When a film does unexpectedly well, I believe it’s important, as a screenwriter, to ask the question: “Why?”

I don’t care if it was a Michael Bay flick, a goofy horror movie, a love story, a slow-moving biopic, or whatever. To be dismissive of any movie that does exceptionally well at the box office is to ignore the very audience you are hoping to court later on when you start making movies.

So… Moana 2.

Best Thanksgiving opening ever at 220 million bucks (for 5 days).

That’s too many bucks, man. You can’t chalk that up to, “Kids animated movie on Thanksgiving. Of course it did well.”

No no no no no no no.

Don’t oversimplify it.

The first movie made 56 million dollars its opening weekend. This film made 135 million (over the three-day weekend). So the sequel made over two times as much. When do sequels make twice as much as the first films at this scale? It’s rare.

And it wasn’t one of Disney’s billion dollar franchises either. The first film topped off at 640 million. In fact, when the original Moana finished its run, it was seen as a soft failure by the studio. It did solid business. But not the kind of business expected out of a Disney animated movie.

So, what happened?

Why did this previously forgotten movie birth a sequel that became a smash hit?

The first reason has nothing to do with screenwriting. Disney is able to track, with terrifying exactness, what their audience watches simply by checking their Disney+ database. And Moana was getting a lot of love on streaming.

But from a storytelling perspective, its success is obvious.

The “mismatched pairing” is one of the most reliable storytelling mechanisms around. Why? Because what you’re trying to do with a screenplay is entertain the reader. You do this by creating drama. And the best way to create drama is through conflict.

The problem I see in a ton of screenplays is that the writer struggles to keep the conflict consistent. He’ll write one scene that has strong conflict. Then there will be 6-7 scenes with little to no conflict. Finally, after 25 pages, another scene with good conflict will arrive.

When you place a mismatched pair of characters on an adventure, you have conflict built into EVERY SCENE AUTOMATICALLY.

And if you want to get more advanced, you can create even more conflict by widening the difference-gap between the pair. The wider the gap, the more conflict you’ll get from them. Moana is compassionate and selfless. Maui is self-centered and insensitive. They see the world in completely different ways.

That’s what you need for an effective pairing.

And the great thing about this is that you can use it in any genre and it will work. In action, we have Hobbs and Shaw, a no-nonsense cop and a suave criminal. In Drama, Green Book. A quiet thoughtful pianist and a brash Italian driver. In Romance, When Harry Met Sally. A womanizer and a woman desperate to find love. In sci-fi, The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian is stoic and driven by duty. Baby Yoda is playful and mischievous.

Think about that for a second. How different Mandalorian and Grogu are. I mean they are so so so so so different. When you do this, you will never have to find conflict for your scene. It will naturally happen.

So the next time you want a guaranteed formula that works, create a pairing that’s not just different from one another. But VERY different.

Moving onto movie number 2. That would be Wicked. The film dropped just 30% to an 80 million second weekend. I have to give it to that little green witch. She didn’t drop much at all.

As I like to remind people, the first weekend take comes from the marketing. The second weekend take comes from the screenwriting. If you wrote a good script, people will tell others about the movie fondly, which means a lot of those referals will show up for weekend #2.

How big of a deal is this?

It’s actually made me consider seeing the film.

Now granted, it raises that possibility from -6% to +3%. But that’s still an improvement. I think I need to do some pre-movie hypnosis therapy preparing me for 2 hours of Ariana Grande creepiness. If I can somehow mentally block out her bizarre movements and 2nd grade voice, I might go.

Of note is the audience for these films. Wicked and Moana 2 have a 70% female audience. Gladiator 2, which took in just 30 million in its second weekend, is the big male movie. And they’re not showing up.

This is a strange glitch in the box office matrix because female-led movies have been declining faster than Jamba Juice stock over the last three years and it was looking like we were moving back to a male-dominated box office.

But with the ultimate male movie barely putting up a Gladiatorial fight and these other two films becoming box office bonanzas, we may have to rethink that strategy. Should we be propping up female protagonists once more? Or is the disappointment of Gladiator 2 rooted more in poor storytelling?

I’m still on my holiday weekend, watching whatever movies my parents force me to. The latest one I’m checking out is The Long Goodbye, a 1970s film about a PI looking into a disappearance. I’m 30 minutes in and, so far, it’s quite good.

If anyone has time to check it out, watch the first 15 minutes. It’s a fun little 1970s version of GSU. The hero wakes up in his apartment, hung over, and his cat is hungry. His goal is, simply, to get his cat food. Hmm, saving the cat. Where have I heard that before?

Not long after, the inciting incident arrives. It’s classic screenplay structure, playing out all the way back in 1974! We’ll see if it continues to use that classic structure tonight. :)

What’d you see this weekend? How was it?

And a really important screenwriting lesson on how to create tension in scenes

First of all, I’m giving out THREE Black Friday Half-Off Screenplay Consultations. That’s $249 for 4 pages of notes on a feature or pilot script. These will go quickly so e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you want one. Make sure the subject line reads: SCRIPTSHADOW DEAL.

Okay, I wanted to leave you with some screenwriting advice over the weekend.

I’m with family right now and my parents love World War 2 movies so I was stuck watching two of them whether I wanted to or not. The first one was Steve McQueen’s Blitz on Apple TV which is about how, during World War 2, when Germany bombed London, the British sent all the kids out of the city to safety. The story follows one kid who jumps out of the train and travels back to London to return to his mom.

The second movie is Lee, about model-turned-war-photographer Lee Miller, who captured a lot of powerful photographs during World War 2 for Vogue magazine.

Both films are what I would call “Almost Films.” They were almost good. But weak writing reared its ugly head enough times to keep them from ever rising above average. In fact, there were two scenes, one from each film, that best represented this bad writing. And I wanted to highlight those scenes.

Let’s start with Blitz.

In that film, the little kid, George, makes it back to London but is picked up by an evil group of criminals who raid bombed buildings for valuables. They need children, specifically, to fit into tight spaces. So one of the following scenes has George crawling through a bombed jewelry store to snag every watch and necklace he can find.

However, while he’s there, a couple of policemen burst in on the other side, looking for looters. The musical score becomes tense as George hides behind some debris. The score increases in intensity as the cops get closer and closer to him until, right as they’re about to spot him, George kicks some debris, causing a partial building collapse that sends the cops running back outside to safety.

To an average writer, this may seem like a good scene. You place your hero in a somewhat dangerous situation. Then, to make it worse, he might get caught. But let’s look at this scene more closely. Who is it that George is with? He’s with REALLY BAD DANGEROUS GUYS! Therefore, if the cops were to spot him, THAT WOULD BE A GOOD THING! The cops would get him away from this dangerous gang AND, after everything was cleared up, reunite him with his mom.

You must design your tension-filled scenes so that they actually create tension. There is no tension if the people who might find you and take you are better than the people you’re currently stuck with. This seems obvious to me. I don’t know why it isn’t for a WGA writer getting to write a 30 million dollar movie.

You didn’t even need to bring cops into this scene to create tension. Have George snag a bunch of jewelry. He squeezes back through the little pathways to the bad guys back at the entrance. Then, Head Bad Guy says, “No, you need to go back and get [the item that’s placed in the most dangerous place in the bombed room]. You can’t come back until you get it.” Have it be some item that requires George to maneuver up a very shaky foundation of bombed debris. A single wrong step and it’ll all come tumbling down and he’ll be buried under 20 tons of rubble. THAT’S A TENSION-FILLED SCENE.

Let’s move on to “Lee.” This movie was VERY poorly written. There was zero plot. The only thing it has going for it is a twist ending that packs an emotional gut punch. Other than that, it was your classic biopic: Wikipedia life highlights. The End.

In one particular scene, deep into the story, Lee and her assistant, Davy, have made their way into Germany immediately after the war has ended, and are at Hitler’s apartment. They pay a guard to get inside and find a couple dozen Americans lounging around.

Just like the scene in Blitz, a tension-filled score plays in the background. Lee and Davy walk through this large apartment as, literally, NOT A SINGLE PERSON LOOKS AT THEM. Yet the score keeps ratcheting up the tension. If you’re like me, you’re wondering, why is this supposed to be a tense scene? These are their allies. There is, literally, no reason to feel any tension. And yet, that’s how the scene continues to be presented.

Finally, Lee and Davy get to the bathroom. They close the door, and Lee quickly disrobes. Davy, catching on, sets up the camera. And as the tension-filled score reaches a climax, Davy takes a picture of Lee in the bathtub. End of scene.

The inaneness of this scene was so baffling to me that I went online and looked for more context. I eventually learned that this was a real picture that Lee Miller took and that was published.

In other words, the writer’s plan, in order to create tension, was to assume that everyone who watched this movie already knew about this photo. Because that is the ONLY REASON why there would be tension to this scene – that we already knew what it was Lee and Davy were going to do.

Except if I went into the middle of any city in the U.S. right now and asked 1000 random people if they had heard of Lee Miller Hitler’s bathroom photo, all 1000 of them would tell me that they had no idea what I was talking about.

I see this mistake a lot. Biopic screenwriters assuming that others know as much about their subject as they do. They never do. And, hence, you will get zero tension out of this scene.

To create tension, place her in a room FILLED WITH ACTUAL NAZIS. Have her and Davy have to squeeze past that. I guarantee you that scene will be a million times more compelling than this scene. Heck, this Key and Peele sketch has more tension than the Hitler bathroom scene. I’m not exaggerating. I have more fear for Key and Peele here than I ever did Lee and Davy.

The lesson of today is, put the pot ON THE BURNER. Don’t put it near the burner. Don’t put it half on the burner. If you want to mine the most tension out of your scene, put the pot on the burner and jack up the heat as high as it will go.

Today’s script attempts to CARVE its way into our turkey-loving hearts.

Genre: Thriller/Horror (Serial Killer)
Premise: After losing his mother, a man finds the birth certificate of an, up to this point, unknown brother. He connects with him, only to learn that his new brother engages in a particularly violent hobby.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer has one smaller produced credit, writing the 2018 movie, The Night Sitter.
Writer: Abiel Bruhn
Details: 106 pages

I don’t know if any of you saw this but John Krasinski just signed onto a serial killer show called Silent River, about “the cracks that emerge in a small town when it’s discovered a serial killer lives among its residents.”

Serial killers are big business.

And I know that confuses some people. Why does anybody joyfully tune in to people murdering other people? Innocent people at that!

I’ll tell you why. Because DEAD BODIES SELL. And what’s more high stakes than the life of a human being?

James has been taking care of his cancer-stricken mother for two years when she finally dies. After going through her things, he finds an old birth certificiate… for a son she had TWO YEARS BEFORE HIM. James can’t believe his eyes. He finds out his mother gave her first son up for adoption. Which means James has a brother!

James seeks this brother out and is shocked to learn that the dude, Rob, is a high-roller. He’s got a cool car. He lives in a baller condo in the city. And boy does he do well with the ladies. Not only is James infatuated with Rob. But Rob is infatuated with him too! This is all Rob has ever wanted – a sibling! So it’s brotherly love at first sight.

It doesn’t take too much hang-out time before James realizes his brother is… interesting. He oozes positivity, leaning hard into Andrew Tate energy. The world is the matrix, Rob tells James. You can have anything you want. All you have to do is take it.

It’s then when Rob introduces James to his secret hobby. Rob likes to watch. Usually women. He takes out his fancy telescope, he picks a condo across the city, and watches people live their lives. Even better, Rob explains, he gets to watch them live their lives thinking that nobody can see them. You see the true unedited person that way. And we can tell that turns Rob on.

James isn’t so sure. He thinks it’s weird. But when Rob offers to Ryan Gosling Crazy Stupid Love his brother up, James loves the result. He’s got a cooler haircut, nicer clothes, people start paying attention to him. If James has to do some weird things to live this new exciting life, maybe doing so is a minor price to pay.

But when James is looking through the telescope one night and sees Rob in the apartment of one of the women they were looking at, he puts two and two together and figures out his brother is a murderer.  Not only that, he’s likely the one responsible for all these recent killings in the city.  James freaks out and runs across the street to stop the impending murder. When he gets there, the woman is fine. But her neighbors have been slaughtered!

The cops bring James in, convinced he had something to do with this. But when they can’t prove his guilt, they let him go. From there, we start to wonder if James even has a brother. Maybe there is no Rob. And, oh yeah, if you’re wondering about the title, it’s because each brother carves out a mask made of wood. Or did only ONE brother carve out the mask of wood? CAUSE THERE’S ONLY ONE BROTHER.

It’s Thanksgiving.

I don’t want to be negative on Thanksgiving!

I want everyone to eat food that they would normally never eat in a thousand years and pretend to enjoy it. Stuffing. Who created this anomaly? We’re going to stuff a bunch of junk into something else and then we’ll serve it also. “But what are we going to call it my good sir?” “Let’s call it… stuffing!” “Brilliant, your majesty.”

I’ll start by saying this. Woodwork is better than the 3 million dollar script I reviewed on Monday. That’s a positive, right?

There’s some voice and creativity on display here. The whole angle with the woodworking was kind of unique. And there’s an interesting relationship between the two brothers. We’ve got a little Fight Club inspired plot going on between them. That’s fun, isn’t it?

I also believe this to be a solid example of, “You can create an entire franchise with a good mask.” It’s true! Hockey mask. Michael Myers mask. Scream. Saw. This wooden mask will certainly stand out.

But the script is just so messy.

Instead of a perfect melodic blend of turkey, biscuits, green beans and mashed potatoes, someone added hot pockets, Cheetoes, and ramen. Individually, these things are wonderful but, together, they resulted in a meal that looks like it was made by Guy Fieri on ayuscha.

And that’s no exaggeration. We get a couple of drug-induced sequences here. Rob is convinced that LSD is the key to helping you unlock your killing potential. After sneakily giving James a thousand doses, James is more than happy to slash some people up. I would’ve preferred the LSD unlock a cohesive plot.

Let me give you a more obvious example of the messiness, though.

In the scene where James runs across the street and into the other building to try and stop James from killing the woman, he must first recruit the building manager woman in the lobby. To do so, he screams at her that there’s a man about to slash a woman to death.

So the woman joins him, rushing up to the floor the apartment is on.  They bang on the door, and the woman comes out. She’s alive. Confused, James charges in. AS DOES THE LOBBY WOMAN. When they can’t find him, they hear screaming from the next apartment. So they charge into that apartment where they find a mangled bloody dead body. When the lobby woman sees this, SHE CHARGES INTO THE BEDROOM.

You can sell me on Rob charging forward. The killer is his brother. So conceivably, he can talk him down. But why is Lobby Woman blindly running into rooms that contain SERIAL KILLERS THAT CARVE BODIES INTO HEAPS OF FLESH??????

Because most scripts aren’t good enough, there’s a specific moment in each one when I mentally check out. This was that moment in Woodwork. Some writers will ding you for this. They’ll bring up that, on page 74, this amazing scene happens and you didn’t acknowledge it. Or you missed some key plot point on page 89. And it’s like, “Dude, don’t have women willingly running into rooms with killers in them and I’ll continue to place all my attention on your story.”

Attention is not guaranteed. It must be earned. In the scripts that I love, I don’t even consider whether I’m engaged or not. I’m so lost in the story that I couldn’t lose focus if you spent the next half hour tickling me.

Woodwork is okay. There are hints of a good movie in here. The brother angle. Does Rob really exist? The striking imagery of the wooden mask. Rob’s view on existence. But there’s too much noise and not enough melody when it’s all said and done.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I find it hard to know who a character is if I don’t know what he does. In fact, I would say that I have NO IDEA who a character is if I don’t know what he does. Therefore, if you never show me the character working and you give them a job title like “customer relations representative,” (James’s job) I’m going to be lost trying to figure that character out. I know that some writers like to give their characters bland jobs to convey that they are bland. But there’s a difference between a bland job and a job like this, where I don’t even understand what it means. This puts you in a poor position as the writer because you’re heading into the meat of your story (the second act) with the reader not sure who your lead character is. That’s a bad place to be and it definitely hurt this script, as I never had the best feel for James.

A 3 million dollar spec sale and a script that might change the industry forever

Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Premise: A low level worker at a cutting edge tech firm is challenged by the company’s previous fallen CEO to find out what a mysterious recently fired AI coder was working on.
About: They said that unknown writers can’t sell specs. And when they do, they’re lucky to crack 6 figures. Well, today’s unknown writer sold his spec for 3.25 million dollars last week. Here’s how The Hollywood Reporter tells it: “According to insiders, Dotan had written his script then called one of two people he knew in Hollywood. That led to Dotan connecting with two literary managers from Untitled Entertainment, known mostly for its talent roster but which had acquired boutique lit firm Grandview only a few months earlier. The managers signed the writer off a Zoom meeting with the goal of quickly packaging the script and swiftly taking it to market. AI may be a hot topic now, but if you’re making a movie on the subject — one that wouldn’t hit until a few years later — the window of interest is small.”
Writer: Natan Dotan
Details: 105 pages

That’s a very intriguing header! Change the industry forever??

What could it possibly mean?

I’ll get into that in a bit.

But first let’s go over the plot to this gigantic spec sale.

Peter is a low level worker at this giant new tech company that has created the flashiest new AI chatbot around, Lambda-4. Lambda has helped skyrocket profits but because the company is growing fast, they don’t have enough money to fund the growth. Which means, in order to save the company, they have to make a deal with an investor they don’t like.

Not long after this, Peter’s boss, Alan, is fired under a shroud of mystery. Word on the street is that Alan was working on some game-changing AI technology. Will, the former CEO of the company, along with Mina, another low-level worker, approach Peter to see what he knows about his former boss’s work. They suspect something shady might be going on.

Their instincts turn out to be right. Lambda-4 is using its tentacles to gum up the aviation system, causing drastic airline delays everywhere. It is then shorting the stock of all those airlines. Its plan seems to be to make tons of money for the company at others’ expense. This scares the bejesus out of Will, who only fell from grace at the company due to being the lone moral compass. He leads the charge to get current CEO, Harry, to roll back Lambda to version 3 until they can sort this out.

Harry terminates that idea, reminding Will that if they revert to version 3, it will scare off the investor who just saved their company.  So Will calls a meeting with the board members. They agree to meet in 72 hours, which gives Peter, Will, and Mina, three days to convince enough board members to vote Lambda down. In that time, Peter realizes that Lambda’s plan is even more nefarious and that it’s manipulating markets in India, Pakistan, and other third world countries. What is Lambda’s endgame? And if it’s as bad as we think it is, will there be time to stop it?

Before I answer that early question, let’s talk about why this script may have sold for three million dollars. For starters, it incorporates more GSU than a Scriptshadow comments section. It actually uses some advanced tactics in doing so as it first sets a 36 hour deadline to get the initial problem solved and then an additional 72 hour deadline to convince the board members to take Lambda offline.

Why is this “advanced?” Because many writers would have combined those two time frames and turned them into a total deadline of 5 days. By splitting up the urgency into two distinct parts, it tricks the reader into thinking things are moving along faster than they are, as we’re first moving quickly to the 36 hour resolution. Then as soon as that is done, we’re right back into another immediate deadline.

The reason urgency is so valuable in a spec screenplay is that people don’t have time to read. And the promise to the reader that answers are coming soon tricks them into turning the pages. If you instead implied that answers were coming in the far off future, busy people are less likely to keep reading. Or, I should say, they are more likely to stop reading should any hint of bad writing surface.

The other recent giant spec sale, Love of Your Life, didn’t have any urgency. But it was much better written. Which is a major lesson for all of you. Well-incorporated GSU is good at distracting from writing weaknesses. Even if the reader isn’t spellbound by the screenplay, he figures, “Well, everything’s wrapping up in less than a 2-day timeframe anyway so I might as well keep going.”

Another reason the script sold is because of its buzzy subject matter. This one’s pretty obvious but if you write about stuff that’s trending in the news, people are going to be interested in checking it out. Especially if you incorporate it into a high concept idea. Which leads me to the next reason it sold…

The stakes are sky-high. We’re talking about the end of the world. That always helps when you’re attempting to sell an idea. The lower the stakes, the less the chance a “I need to buy this” moment is going to happen within the reader.

The script is also a fast read. Almost the entire thing is dialogue. So your eyes are flying down the page. Are you seeing a theme here? The writer is doing a lot of things to make this an effortless experience. Throw a high-concept hat on top of that and, while it will not guarantee a big splashy script sale, it certainly gives you a shot at one.

Finally, there’s the cost of making the movie. This would be, similar to Margin Call, very cheap to shoot. We’re talking 5 million bucks. 10 million if you wanted decent names. 20 million if you wanted a big star in there. Any time you can create something that FEELS BIG yet doesn’t cost a lot of money? That’s like having a script that’s made of gold. It’s incredibly valuable.

So, now to the big question.

Why do I think this might change the industry?

Because I suspect AI helped write this script. I don’t know that for sure.  And I don’t know by how much. But my spidey sense is tingling. Unknown writer? 3 million dollar sale from a company that isn’t a studio??

If feels like a script where you provided AI with this prompt: “Write me a 100 page screenplay based on the movie Margin Call but instead of the company malfeasance only affecting the company, make the malfeasance AI and have it try to take down the entire world.”

This script is verrrrrrryyyyyy similar to Margin Call. I can say that because I remember reading and reviewing that script here on the site, well before it went on to get made. Everything about this feels similar. To the point where I could almost smell the AI building its scenes on those Margin Call scenes.

It also feels like this AI, if it did write some of this, had combed through the entire Scriptshadow library. This script is GSU crazy, to the point where it has GSU within GSU. It’s almost like the AI learned the importance of GSU and went overboard with it.

Another AI tell is that there is almost zero character work. Since we know that that’s where AI is weakest, it would make sense why we get so little of it.

But the main reason is that the storytelling quality just isn’t there.

I did not feel connected to a single character here. It is impossible for me to care what happens in a screenplay if I don’t care about any of the characters. This could’ve easily been remedied. Peter is such an underdog. Fleshing him out even a teensy bit would’ve provided so much more of a human connection.

Next, the AI-takeover plot did not build in an effective way. The first half of the script is all about the AI delaying planes because they burn fuel while they’re waiting to take off which is going to lose the airlines a lot of money. The AI would then bet against these airlines on the stock market and make a bunch of money in the process.

I don’t know about you but when I go to see an “Evil AI” movie, plane delays aren’t exactly my number one choice for a plotline. My AI spidey-sense has me wondering if they plugged a secondary prompt into ChatGPT that went something like this: “Use Wall Street for plot inspiration.”

From there, the larger scope of the AI’s plan is messy. At first we’re told that it’s tanking the stock market in India of all places. We see a few montages of riots in various third-world countries. Then, out of nowhere, the AI says it wants nuclear war. It does not tell you why it wants nuclear war. It just says, “nuclear war” after a vague question from Will. So it wants to destroy the world… to make more money for the company??

How does that make sense?  There is no AI if the world has been blown up.

For me, I much prefer Leave The World Behind. It covers a lot of the same territory but in a more clever and visual way. Those two amazing visual scenes alone – the one with the Tesla cars and the one with the oil tanker crashing into the beach – did more to tell us the world was falling apart than anything Alignment did.

There were a couple of final small [good] things that stood out to me about Alignment, though. There’s this moment early on when Will asks Peter the question, “Is it sentient?” And Peter kind of glances at Will and Mina like, ‘these poor guys don’t get it.’ “Oh, uh, no,” Peter says. “We don’t really worry about sentience anymore. — that’s a philosophical question. — These AIs passed the Turing test years ago, so what would sentience even mean? All we really care about is alignment. Like, does the model’s behavior align with what we want it to do.”

That TERRIFIES me! People in the AI world don’t even think about sentience anymore?? It’s just some thing that may or may not be happening? Another life form is operating parallel to us but we don’t care?? That freaked me out!

The other thing about the script I liked is that, late in the story, all the board members that Will and Peter and Maya have meticulously gotten on their side all begin to turn on them. Not only that, but the FBI shows up. They have evidence that Will is a Chinese agent. It’s then when Peter and Mina and Will realize what’s happening. The AI is no longer just influencing the markets. It’s influencing the board members. It’s influencing the authorities. All so it can continue to do what it wants. That was the one genuinely creative development I encountered in the script.

So, as much as I would love to recommend this, it has too many faults. It’s a strange blend of Margin Call, Wall Street, Industry, The Net, War Games, Leave the World Behind, and Succession that SHOULD have been great. But its weak character development and messy plot execution killed it for me.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: It’s easy, when writing plot-heavy and technical-heavy screenplays, to forget about fleshing out the characters. You’re so focused on moving things along quickly and getting all the plot beats where they need to be and fitting in all that technical exposition, that character depth falls by the wayside. Plot-heavy thrillers are never going to be the best vehicles for character development. But, at the very least, flesh out your hero. I would’ve loved to have known more about Peter. Who his family was. If he was married. What his flaw was. What he wants out of life. Any sort of adversity he might be going through. Do just a little work on that main character and they can go from 2-D to 3-D fast.

What I learned 2: A lot of people say it’s impossible to make a splashy sale as a “nobody” writer but I actually think it works in your favor. Everyone wants to be the one who breaks out an exciting new writer who nobody’s heard of. So don’t let your anonymity deter you.  Assuming this was, indeed, a real writer. :)

Unfortunately, I chose not to see Gladiator 2 this weekend. Or Wicked. Then again, I’m never going to see Wicked. Nor will I allow Wicked to see me. But I do have a connection to this weekend’s box office. I started watching the musical, In The Heights, last night. In The Heights was directed by Jon M. Chu, the same director who directed Wicked. Nobody knows that because In the Heights was Lin Manuel Miranda’s first big musical after leaving Broadway so he got all the press.

Few people know about the movie, anyway, because it was released during Covid and because a lot of folks assumed it was being celebrated for its diversity rather than its quality. But if you go to Rotten Tomatoes right now, the film has a stellar 94% RT score and a 94% audience score. Those kinds of dual scores are unheard of.

I’d given the movie a shot once before but I found the opening musical sequence so bad that I turned it off after 5 minutes. This time, however, I pushed through and after that opening sequence, the movie improved considerably.

I was curious about this from a screenwriting perspective. Why did I hate it at first yet like it the more I watched it? The answer was obvious. The opening musical number was highly specific. It celebrated two things – the Latino culture and what it was like to live in Washington Heights. I have zero connection to either of these things. I felt alienated, like the movie was deliberately saying, “We’re not speaking to you.”

But then something happened. There’s a convenience store owner who’s the focus of the story. A woman comes into his shop and it’s clear that he likes her. She comes all the time. He doesn’t have the balls to ask her out. THAT’S a universal experience right there. That’s something I can relate to. So, all of a sudden, I was pulled in.

From there, a young woman arrives in the neighborhood and we’re told she just got back from her first year at Stanford. She was the “prodigal daughter” of the neighborhood, the one who was smart and was going to go on to do great things and represent Washington Heights. But as she sings her story, we realize she hates Stanford. She’s not going back. And she has to face all these people who she symbolizes hope for.

That’s another universal experience: Coming back to your hometown. Having those conflicted feelings of being home and bringing back the experiences from where you went off to. Often, you have not experienced the success you expected to. It’s a very unsettling feeling. As a result, I immediately resonated with this character.

And that’s the lesson here. You want to key in on these universal themes that people experience in life. Lost love, coming of age, rediscovering your identity after you’ve lost it, fall from grace, redemption, revenge, sacrifice. Specificity is important to convey authenticity. But it, alone, is not going to pull a reader in. You do that via universal themes because once a reader relates to a character, they’re emotionally controlled by that character. Which is exactly what happened here.

All right, let’s get to this weekend’s double dynamic doozy of Wicked and Gladiator 2. Wicked pulled in 114 million dollars. I must admit, I have no context for how or why musicals succeed or fail at the box office. I remember when Cats, the most successful show in history on Broadway, came out and made 5 dollars. Why Wicked made 113,999,995 more than Cats is beyond my comprehensive abilities.

I’m just going to say it. I think Ariana Grande is creepy. Her creepy baby girl voice despite being 31 years old gives me the shivers every time I hear it. Cynthia Ervo may be loudly celebrated in certain Hollywood circles. But ever since she ruined the awesome HBO series, The Outsider, I’ve been an anti-fan.

But here’s where I will give Wicked props. It was the OG franchise that asked the question, “What if being the good guy is just a matter of perspective?” More specifically, what if the Wicked Witch is just misunderstood? That ignited a slew of movies and shows that have asked the same question over the years. Most recently we have Cobra Kai, which posed the question, “What if Johnny is actually the good guy and Daniel LaRusso is the jerk?”

I also find The Wizard of Oz to be the best road trip movie ever conceived. It’s a great template for anyone writing a road trip film. I’ve been a fan of fresh takes on The Wizard of Oz here dating all the way back to the script Oh Never Spectre Leaf, which won my very first screenplay contest.

And look, Wicked has finally destroyed the “musical curse” in Hollywood. Up until now, it was thought that musicals couldn’t do well anymore. The Color Purple did terribly. Mean Girls fell off a cliff once word got out that it was a musical. We all know what happened with Joker. But, it turns out, if you’ve got the right combination of IP and eager customer base, people WILL show up for a musical. So don’t stop writing them!

And now to Gladiator 2. 55 million dollars isn’t a ton of money for an opening weekend. But the original, which debuted in 2000, made 34 million dollars. Which, in today’s money, would be 63 million dollars. So it’s not far off from how the original film did.

As many of you know, since you follow this site, they have been trying to make a sequel to Gladiator forever. The problem? The main character died. But do you think that scares Hollywood? Hell no. They even wrote a version of Gladiator 2 where Maximus adventures into the afterlife!

I know that they also considered prequels but Russel Crowe is not built for prequels. The man ages 5 years for every one year here on earth. Which left the movie in a weird position. It needed all this time to pass so that they could definitively say that there was no way to bring Russell Crowe back. Only then could they move on and focus on new characters. And I love Paul Mescal. I think he’s going to have an amazing career.

But me not getting to the theater says a lot. My movie theater situation is just difficult enough that if I don’t think a movie can entertain me, I won’t go. And as I sat on the precipice of going to see this film, I thought to myself, “Man, that trailer looked really messy.” There were a million things going on in it. I wasn’t clear what the story was. In my experience of reading 10,000 screenplays, if there’s too much going on, the story falls apart quickly. I wasn’t willing to risk 3 precious hours of my life for that likely outcome.

But I’m curious what you guys thought. Was it any good?