Genre: Horror
Premise: Two sisters come back to their hometown after their mentally ill mother dies, and are dragged back into the mystery of what happened to their third sister, who drowned when they were children.
About: Universal preemptively purchased this short story. Janelle Monáe will star and produce. Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) will adapt the screenplay, which is based on the short story of one of the highest-concept writers in Hollywood, Colin Bannon, who’s made the Black List a record 7 times.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 27 pages

I don’t have a lot of time today so I have to speed through this one. Apologies in advance for any grammatical errors. And I encourage everyone to read the short story first because it’s a spoiler type read. And if you know the spoiler ahead of time, the story’s no fun. With that said, the only way to talk about this story is to talk about the spoiler, so you’ve been warned.

The quick and dirty plot breakdown is that a young girl named Sam lives in the South with her sisters, Riley, and Maddie. Maddie is the youngest. One day, when their mother was at the lake watching Maddie swim, she looked down at her book, looked back at the lake and Maddie was gone.

After that, both the mother and father went crazy. The dad just upped and hightailed it out of there without ever saying goodbye. And the mom was so mentally diseased that she poured bleach into her eyes, blinding herself forever. Social services came in, ripped away Sam and Riley, and the two lived the rest of their youth in foster care before heading out and trying to make it in the real world.

Sam would move to New York and become an addict and a dealer. Then, one day, she got word that her mom had died so she and Riley went back to their hometown to bury their mother. They hadn’t been in the house since they’d been taken away, and the first thing they were greeted with was a snake. Welcome home!

At the funeral, some real estate dude offers 800 grand to buy the house. Sam didn’t have to be told twice and invites the man to stop by the next day. But, on that day, as Sam and Riley clean up the house for his visit, they go downstairs and find a secret passageway, a la Barbarian.

They walk down a hallway and find an exact recreation of Maddie’s bedroom. Even freakier, they also find Maddie!!!! But Maddie is now 30 years old and wears a hood that keeps her face in shadow. She then screams, “DON’T LOOK!”

The girls run upstairs where they see the real estate agent. But it’s not just the real estate agent. It’s the real estate agent WITH A CHAINSAW!!!!!! WTF??????? He starts screaming to let him have her head or something. And then he’s attacking the girls. And then Maddie appears, lowers her hood, and we see her hair. Which is all snakes. The agent looks at her and, seconds later, he’s stone.

Yes, it appears that Maddie is Medusa. And that’s why all of this needed to happen like it did. And poor dad? Didn’t leave. Accidentally found her secret room one day, looked her in the eyes, and turned to stone. The problem now is that others are coming. Maddie can’t hide here anymore. Which means the girls will all have to leave together. And once they’re out in the real world, they’ll have to learn to live under these new supernatural circumstances. The end.

For the Win burger

All in all, this story was kinda clever.

It presents itself as a haunted house movie. The focus is on the girls coming back to their home and the home being freaky. And then, like I say you gotta do with all ideas, the author introduces a fresh unexpected angle. This isn’t your traditional haunted house movie at all. It’s a Medusa movie.

Bannon did a great job with his setup. There are about a dozen setups (the mother got into making sculptures – which actually turned out to be Maddie’s victims, there are snakes everywhere in the house, the mom bleached her eyes so she didn’t risk turning to stone herself, they find old stories about how their great grandmother decapitated one of her daughters, etc.) in this movie so that when the payoff finally comes (she’s Medusa), it makes sense immediately. Also, unlike most stories, the writer never tips his hand with any setup because we don’t even know this is a Medusa story.

So that reveal was fun.

I will say that it’s always a risk when you do the genre change-up. With this movie, you have no option other than to promote it as a haunted house movie. Which means that the type of audience that likes ghosts, maybe even monsters, are the ones who are going to show up. Unfortunately, that’s not always the same audience that likes Greek mythology. So when the Greek mythology payoff comes, you’re going to have some disappointed people.

I secretly like the genre change-up because it’s so challenging to pull off. You want to see if you can be one of the few authors to do it. Can you start a song with rap and end it with country? So I’m curious how people will react to this.

One more thing I want to point out to anyone who’s thinking about writing a script or a short story in this same vein. You’re probably looking at this and thinking, “I just gotta go high concept and that solves all my problems!” And you’re kind of right. It makes things easier for sure. But if that’s all you do, you won’t sell the script. I guarantee that the reason this sold to Janelle Monae is because of the sisters’ relationship.

Most of the smart successful people in Hollywood need to have an emotional connection to the story for them to pull the trigger. So, draw them in with the highest concept you can think of then grab onto their hearts with the best character story you’re capable of writing.

I’m proud of Bannon here. This is his most focused story yet. And, for that reason, it’s probably his best.

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

What I learned: Genre change-ups MUST BE SET UP BETTER THAN SINGLE GENRE STORIES. Remember, you’re bringing people in who may not like what your story is going to turn into later. However, if you have a ton of setups, like Bannon does here, then when we switch over to that second genre, we’re at least not surprised by it. It makes sense to us. That, to me, is what saved this story.

I have a new favorite movie.

It’s called For The Win.

Okay, it’s not a movie. It’s a burger joint. And it has supplanted In and Out as the greatest burger in the world. For those of you in LA, it’s on the corner of Vine and Franklin. It’s a smash burger joint. And it has a really great backstory.

It used to be this really popular French restaurant that all the celebrities went to. But then Covid happened. So they were forced to improvise. The owner decided to turn the restaurant into a temporary burger joint so they could deliver burgers to people during Covid.

But then something unexpected happened. People fell in love with the burgers. Now, it’s one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in LA and everybody wants some. Comment down below if you know the movie reference.

Why am I talking about this?

Because this weekend I had a choice between going to Jurassic World Rebirth or going to For the Win. And it wasn’t even CLOSE. I picked For the Win straight up. And then you know what I did? I went home and watched the original Jurassic Park to accompany my devouring of those state-of-the-art cheeseburgers. That’s right, I had more than one.

One of the worst things to come out of this new era of studio filmmaking is the sequel to the reboot. I can understand reboots. If something’s been gone for a really long time and we’ve worked up the appetite to have it come back into our lives, that’s a reason for the movie to exist.

But when you make a sequel to the reboot, it defeats the whole purpose of the reboot. The purpose of the reboot was we hadn’t seen these guys in forever. But now that we’ve seen them, we’re okay. We don’t need to see them again. Yet Hollywood keeps forcing this on us. It’s like when they announced the second season of the Full House reboot on Netflix. Everyone collectively said, “Uhhhhh, do we really have to do that?”

But Jurassic World Rebirth takes this issue to the next level. It’s a reboot of the reboot happening directly after the end of the last reboot. It’s like making a copy of a copy of a rebooted… copy?

And based on the reviews coming in, that’s exactly what this movie is. A trashy reboot rushed into production. And guess what, the audience knows. You can’t trick the audience anymore. But believe me, Universal and the rest of the industry is trying.

They are touting this movie as a giant success. It made 147 million dollars domestically, they said.

Well, let’s look at the numbers a little more closely. For starters, they’re using a 5 day weekend opening to get that number. The first three days it actually made 85 million.

To give you some perspective on where that lands on the Jurassic World money list, the original reboot, Jurassic World, made 212 million dollars in three days. The second film made 145 million in three days. And the third made 135 million. This means Jurassic World Rebirth made 40 million less than the lowest moneymaker in the series.

And it ain’t going to make that money up on the back end. Cause Superman’s coming to town next weekend and that movie’s going to make WAY MORE MONEY than everybody thinks it will. I believe in James Gunn. The dude actually cares about screenwriting, unlike these Jurassic World bozos.

I point this out because the Jurassic World Rebirths of this world are really bad for the industry. The industry will tell you they’re good. They’re not. If this movie had blown the doors down with its opening, you would’ve had every single rebooted trilogy rebooting again within two years.

It is important that this movie fails, if only because by every metric of goodness, based on everyone who I’ve talked to who’s seen it, it is the most generic movie ever. And I don’t support movies where money is a priority over giving the audience the best experience the studio is capable of giving. Cause the irony is, if they do the latter, they get the former! But if they only focus on the former, like they did here, you get trash. This movie is trash. You can smell it from 3000 miles away.

Why did that first movie work so well?

I did glean a couple of new lessons after watching it – that was, when I wasn’t shoving crispy meat down my gullet.

The big secret I learned about Jurassic Park is it may be the best movie ever at dangling carrots. Why did you come to that movie? You came to that movie because Spielberg dangled the dinosaur carrot in front of us. So when we sat down, we were a captive audience due to us only wanting to see some dinosaurs. So, for the first act, we just sat there drooling, until those first dinosaurs showed up.

But Spielberg did something clever. He then dangled a second carrot – the T-Rex. You could’ve had Jeff Goldblum reading an iPhone Terms of Service contract for 60 minutes and we would’ve been captivated because of how much we were looking forward to seeing the T-Rex.

And then, when we got the T-Rex, they dangled the next carrot in front of us – THE RAPTORS. The raptors were cool because not many people knew what raptors were going into that movie. And Spielberg did a great job setting up how terrifying they were. So, of course, we had to keep watching to see those raptors.

By that time we were so invested in the story, that they didn’t need to dangle any more carrots in front of us.

Granted, these new Jurassic World movies don’t have that same luxury since we’ve already seen all the cool dinosaurs. But that’s why you gotta put more effort into the movie than slapping together a screenplay six months after the last trilogy ended. It’s not going to end well. And it didn’t. And this movie will FALL OFF A CLIFF in its second weekend. And they deserve it. Cause they’re taking the single greatest movie idea ever and they’re driving it into the ground and making it not special anymore.

That’s all I gotta say. Next week, I’ll be reviewing Superman as well as my latest burger from For The Win.

I’m giving out 1 more – JUST ONE! – half-off set of notes on a screenplay. The first writer who e-mails me gets it. So e-mail “FIRST” to carsonreeves1@gmail.com now!

So, yesterday, I was bumbling around my movie streaming options and saw a thumbnail for the film, “Up In The Air.” I remember that that was a big screenplay back in the day (it actually got nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar) and I casually wondered, “What would happen if you wrote that script today?” And I honestly think that it wouldn’t register as even a blip on the town’s radar.

It’s just not the kind of material Hollywood is reacting to these days. It would be considered too soft. And that got me thinking, “What *is* the kind of material Hollywood is reacting to right now?” We knew the answer to that three years ago. It was social activism stuff. And then, before that, it was anything with a female lead. But, in 2025, we’re in uncharted waters. There is no clear trend to latch onto.

Typically, what you’re looking for when trying to figure out what’s “next” is a) whatever surprise breakout movie just happened at the box office. And b) what Hollywood has been buying up recently on the market.

What’s the biggest surprise breakout movie recently? Sinners. The film dominated the industry for three solid weeks, defying all expectations. Nobody saw it coming, but it achieved that most coveted benchmark in Hollywood—the strong second weekend hold.  So my best guess for what Hollywood wants next is big-budget horror.

This was solidified with Final Destination: Bloodlines, another big-budget horror film that did well. So, it seems like we’re in the clear here, right? This is obvious. Write big-budget horror!

Not so fast.

The one-two dud punch of 28 Years Later and Megan 2.0 made everyone in Hollywood who had their foot on the gas, ease up, pull over to the side of the road, and call their agents. 28 Years Later didn’t do terribly. But it didn’t do as well as it was supposed to. And then, unfortunately, Hollywood always remembers the most recent thing that happened. And the most recent high-budget horror film was Megan 2.0, which bombed.

With that said, big-budget horror (over 30 million dollar budget) is really all they have going for the town right now. So I would say it’s the best bet. You just have to come up with an idea that justifies the money. It can’t be a good high-budget horror idea. It’s got to be a great one.

Serial Killers are going to be in as well. Longlegs reminded the industry just how lucrative serial killers can be. They’re also cheap movies to make so you don’t have to tell them twice to start making that genre again.

Romantic comedies are also back. They’re not aggressively back. But Anyone But You’s success got a lot of studios flexing their jazz hands because this is another genre that costs them nothing to produce. We also just saw that rom-com sell last week, the one with Dave Bautista.  And “Fake Wedding,” which I documented in my newsletter.

Some great news is that both these genres sell well in spec script form. So if you like serial killers or romantic comedies, THIS IS YOUR TIME! You could definitely sell a script in one of them with a strong concept.

Now let’s look at what Hollywood is buying. Romance is hot right now. It’s not sexy (ironically). But It Ends With Us showed that there was a real appetite for romance movies, even ones that tackle complex subject matter. But what really solidified this was the sale of Love of Your Life. Whenever Hollywood pays 7 figures for a script these days, they aren’t just buying a script. They’re steering the direction of the industry.

High Concept sci-fi seems to be the name of the game in short story sales these days. We just got that time travel short story sale. We got the big alien hostage exchange short story sale. But I don’t think you need to only write these stories in short story form to sell them. If you write a great script in this genre, they will sell as well.

Where is all this high concept sci-fi desire coming from? Clearly, it’s coming from the fact that Steven Spielberg’s next movie, about UFOs, is a spiritual sequel to his old high concept sci-fi films. This is what Hollywood does. When they know a possible hit is coming, they stock up on similar concepts, put them in development, and then if the movie is, indeed, a hit, those projects are ready to roll off the assembly line.

But, if you’re going to write these as scripts, the script has to be better than the short story. The short story trend is kind of a con game that Hollywood hasn’t figured out yet. Since you don’t have to go into  detail regarding the story in a short story, it allows you to hide a lot of the story’s weaknesses. You can’t do that in script form since it’s the final format. But trust me. If you write a good high-concept sci-fi script right now, it will sell.

Finally, whenever there’s a vacuum in the industry, it’s an opportunity for writers to take risks again. Hollywood is always looking for the next great thing. But they’re especially looking during times like these, where they aren’t sure where the industry is headed. They can’t even count on superhero movies anymore. So, if you have a weird idea, bust it out. Start writing that sucker.

I will say this: That if you can package your weird idea into something identifiable, you have a better shot at selling it. Scriptshadow #7 Unproduced Script, Osculum Infame is a crazy-ass script that’s super inappropriate on so many levels. But it locks itself into a very identifiable format. Real-time setup where a woman accused of being a witch is hung on a tree to die and we follow her for the next 90 minutes as she tries to escape.

Conversely, as much as I liked the insanely weird Everything Everywhere All At Once, I don’t think that sells in script form. It’s too all-over-over-place. It only works as a writer-director project where the directors knew how to balance the wacky structure and endless narratives with perfect onscreen visuals.

But yeah, this is the time to write your “Bubbles,” your “The Lobster,” your “Bad Boy,” your “Dogs of Babel,” your “Meat,” your “Poor Things,” your “Donnie Darko,” your “Being John Malkovich,” your “Birdman,” your “Memento,” your “The Voices,” your “Pulp Fiction,” and yes, your “Osculum Infame.”

Or, just write something that nobody else is writing right now. Something out of left field. “Daddio” became such a huge industry favorite because, normally, that’s a romantic comedy premise, and then you opened that script and it was nothing like a romantic comedy. It was dark. It was unusual. It had interesting dialogue. It wasn’t afraid to tackle taboo subject matter. But Daddio wasn’t Osculum Infame. It was just a story. But it was a story nobody was telling. So, if you can do that as well, you’re going to get people curious because, right now, the industry is DESPERATELY looking for things that are NOT AVAILABLE AT THE MULTIPLEX, OR ON STREAMERS.  Because those movies aren’t doing the job.

And hey, if you can write it fast, you may be able to enter it in the Scriptshadow Mega Showdown – fhe only screenwriting contest that’s free. And the only screenwriting contest judged by YOUR WRITING PEERS.

HOW TO SUBMIT
What: Mega Showdown
When: Friday, August 1
Deadline: Thursday, July 31, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me your: Script title, genre, logline, and a PDF of the script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Genre: Comedy Horror
Premise: When a group of new hires gets invited to their company’s corporate retreat, things
quickly take a turn as they discover the only way to land the job is to survive the
weekend. Literally.
About: I believe today’s writer, Jackson Kellard, has a couple of scripts in development. But this is the one that’s gotten him the most attention, as it ended up on the Black List with 10 votes.
Writer: Jackson Kellard
Details: 117 pages

I feel like, 1000%, this actor would be in this movie.  Playing… someone.

There are a dozen ways to tell, right off the bat, if a script is doomed. One of those ways is if you see a high page count in a low-page count genre. Contained concepts. Thrillers. Comedies. Most horror. These are all genres that should hover between 90-105 pages. When you write a 118 page version of one of these films, it’s a tell-tale sign that you haven’t been around screenwriting for very long.

Yes, it’s true, there are 120 page scripts that read like 90 page scripts and 90 page scripts that read like 120 page scripts. But the reality is, when you’re writing spec scripts, a MAJOR FACTOR in their success is making things as easy on the reader as possible.

Because you’re not getting the high-level “decision-making” dude at the studio reading these scripts. You’re getting the secretary, who’s hoping to move up in the company, and they’re told that they have to read six scripts over the weekend and tell their boss which one is best. That’s the reader you’re getting. So, your scripts are never being read under ideal circumstances.  Therefore: Make it easy for them!

Now, I’ll give it to today’s writer that he has a concept that will get people to open his script. Which is how I’m guessing Onboarding got enough votes to make the Black List. The Black List is very much a ‘quantity’ game these days. The more reads you can get, the more people you have who could potentially vote on your script. This is a concept people will check out. But as I’ll point out after the plot summary, even the concept, here, has issues.

New employees for the company, West Bridge Capital, are informed that they need to go on an orientation on a remote island. There are about 80 of these new employees and when they get there, during the opening ceremonies, they all pass out. When they wake up, they’re spread throughout the island in various scenarios where their lives are in danger.

The group we’re with consists of Charlie (the nerd), Eva (cool tattoo girl), AJ (crypto bro), Andre (gay and loving it), Jane (old chick who tries to act young), and Erik (son of the CEO of the company).

Our group wakes up on a giant platform in the sky. When the ropes of that platform are released, they’re basically standing on a giant tilting piece of wood. They realize that the only way to survive is to spread out and balance the board, or else it will tilt and they’ll slide off to their deaths. They somehow make it off of this and quickly realize that the company is trying to kill them.

Charlie, however, reminds everyone just how hard it was out there in the job market. If they can just survive this orientation, they get to work at one of the top companies in the country. They all agree and away they go. Charlie, by the way, has his sights set on Eva, who’s way too cool for him. But that doesn’t mean he won’t shoot his shot.

They next end up in a cave that’s quickly filling with lava. An LED TV turns on and they’re on a zoom call with one of the managers, who informs them that she’s going to play a game of charades with them. Every answer they get right, a stairway is lowered. And if it’s lowered enough, they’ll be able to walk up it and get out of here before they’re burned alive. The answers include pop culture things such as “Scandavol” and “Caitlin Clark.”

Eventually, Charlie and Eva are split up from the main group (after they tumble down a waterfall) and Eva is able to hack her and Charlie’s tracking devices so the company can’t find them. While in the jungle, they stumble across a little mini town that previous survivors of West Bridge Capital’s initiation weekend have formed. There, they have little pun stands like, “The NY Steak Exchange,” where a woman cuts and cooks steaks for you.

The CEO of the company, Jonathan Marks, gets so pissed that Eva outsmarted him that he empowers his primary operator, Hank, to go into the game and kill her, along with everyone on her team. But Johnathan has pissed Hank off so many times, Hank does the unthinkable and teams up with the new employees instead.

Let’s start at the top. This concept is dated. I’ve come across this concept two-dozen times at least. I’ve probably read ten versions of this story. So, already, you’re in the hole.

Whenever you choose a well-tread concept, your only hope of writing a good script is taking that story in a unique direction. Either the execution is unexpected. Or the writer’s voice is unexpected. Cause the worst thing that you can do is pick a common concept and execute it commonly.

Now, while I wouldn’t say Onboarding’s execution was 100% obvious. It’d say it was about 80% obvious.

I got the sense that the writer wanted to separate himself via the humor. This is a very comedic script. But screenwriters writers don’t seem to realize that they’re competing with a level of comedy that’s beyond what even the solidly funny comedic writers are capable of.

It’s the same thing with tennis (hey, Wimbledon is going on, let me make this analogy). I competed up to a certain point, playing several low-level professional tournaments after college. And I’ll never forget the day I played this guy in the first round of the biggest tournament I’d ever played in and he hit the ball so hard and with so much spin that when my racket made contact with his shots, the ball would push my racket backwards against my wrist so severely, that it was painful to hit the ball. I’d never experienced anything like that.

I knew, after that match, I could never compete with these people.  Which is why I moved to Hollywood instead.  Yaaaayyyy!!!

Nowadays, any average person who sees me play, they say, “Wow, you’re good.”  And I am pretty good!  But I know that when I play against someone who’s an actual competitor, I’m not even in the same stratosphere.

That’s how I felt reading all the jokes in this script. They were fine. Yeah, watching Andre The Gay Guy get upset whenever he couldn’t vape made me chuckle. But to compete in the comedy space where people are giving you 40 million dollars to make a movie? You have to operate at a different freaking level. And this script never got there comedically.

Onboarding may have been able to still entertain me if the set pieces were strong. But they weren’t. We get a classic screenwriting beginner mistake where the opening set piece (the one on the tilting platform) was about 75% clear. Instead of what it needed to be. Which was 100% clear.

I had a hard time visualizing what I was looking at. To make things worse, the second half of the set piece had them opening up hatches and then bungee jumping down to the ground. Is this task about balancing or is it about bungee jumping? You gotta pick one. Cause I didn’t understand for the life of me how you keep the balancing goal while also bungee jumping. It was very confusing.

And then you straight up lost me with the lava-cave charades. That’s not even creative. It’s dumb. Again, a lot of what scripts come down to is writers either wanting to work hard, pushing their creativity to its limit, or taking the easy route. In other words, are you going to work that creative brain of yours until you come up with an exceptional set piece or are you just going to go with the first or second idea that pops into your head? Lava charades definitely felt like a first idea. And I was out after that. I knew after that scene that there was nothing this script could do to win me back.

With all that said, there’s a base level of know-how here which, these days, is enough to get you on the Black List. If you have a concept that’s juicy enough to get read requests, you will have enough people to potentially vote on your script come Black List voting time. From there, it’s just making sure not to make any drastic mistakes. Your script has to be professional. It’s got to have a 3-Act structure, it’s gotta move, it’s got to have basic character stuff (an arc for one or two characters). This script does all of that. It just doesn’t do anything more than that.

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

What I learned: This concept is dated. If you come up with an idea like this, you should acknowledge that it’s too common, and look for a version of that idea that’s fresher, more modern. How bout “Love (And Death) Island?” A bunch of Islanders stuck in one of those Love Island villa shows.  Instead of trying to stay in the villa, they’re trying to get out. Cause if you stay in the villa for too long, you die.  That sounds more current to me.

This is the biggest newsletter I’ve written in several years! It’s jam-packed with screenwriting gooeyness. I reach out to those writers terrified to share their work and pull them up from out of their mental graves. I dissect the perfect character-driven film to help all of you improve your character writing. And yes, the rumors are true, I RE-DID THE TOP 25 SCREENPLAY LIST. It’s not going to take effect here on the site for another 48 hours cause I want it to be exclusive to the newsletter. I wrestled all day with whether to add one of the scripts to my top 10 because it’s such a disturbing script.  You’ll have to get the newsletter to find out if I caved.  Oh, and all scripts on the list have links to the reviews. You could theoretically spend the next day just reading my newsletter, my screenplay reviews, and screenplays. I also take on ANOTHER short story sale – this one that takes a lot of creative risks, stretching the format to its limits. And I dig DEEPLY into all the new projects popping up around town. You are not going to want to miss this newsletter. TRUST ME.

If you’re not on my newsletter list, you want to get on it. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll shoot it over to you.