While I continue to root for Margot Robbie, a part of me is happy that Birds of Prey underperformed. The message of that film wasn’t one of exclusivity. But it certainly wasn’t inclusive. That word has to work on both ends of the spectrum. So I’m hoping that sends Hollywood a message to give us films that unite us, as opposed to divide us.
A lot of people are saying that if Birds of Prey came out on Valentine’s Day weekend, it would be a totally different box office story. The film is about a breakup so the subject matter was perfect for the holiday. It also used Deadpool as its template. That film changed the game for Valentine’s Day openings, proving that it could offer humongous box office.
I realize now what happened. Birds of Prey got greedy. They thought to themselves, if we open the weekend BEFORE Valentine’s Day, we get that opening weekend money AND we get that big Valentine’s Day Deadpool haul as well. The problem with that strategy was they weren’t able to market the movie as a Valentine’s Day film. Who knows how much of a difference it would’ve made but if the difference was 10 – 15 million dollars, that’s the difference between the trades labeling the film a bust and labeling it a solid opening. And in this town, perception is reality.
I often wonder how big a difference a release date makes. People used to think you couldn’t open an action movie on Valentine’s Day. Then Deadpool came around. Studios supposedly scratch and claw to get one of those big summer slots. But in the summer, all your second weekend box office is swallowed up by the next big shiny blockbuster. So how desirable is one of those weekends really?
James Cameron famously thanked 20th Century Fox for moving Titanic from the summer, where it was originally slated, to a winter holiday opening. The film went on to break every box office record in the book. It begs the question, what if it had opened in the summer? Would it have made way less money? Would the world not have fallen in love with Leonardo DiCaprio?
The box office comeback story of the year may go to Sonic the Hedgehog. That film was dead as a doornail when that first trailer came out. Everyone proclaimed it the single worst animation of a creature’s face in history. In one of the rare instances of Hollywood admitting they were wrong, the director, Jeff Fowler, publicly apologized then had Paramount push the release date back so they could redesign the face. Flash-forward to today and Sonic the Hedgehog had the biggest video game adaptation opening in history with a 4-day holiday haul of $65 million bucks. Which equals its Rotten Tomatoes score. Not bad.
Let’s sit on that for a second. Sonic the Hedgehog is the BIGGEST VIDEO GAME ADAPTATION OPENING EVER. This continues to be one of the bigger curiosities in the movie business. Of all the things that should be a slam-dunk to adapt, you’d think video games would be at the top of the list. They take all their cues from movies anyway. In some cases, they even improve upon them. Go watch a level from Uncharted for proof. And yet they always land in theaters with a big thud. Assassin’s Creed is such a cool movie concept. But the film was unbearable, to the point where it made you retroactively dislike the video game.
I’m not sure what the reason is. My guess is that video games are built on top of flimsy mythology. Lord of the Rings was such an extensively researched world. Everything that came out of it felt solid and believable. That set the stage for a fully-fleshed out adventure. But these video games – all they care about is cool levels. And whatever janky paper-thin backstory helps them get there, that’s good enough for them. So when you extrapolate that out into a story, all the pillars holding up your screenplay are weak and crumbly. Curious what your thoughts are on this.
Speaking of adaptations, Blumhouse underperformed this weekend with their latest film, Fantasy Island. Blumhouse is in an interesting place at the moment. They blew up because they elevated the most reliable money-making formula in Hollywood – make horror films cheaply. Before Blumhouse, a lot of low-budget horror was schlocky and cheap looking. Blumhouse gave their movies a slightly shinier production design which allowed them to play in theaters as opposed to going directly to digital.
The problem with that is, it’s an easy formula to copy. There’s nothing proprietary about what they do (for example, nobody else can make Marvel movies but Disney – you can’t replicate that). This has allowed other horror movies to eat into their market share. Lights Out. A Quiet Place. Hereditary. The only thing keeping Blumhouse above these production houses is the fact that they make so many films. This allows them to take more chances and increases the odds that one of the movies breaks through and becomes a media darling, like Get Out.
Jason Blum knows this so he’s trying to innovate and take the next step forward that no one else is thinking of. This weekend, he adapted a successful TV show in “Fantasy Island,” but instead of staying true to the material, he put a horror slant on it. That was the innovation. I don’t know what their projections were but I know they were hoping for more than 14 million for the 4-day weekend.
I actually like this idea. Any “stuck on an island” horror concept has potential. And I liked the irony of characters stepping into what they believed was a fantasy, only for it to become a nightmare. But it just didn’t capture the public’s interest. The problem when you open things up in the horror world – when you try to be bigger – is it becomes more apparent that you’re in over your head. Audiences don’t think about the lack of production value when an entire haunted house movie takes place inside the house because it’s organic to the concept. But when you start incorporating more space, more sets, bigger shots, additional characters, we can see where you don’t size up with the Marvels, DCs and Fasts and Furiouses of the world. It’s almost like by going bigger you actually look smaller.
On the plus side, Blumhouse still has The Hunt, which is finally being released. I’m curious to see how this does. They’ll be able to sell it as “the movie they wouldn’t let you see!’ And what gets people more interested in something than being told they can’t see it? What’s your prediction on The Hunt? I think it could open in the $25-30 million dollar range assuming they open wide (3000 theaters). But they might do one of those “feeler” releases (800 theaters), in which case I have no idea how much it’ll make.
A movie that continues to impress me is 1917, which has been around for 8(!) weeks and pulled in another 8 million dollars this weekend. I’m learning a lot from this film. There’s this giant potential audience of History Channel geeks – people who watch shows like “Hitler’s Bunker” and “World War 2 in color” who are dying for a larger-than-life version of what they get in those shows. Because History Channel shows have relatively low budgets. They can only do so much. So if you promise them something that’s just like those shows but bigger and more expensive with great production value, they’ll leave their houses and pay for it. 1917 proves that.
Another thing this movie’s taught me is to look for fun angles in war movies. I don’t mean fun as in “comedic.” I mean using war movies as a ride as opposed to being big glorified dramas. War films are traditionally downers. I mean, it’s war. Lots of people are getting killed. So there’s a dire tone tugging at most of these films. If you can find a way to make a war movie fun, that’s a huge advantage because people generally go to the movies to have fun and feel good.
That’s why these Oscar movies, despite getting endless advertising, often struggle to make money at the box office. Audiences know that it’s not going to be a traditional “fun” experience. The way 1917 became fun was by condensing the timeframe.
I’ve been telling you this for years. One of the easiest ways to supercharge an idea is to create a condensed timeframe. An idea that feels tired and played out can all of a sudden seem fresh and exciting if the right timeframe is applied. Where writers make the mistake is to apply this advice to the usual suspects – pairing it with an action or thriller concept – “A guy’s fake heart is actually a bomb so he’s got to get from the top of a skyscraper to the bottom in 2 hours or everyone in the building dies.” But, actually, where a tight timeframe stands out is when it’s paired with a non-traditional concept. When we think of World War 1, we don’t think of narratives taking place in less than 24 hours. That’s what helped 1917 stand out. You can apply this to any non-traditional setup. A Western. A drama. A romantic-comedy. Just in my head right now, that sounds exciting. A romantic comedy told in a single day.
As for the rest of the box office, I’m shocked to see that Jumanji crossed the 300 million dollar mark. I didn’t think anyone saw that movie due to the risky but ultimately failed choice to have The Rock and Kevin Hart mimic a couple of old men for two hours. Parasite got a small bump from its Oscar win and it’s cool to see Bong Joon-ho celebrate his most successful movie ever. Finally, in what can only be titled “The Ultimate Revenge,” Star Wars Episode 9 fell out of the top 10 to number 15, whereas Rian Johnson’s Knives Out has now pulled ahead of it, taking the number 12 spot. Why is this significant? Because Rise of Skywalker has been out for 8 weeks whereas Knives Out has been out for 11! Does this mean that Rian Johnson was right to kill Luke Skywalker all along? Should every movie from here on forward subvert expectations? Are Rey’s parents’ nobodies? I have to revaluate everything!!!
I hope your Valentine’s Day, Galantine’s Day, or Self-Coupledintines Day is going splendidly. Just a couple of deadline reminders to keep you folks writing.
March 13th is SCI-FI SHOWDOWN! That means you have until 8pm Pacific Time March 12th to send your sci-fi spec in for a sure-to-be heated competition. E-mail carsonreeves3@gmail.com and put “SCI-FI SHOWDOWN” in the subject line. Include the title, genre, logline, why you think the script deserves a shot, and, of course, a PDF of the script.
Then, you have until June 14th to get your script in for the LAST GREAT SCREENPLAY CONTEST. For that one I need the title, genre, logline, and PDF sent to the same e-mail (carsonreeves3@gmail.com). Except the subject line should be: “LAST GREAT CONTEST.” For more information on The Last Great Screenplay Contest, go here.
Oh, and here’s a Valentine’s Day screenwriting tip. One of the best ways to convey two people falling in love is NOT to have them talk about stuff. Have them encounter a physical obstacle and work together to overcome it. The key here is that they overcome something together. That always brings people closer. Titanic is full of scenes like this, with Jack and Rose repeatedly trying to escape her fiance, his undertaker, and a slowly sinking ship.
The other day I was reading a script and getting bored. This is not an unusual occurrence. The odds dictate that I’ll be bored by most of the scripts I read. But this one was bothering me because the writer wasn’t bad. The characters were interesting. The world was interesting. The writing itself was vivid and showcased a unique voice. I SHOULD HAVE BEEN into it. But I wasn’t. Why?
It finally came to me. The scenes were all boring. The writer was good at setting everything else up. But the scenes themselves would land with a big dramatic THUD. The main reason for that was that the characters didn’t have anything to do but talk.
Now dialogue is an essential part of any screenplay. There’s nothing wrong with sitting your characters down and having them talk to each other. Dozens of sit-coms have become billion-dollar businesses using that very format. But while it may appear to the untrained eye that characters are just standing around and talking, there’s usually something else going on. And that something is called:
PULLING.
“PULLING” is the act of creating something that’s pulling at some variable within the scene, usually the characters. The best way to explain it is to give you an example.
Imagine a scene where Jake is visiting his friend Charlie at his office job. We cut into the scene with Jake sitting in the corner and Charlie sitting at his desk. The two are talking about whatever the writer wants them to talk about – who’s going to win between the Knicks and Bulls tonight. This scene is going to be boring 99% of the time. Go ahead, try and write the scene yourself. I guarantee it won’t be good.
But if you step back and create something that’s pulling at one of the variables in the scene, you’ll immediately notice improvement. For example, what if Charlie has someone waiting for him in the lobby, preferably someone of importance who makes him nervous. Now when we cut into the scene, it begins when Charlie’s secretary calls in and says “Fred Clayborne is waiting in the lobby.”
Now Charlie and Jake can’t sit there and chat away with all the time in the world. There’s something pulling at Charlie from outside the scene which limits the amount of time he has to talk with Jake. This creates a psychological shift in the audience where they care more about the conversation because they know it’s ending soon.
One of the biggest mistakes I see writers make is believing that their dialogue is so good that it can withstand a static setup. I can tell you from experience that only 1 in every 1000 writers is able to pull this off. You’re better off finding something to pull at your scene.
One of the most well-known examples of PULLING is the “bomb under the table.” If you have a non-dramatic scene of two people talking to each other at a restaurant, you’re probably going to write something boring. But, if at the beginning of the conversation, the camera cranes down to reveal that there’s a bomb under the table that neither of them know about, the conversation all of a sudden becomes fascinating. And all you did was create something pulling at the scene – in this case, a bomb.
And remember that the “bomb” can be anything. It doesn’t have to literally be a bomb. It can be a jealous ex-girlfriend trying to talk her way past the front door hostess to inform her ex’s date how terrible a person he is. It could be we learned in the previous scene that the woman on the date is pregnant and plans to tell the guy later during dinner. It could be that we know this guy is a serial killer but his date has no idea.
In each of these cases, there is something PULLING at the scene. And while it sounds obvious when I use examples, I read a ton of scenes with no pulling whatsoever. Just characters sitting around talking. It’s deceptively easy to overlook.
I was just watching Curb Your Enthusiasm the other night and noticed that Larry David uses PULLING all the time. There’s this hilarious sub-plot in the most recent episode where Larry will be flying everyone back from a wedding in a private plane. Because the plane is so small, the pilot needs to know each passenger’s weight in advance of the flight. But his friends refuse to disclose their weights to Larry, leaving Larry to spend the entire trip trying to trick it out of them.
Eventually, Larry’s out at a local carnival (the wedding is in Mexico) and stumbles across one of those “Guess Your Weight” exhibits where a man tries to guess your weight. Larry pays the guy to discreetly give him the weight of each of his friends when they show up. He’s going to herd them over in the direction of Weight Guy, pretend like he’s just talking to them, when, in actuality, he’s turning and positioning them so the weight-guesser can see them from all angles and properly guess their weight.
The PULL is coming from Larry and the Weight Guy. You have a group of characters at a festival talking. But if that’s all you have, your scene’s going to be boring. By creating the PULL of Larry secretly trying to get all their weights, the scene is all of a sudden alive and interesting.
Another script I read recently had this woman – we’ll call her Jane – who lived across the street from a hunky guy. Every day at exactly 5pm, the guy would come home and immediately undress. Jane built her day around this moment. It was the only thing that mattered – watching him get undressed. Then, in an early scene, Jane’s annoying neighbor shows up to talk about a bunch of boring exposition-related stuff that we’ll need to know for later on.
This is a classic example of a scene that could’ve been boring. Two characters talking about plot. But the writer had the annoying neighbor show up at exactly 4:57pm, walk past Jane into her apartment, and start talking. Now, boring exposition becomes exciting! Because we know that all Jane cares about in this moment is getting Annoying Neighbor out of her apartment before Hunky Guy gets home. Time is one of the most reliable types of PULLING. Put a time crunch on a scene and it immediately becomes more interesting.
One of the reasons Parasite won Best Picture is because it was jam-packed with PULLING. In one of the early scenes, Kim Ki-Jung, the sister from the poor family, must come in and convince the rich mother that she’s the right art tutor for her son. There’s only problem. Kim isn’t an art teacher. She knows nothing about art. She’s tricking the family in order to get on the payroll. So in the first scene where she’s tutoring the son, Kim herself is the PULL. Her deception is what’s pulling at the scene.
In order to understand that better, imagine if Kim really was a great artist. That she really did tutor children in art for a living. And she came in to interview for the job. There’d be a little bit of pull in that she still has to prove herself. But the pull is much more powerful if she’s lying. That’s what makes the scene exciting.
Another thing to note is that you can save yourself a lot of trouble if the PULL is built into the concept itself. Parasite is about a poor family who is secretly infiltrating a rich family. Almost every scene contains some element of deception. And deception is a powerful PULL. So when you do that, you don’t have to think hard about how to make every scene exciting since the PULL is baked into the equation.
To simplify that down even more, the most common PULL is a limited time frame. If characters always have somewhere to be, then in every scene they’re being pulled to someplace else. Therefore, films like 1917 are the ultimate PULL movies. The characters can never sit down and be boring because they’re always being pulled somewhere else. And even in the moments where they’re not – where they take a break or catch their breath – the lack of time is always looming over them, creating a natural PULL that looms over the scene.
Let me finish this up by saying the hardest scene to write is characters in a location, with nothing to do, nowhere to be, and all the time in the world. This is the ANTI-PULL. And while there are examples of some writers who can pull it off, it’s way more likely that you’ll write a boring scene. Add a good PULL and problem solved.
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) With one last chance at a promotion, a down-on-her-luck real estate agent returns to her rural hometown to sell the impossible – a haunted house where countless couples have been murdered. As the bodies of new residents continue to pile up, our real estate agent will stop at nothing to rid the house of evil – no matter what the cost.
About: This script finished number 17 on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Roy Parker
Details: 115 pages
I’m going to keep this simple. This concept sounded fun! And it was Top 20 on the Black List. Let’s see how it turned out.
29 year old junior real estate agent Annette is prepping for her agency’s once-a-year contest whereby all the junior agents compete to sell a tough listing. Whoever sells a house first becomes a senior agent. Annette does a solid job, selling a place with a giant glob of dirt in the middle of the floor, but finds out she lost to Douchebag Don.
Not to worry, her boss tells her. They’ve got a sister agency two hours from here with a really difficult-to-sell property – the “Kaufman House.” If she can sell that house, he’ll give her that promotion. Annette grabs an Uber to get there, only to realize her driver, Roxxy, is an old high school acquaintance.
When Annette tells Roxxy about the house, Roxxy knows of it and informs her that it’s haunted. Annette doesn’t believe her until she gets a couple to bite during an early open house and the couple comes running out of the house screaming a few minutes later. This is followed by four college kids buying the house, who, on their first night, kill each other with a shotgun. This is followed by several other people buying the house and getting killed in gruesome ways.
Determined to sell the house, Annette asks Roxxy if she has any out-of-the-box ideas, and Roxxy comes up with a promotion for people who love haunted houses. Bring them in from all over the country and drive up a bidding war. The problem is, whatever they do, people keep dying. So if Annette is going to pull this off and get that promotion before she turns 30, she’ll need to come up with a way to un-haunt this house.
I’ve had some problems with entries on this year’s Black List. The number one script was not number 1 quality. And there were a few others that weren’t necessarily bad, but didn’t possess qualities you would associate with a Top 20 Black List script. “The House is Not For Sale” is the first time I’m shocked a script made the list.
You know how I talk to you guys about red flags? These are things I’ve seen a bunch of times as a reader that indicate we’re in for a rocky read. And the more red flags that pile up early in a script, the rockier the road is going to be. I came across a lot of red flags in “House.”
For starters, the opening teaser has a real estate agent showing a couple the Kaufman house. At the end of the showing, the couple says, “We’ll take it,” and the agent hands them the keys and leaves.
Um… that’s not how selling houses works, lol. You don’t get the keys right after you say you want the house. At the very least, there’s a little thing known as payment that needs to happen.
Why is this a red flag? Well, I’m about to read a script about real estate from a writer who doesn’t know one of the most basic things about real estate.
In the opening teaser, the couple who bought the house dies that first night. Then we cut to the next day with the real estate agent in her car facing a lake. She then slowly, as if in a trance, drives her car into the lake until it is fully submerged in the water. I went back and read the scene three times and I still couldn’t figure out if she was possessed by a ghost from the house who was killing her or if she was committing suicide because she couldn’t sell the house. A lack of clarity in the first five pages of a script is one of the most reliable measurements of script quality.
Later, Annette is talking but her dialogue is in italics. I was confused why this was happening so I circled back to look for clues as to why the italics and eventually realized it was her talking to herself in her head. Why the writer would assume we’d know that, I’m not sure. I just read a script two days ago where italicized dialogue represented another language. Never assume we know what something is. You have to tell us. We can’t read your mind.
Once we get to the Kaufman House, things get sloppier. Everyone who buys the house is able to move in that day. Maybe there’s an “IOU” form of payment in real estate that I’m unaware of. But I’m almost positive this is not how it works.
And then, when the people in the house are killed, it’s never mentioned what happens to them. Is Annette burying them in the backyard? Are they being given funerals? Wouldn’t 20 people being killed in a house in the span of 2 weeks be cause for a police investigation? Some media scrutiny? None of this is ever explained. We’re expected to go with it.
I’m guessing the writer would chalk the answers up to “this is a comedy.” And this is something that’s worth discussing because lots of comedy writers have this approach. They don’t think logic is relevant when it comes to funny. In some cases, that’s true. If you write a really broad comedy, you can get away with a lot of illogical things. In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd and Harry kill a guy in the middle of a busy restaurant and are back on the highway five minutes later.
But the writers still went through the process of creating a logical progression as to why they got away with it. Lloyd didn’t know that all the extremely hot sauce they snuck on the ailing hitman’s burger would give him a heart attack. It looked like an accident. Conversely, there’s no attempt at logic in “House.” Four frat boys blow each other’s heads off and Annette chalks it up to a bad day at the office and preps the house for the next showing.
I’ll give the writer this. He put some real effort into the character of Annette. He gave her this whole backstory with a family that put a lot of pressure on her and was so ashamed at her lack of accomplishments that they made up a success story about her so that the rest of the town didn’t pity their family. That feeds into the pressure Annette feels to sell this house.
But the lack of research and logic was so overwhelming, it was all I could think about. I can’t focus on what’s happening in the current scene when I don’t know what happened to the three people in the previous scene who were brutally killed. To have the reader go with that as if it’s not a big deal is asking a lot. The overall approach to this story felt lazy so, unfortunately, I couldn’t get into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Sweeping under the rug.” We all do it even though we know we shouldn’t. When you encounter a fallacy in your script, something without an easy solution, you simply… sweep it under the rug. We hope that if we don’t pay it any mind, the reader won’t either. In “House,” it’s not explained what happens to the people who are killed in the house. The writer knew that if these people had public deaths, he’d have to write that into the storyline (media and police would need to be called in). On the flip side, Annette burying the bodies created its own set of problems. You’ve got this giant body count and no friends or family are coming around to check on what happened to the victims? Since neither option is ideal, the writer just sweeps the problem under the rug. I can tell you from experience and from reading thousands of screenplays, sweeping stuff under the rug never works. Just like real life, when there’s an issue in your script, deal with it.
Genre: Science-Fiction/Fantasy
Premise: A ragtag group of resistance fighters infiltrate the First Order-ruled world of Coruscant in an attempt to ignite an ancient communication beacon that will recruit thousands of worlds to come join the fight and defeat the First Order.
About: Before Rise of Skywalker, there was what was supposed to be the original 9th movie in the Star War franchise, Colin Trevorrow’s, “Duel of the Fates.” But Kathleen Kennedy ain’t being Kathleen Kennedy if she’s not firing a Star Wars director so she canned Trevorrow right as the film was about to start shooting. She then called up JJ Abrams, the director of mega-hit, Episode 7, and asked him to come back and direct the final film, which he did. Many seemed confused by the fact that Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow received half of the writing credit on Rise of Skywalker considering Kennedy so publicly cited a bad script as the reason Trevorrow was fired. Will that mystery be solved today via a Scriptshadow review? Grab your brooms, channel the force, and let’s find out together.
Writers: Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
Details: 130 pages
Yesterday’s post ended up being pretty divisive so I asked myself, “What can I do to bring everyone together again?” The answer came to me like a beam of light. What brings people together more than STAR WARS?
So I clicked open the script that was originally meant to be Episode 9 to definitively find out if Kennedy made a crucial mistake, allowing the superior Star Wars movie to be lost forever in the pages of a screenplay.
After the opening crawl tells us that things are, like, REALLY bad for the Resistance, we settle in on something called the “Kuat Orbital Ring.” Our good buddies Poe, Finn, Rose, and BB-8 have snuck into a migrant worker site run by the First Order hoping to free all the slaves. Unfortunately they get sniffed out and have to run for their lives. As they’re fighting, Rey appears out of nowhere with her two-sided lightsaber. She then gets the idea to steal one of the Imperial Starships hovering over the planet.
Rey’s able to take the ship using a stronger version of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Jedi mind trick, informing the ship operators to do what she says. They then fly the ship back to the Secret Resistance Base that Hux is trying to sniff out from the First Order’s new headquarters on Coruscant. Leia is waiting for them and, after a little chat, someone brings up that there’s this Old Republic technology underneath the Jedi Temple on Coruscant that, if used, could alert all the planets in the galaxy to come and fight for the Resistance. The whole clan agrees to try and activate it except for Rey, who’s having visions pulling her towards Kylo.
Speaking of Kylo, he’s in the Remincore System being trained by 7000 year old Master Sith Lord Tor Valum, a dude so versed in the dark Jedi arts that he taught Master Plaegius! Valum teaches Kylo a new trick that allows him to suck the life out of other life forms. So what does Kylo do? HE SUCKS THE LIFE OUT OF TOR VALUM, turning Jedi knowledge into a form of fast food. Kylo still needs to learn some dark secret underneath the temples of this planet, however, to become all-powerful. If that happens, he will be more powerful than 1000 Death Stars, able to crush planets from anywhere in the galaxy. Yikes!
Back on Coruscant, Finn is running around the sewers, looking for this darn beacon thing. He eventually stumbles upon an underground society of displaced Coruscant residents. He asks them if they’re ready to rise up and fight and they say, you bet we are! Hux learns about their plan, though, and orders his troops to find and squash these cellar dwellers. But that’s going to be difficult, since Leia has just shown up with the stolen First Order starship – a starship filled with Resistance fighters and tons of ships and AT-AT walkers to attack the First Order with.
Rey finally arrives on the Dark Jedi planet to stop Kylo. But Kylo ain’t having any of it. The two fight and Kylo easily has the upper hand. Rey tries to recruit all her Jedi powers to stop him, but then Kylo uses Tor Valum’s life-sucking power to suck out Rey’s soul! It’s not looking good for the Resistance either, as they’re getting pummeled by the First Order on Coruscant.
Luckily, at the last second, Leia force-calls Kylo, tells him to stop being such a meanie, and Kylo gives Rey her soul back, sacrificing his own life in the process. And on Coruscant, Finn finally got that message out, so all the planets come to help the Resistance. Hux is really upset that he lost so he goes over, grabs one of the many lightsabers he’s collected over the years, ignites it (it’s a purple one!) and sepaku’s himself. The Resistance wins and Rey comes back to teach a new generation of Jedi. Oh yeah and Rey’s blind now. I don’t remember why.
Let’s deal with the obvious question first. Is this a better script than Rise of Skywalker? No. Not by a long shot. It’s not bad. It’s actually decent most of the time. But the knock against Tervorrow has always been he doesn’t surprise you. He doesn’t make any bold choices. And you can see that here. People who complained about Rise of Skywalker being generic and safe – read this script. You’ll see what actual generic and safe looks like.
The first moment I knew the script wasn’t going to be great was the opening. It wasn’t clear why we were at this Orbital Ring place. I think it was to save slave workers but I’m not positive. One of the reasons the Jabba the Hut sequence in Return of the Jedi is so strong is because the objective is so strong – rescue Han Solo. And clear! We know why they need to infiltrate Jabba’s palace. We didn’t know anything like that here.
Then there was the stealing of the Star Destroyer. In screenwriting, the bigger the objective is, the bigger the plan needs to be, the more convincing everything needs to be, the harder everything needs to be. You’re stealing a giant ship here. It can’t be as easy as waving your hand at the captain and saying, “You’ll do what we say now.” There’s even a moment where Hux asks his side general what’s going on with the ship and he says, “Oh, everyone from that ship is on leave. Only the bridge crew is inside.” In other words, they made stealing an impossible-to-steal element the easiest thing to steal in the world. Storytelling works best with the opposing logic. You want to make stealing something the hardest thing in the world because that means your characters will need to overcome genuine obstacles to succeed. Everything your characters are after in a story must be earned, not handed to. So that was a major faux pas right away.
Also, the sequence that held the most promise ended up being the biggest dud. Kylo Ren learning from this 7000 year old Sith Master. We’ve already seen Jedis learning from masters in past Star Wars stories. But we’d never seen Siths learning from Sith Masters. So there was potential to really have fun with that. But we only get a couple of scenes with this Master Tor guy before Kylo kills him. You can’t build someone up as surviving 7000 years worth of Jedi obstacles and then kill him in two scenes. It’s inconsistent.
Also, I’d heard that Luke’s ghost was going to haunt Kylo in this. That’s another cool idea that we hadn’t seen in Star Wars before. But that happens for all of one page. So it was another letdown.
There was one set piece that stood out in the script. When everyone is trying to escape the Rebel Base as its being attacked by the First Order, the First Order shoots this giant laser beam down and blows this big chunk of planet up just as Poe and Rey have left in their ship. And the Knights of Ren come in, chasing them in their ship, in a sequence that has all this floating planet debris in the way. So, for example, they’re having to zip up the side of mountains that are floating in space. One of the hardest things to do in these giant event movies is come up with original set pieces. They’ve all been done. So any time someone comes up with a fresh idea, I give them props.
Now that I’ve read the script, I think I know what happened with the firing. The thing studios and executives and producers are most terrified of is the ending. The ending has to be great. Why? Because that’s what the viewers leave with. If you have 90 minutes of a good movie and the last 30 minutes are bad, that’s what the audience remembers. So that’s what they tell everyone else ( “The ending blew.”). This is why they did a 50 million dollar reshoot of Rogue One’s ending. They wanted to get that right.
I suspect that Kennedy fired Trevorrow because of the script’s ending. It’s weak. For starters, Rey and Kylo are off on some planet in the middle of nowhere fighting each other while the war was going on on Coruscant. So it felt insignificant. Especially because they didn’t do a good job establishing the power Kylo would gain and what he would do with it. There’s a reason the ending of Star Wars is so great. We see the Death Star rounding that moon. And we know what it’s capable of once it clears the moon and has a shot at the Rebel planet. We were told earlier in Duel of Fates that Kylo will have the power to crush planets from anywhere in the galaxy, but there’s no visual representation of that to scare us. The implication is that maybe it’ll happen some day. That’s not nearly as scary as seeing a Death Moon seconds away from blowing up a planet.
We may have forgiven this if Rey’s personal battle with Kylo would’ve been great. But all the fight beats, with the exception of him taking out her soul, were lackluster. For example, we learn the real reason Rey was left on the planet was to be hidden from Kylo. It wasn’t exciting. And fights are supposed to build. It should feel like air is being pumped into a balloon that’s getting bigger and bigger. But Rey and Kylo’s fight was more like, she got tired and beaten down and the two of them sort of limped their way to the end. And then Kylo deciding to give Rey’s soul back because his mom Skyped him didn’t feel earned at all.
So I’m guessing that when Kennedy hired JJ back, her primary directive was, “We need a huge ending.” And while I don’t have inside information, I’m guessing that was the motivation for JJ bringing the Emperor back. He knew he had to make that ending huge and the Emperor offers you that opportunity. And I will say this. You may not have liked that Emperor-Rey-Kylo finale in Rise of Skywalker. But I promise you that it was a hundred times better than the Rey-Kylo ending in this script.
I’m still confused about why Connolly and Trevorrow got half-credit for Rise of Skywalker. The only connection I see between the two films is that Leia does a lot of force-Skyping in this. She’s leading the Resistance. And then the life-force grab at the end of Rey and Kylo’s fight inspired the Emperor’s life-force grab at the end of Rise of Skywalker. But outside of that, the plots are very different. I guess that mystery will have to be solved another day.
Next Star Wars we’re going to see is October, when Mandalorian Season 2 debuts. In the meantime, there is no official Star Wars movie on the Disney calendar. Will we ever see a Star Wars feature film again?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You don’t get points for connecting the dots – The problem multi-narrative scripts (like Duel of the Fates) have is that there are a lot of plot points and a lot of plot points that need to intersect. For example, you have Rey over on one planet, Poe over on another planet. And you know that by page 60, you need them to meet up. This forces you to create some dots that must be connected in order to get the characters to the place where you need them. This can be tough to do. And what happens in a lot of the scripts is that the writer is so happy to JUST GET ALL HIS DOTS CONNECTED, that he thinks he’s done once that’s finished. This is especially true of beginner writers who just want to be applauded for bringing everything together in a way that makes sense. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of your work. Once you’ve connected all the dots so that they make sense, you must go back into the individual narratives and make them as strong as they can be. Duel of the Fates had a very “happy I’ve connected the dots” feel to it. Technically everything made sense. But none of the individual storylines, nor the larger storyline, were as good as they could’ve been.
