’t one of them) that was finally made and we saw in big beautiful glory why it was never meant to be a movie.
Speaking of The Black List…
The now infamous “best scripts” list is hitting us with its 2024 iteration tomorrow morning.
The list is in desperate need of a teardown so it can redesign itself for 2024. I’ll be doing my annual Black List Re-Ranking post (where I re-rank the scripts in the correct order of quality) on Thursday and the reason I do that is because the scoring system for this list has always been a disaster. Outside of the top 5 scripts, the quality-per-votes consistency is awful.
The problem is that every Black List that’s come out since 2020 – a year that is by no means a coincidence – has been focused less on quality and more on socio-political themes (aka “Message Scripts”). Which would be fine if more than a few of them were entertaining. Emerald Fennel (Promising Young Woman) was the only one who seemed to understand that.
The good news is that every year since then, the list has moved further away from that tone and more back to normalcy. The problem is that the writers haven’t pivoted. So many of these new writers learned to write during a time when message was king. As a result, no one taught them that, actually, concept is king. Drama is king. Keeping the reader entertained is king.
My 2024 Black List wish list is for there to be not more than one biopic. I know that’s hoping for the impossible but by golly that would make the list 200% better. Outside of that I want weird scripts, like Everything Must Go. But what I really want is a handful of weird scripts that achieve the chupacabra of scriptwriting, which is that they’re both weird… AND are good enough to become movies.
What’s on your Black List wish list?
