The greatest newsletter in the history of Scriptshadow is now available for anyone to look at, even if you’re not signed up!

I’ve been getting so many e-mails from people saying they didn’t receive the newsletter that I’m providing you with a link right here. So, go check it out yourself!

This is easily the best newsletter I’ve ever put together. I create a brand new Top 25 Amateur Scripts list – all the best scripts from over the years that have debuted here on Scriptshadow. I take a deep-dive look into the best AI movie on the internet and what it means for the future of screenwriting. I review the hottest, and also weirdest, script of the year, which just sold to A24. I drop all sorts of screenplay nuggets throughout the newsletter. The average screenwriter is going to learn more from this than 4 years of USC screenwriting classes. It’s just a great newsletter.

If you didn’t get it or if you want to be on the newsletter list, simply e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

And here’s how to enter the MEGA-SHOWDOWN SCREENWRITING CONTEST!

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

The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Deadline is Thursday, July 31. Get those scripts in. Here’s how to submit!

Okay babes, buckle up your Marc Jacobs because we’re about to take a trip through the land of TV tantrums, Emmy snubs, and delusional hot takes — and yes, there will be sass!

Here’s the sitch: I am crawling across the desert of Post-Peak TV begging for a drop of decent storytelling. Where is my oasis??

Let’s review the battlefield:

–White Lotus? Flawless. Give me more depressed rich people, like, yesterday.
–The Bear? Girl. What is happening. It went from Michelin star to microwave burrito faster than my last situationship.
–Severance? Too smart. Like, I get it, you’re genius. I’m exhausted.
–Slow Horses? Every human over 60 has threatened to disown me because I “don’t appreciate British espionage.” Sorry, Grandpa, I’m bored.
-And The Studio? LOVED. But like every late night fling, it ghosted me. Rude.

So no, I’m not here to dissect every Emmy nom like Mario Lopez on Entertainment Tonight. What I am here for is this snubs article from Variety that’s throwing tantrums over all the “undeniably amazing” shows and performances that didn’t get nominated. Like, okay, calm down.

Spoiler alert: I do not agree with half of it and am ready to flip tables, Snookie-style.

So yeah — if you’re looking for calm, nuanced commentary… wrong website! Things are about to get snarky, dramatic, and a little bit ratchet. Let’s yank this list up our legs like it’s a pair of 2012 skinny jeans.

My hot take air fryer has been warmed up.

Commence politically incorrect opinions in 3……..2…….1……..

Surprise: No ‘Last of Us’ Season 2 Fatigue for the Show’s Key Players (despite weak second season reception)

With Pedro Pascal being Hollywood’s front man for Trans rights and Bella Ramsey being the poster person for non-binary humans, this show could’ve replaced itself with a montage of 80s commercials and these two still would’ve gotten nominated. Come on, Variety, you shouldn’t be surprised by this at all.

Snub: Patrick Schwarzenegger, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Nivola and Leslie Bibb Didn’t Check Into the Awards Race With ‘White Lotus’ Co-Stars 

This isn’t as damning a snub as it first seems. Cause all of these actors knocked it out of the park, especially the Terminator’s son. The problem is, they only have so many slots to put actors in. Some of these categories have as many as four White Lotus actors duking it out against each other. So, of course they can’t fit any more. Don’t get me wrong. THEY SHOULD. If it were up to me, White Lotus would have 87 nominations and take over every category. But I guess they think that would be unfair or something.

Snub: Elisabeth Moss not nominated for the last season of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Nobody has cared about this show literally since the first season. Ironically enough, the only time anybody knows that the show is still running is when these nominations come out and Elisabeth Moss gets nominated for whatever the hell character she plays in the show AGAIN. I’m guessing that, last season, The Handmaiden’s Tale lost the last 7 people who were watching it and, therefore, nobody knew it was on anymore, which is the only reason Moss didn’t get nominated again.

Surprise: ‘The Residence’ Star Uzo Aduba Scores Even Though Netflix Cancelled the Series

A rare Shondaland miss. The Shonda hasn’t been knocking it out of the park lately. It wasn’t the worst concept in the world (the president is killed in a whodunnit) but there was something about the tone that was a little too kooky for a drama. It also, oddly, felt like it was populated exclusively with Broadway actors, which didn’t help.

Surprise: Meghann Fahy gets a nod for “Sirens”

I am an unabashed Meghann Fahy fan. Or, as we call ourselves, “Fahy Fannies.” She comes from the White Lotus tree so of course I love her. Even though “Drop” did everything in its power to permanently destroy the concept of suspension of disbelief, I still liked her performance. And Sirens, while not great, was better than you thought it was going to be. That and it has the greatest young actress on the planet, Millie Alcock. Better watch out Sydney Sweeney. Millies coming for you!

Snub: ‘Agatha All Along’ Missed in All Acting Categories

Wow, are you telling me that a show that catered to an extremely limited demographic starring a character nobody outside of die-hard Marvel fans have ever heard of from a production studio that has imploded on television had a show that didn’t garner any Emmy nominations???? SHOCKING!!!!!

Snub: Tina Fey’s Buzzy “The Four Seasons” Only Lands One Nomination

This surprised me a little bit.. It surprised me because Tina Fey is thought of as the screenwriting messiah in Hollywood. And the concept is very awards friendly. It has this unique conceit of a group of friends coming together once a season. It also has a high profile death in the mix, which usually gets voters loins lubricating. And it does start to get its tentacles into you in those last four episodes. This might simply be the ultimate example of there being too much product out there and it’s impossible to keep up with it all.

Snub: Paul Giamatti Can’t Jump in With ‘Black Mirror’ 

This is a real shame because this was a great episode of television. It was so heartfelt and I loved that it reminded us how effective you can be telling a simple story cheaply in the sci-fi space if the execution is sharp. All you gotta do is lean into the characters. Again, I think when it comes to single episodes, it’s nearly impossible to stand out. There are 8000 new episodes of fictional television a year. People aren’t going to be able to find them all.

Surprise: No Acting Love for ‘Andor’ 

Unhinged rant incoming! The surprise here isn’t that no actors got nominated for Andor. The surprise is that ANDOR GOT NOMINATED FOR ANYTHING AT ALL! The show was AWWWWWFFFFUUUUULLLLL. It was a terrible terrible show with a terrible boring main character and a pointless storyline. I literally tried to watch the last season 8 times. Each time, I would fall asleep within ten minutes. There was one set piece where characters just walked around a giant house in the mountains and had the most boring conversations ever that went on for 25 minutes. Every night I would pick up where I left off, WE’D STILL BE IN THIS STUPID HOUSE! THIS IS STAR WARS FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!! How did we get here????? I promise you that George Lucas would’ve never approved of a 25 minute sequence where characters walk around a house and chat with each other! They spent 600 million (!!!!!!!!!) dollars on this show!!!!!!! They could’ve made THREE STAR WARS MOVIES FOR THAT. Instead, they made a show about the 90th most interesting character in the Star Wars universe who only got a shot at this show because audiences believed, when they were walking into Rogue One, that they were seeing a sequel for The Force Awakens! And that wasn’t by accident, by the way! Nobody cares about this show. It’s the biggest waste of money in the history of Hollywood and they’re desperately trying to justify it by clinging onto anything they can use to say it was worth it, such as Emmy nominations. The fact that this show isn’t seen as Ishtar x 100 is only because Disney made so much money off of Marvel that they could withstand a 600 million dollar mistake. Which is crazy but it’s true.

Snub: ‘The Bear’ Creator Chris Storer left out of the race.

You should be left out, Chris. This show was great when it was the only thing you were writing. Once you took on 10 other projects and started writing entire episodes in an hour, the show blew. Thank god some people in Hollywood can recognize that. Rotten Tomatoes still seems to think it’s Season 1 with the reviews they’re giving. I will watch episode 5 of the new season though as Carmy goes to Oak Park, where I grew up. :)

Snub: ‘Industry’ Is Closed for Awards Business

I tried to watch this show several times and thought it was pretty good. But it always gave off this aura of trying to be a bigger show than it was. It thought it was top-notch TV when it was simple cheap escapism. I do like that girl who came out of that show, though, Marisa Abela. She’s going to be big.

Snub: The Cast of ‘Righteous Gemstones’

I don’t have strong feelings about this show— love or hate. It’s just there, doing its thing. But it’s clear that the comedy is being shipped into each episode via a time machine circa 2005. The humor leans heavily on tropes and punchlines that might’ve landed back when flip phones were hot, but now they go over like semi-stale bread.

Snub: ‘Squid Games’ Ignored

Awwwwwww. Squid Games no get any love? Poor Squid Games. Poor widdle-iddle Squid Games. Let’s be real here people. This show only worked in the shadow of the pandemic when folks were desperate to escape their realties. Once the pandemic was over, the cream began to curdle and what once felt shocking now felt silly. I feel sorry for the people who went into seasons 2 and 3 thinking they were going to see something good. They must’ve missed the interview that the writer did where he said the only reason he was doing a second season was to get paid. Hey, props for honesty, right?

Snub: Natasha Lyonne Had a Losing Hand With ‘Poker Face’ 

Is there a show whose gimmick runs out faster than Poker Face? You’re tired of this chick by the 15th minute of the pilot episode. And this show was expecting awards attention??? Natasha Lyonne is like the odd-looking Sesame Street puppet that needed to be cut from the show at the last second. You can only take her in doses of 5-10 minutes at a time. Once you go over that limit, its like being forced into the world’s worst acid trip. Good for the voters for recognizing this show is all hype and zero depth. Sometimes they do get it right!

Snub: Allison Janney Can’t Get the Vote 

I’m about to introduce a peripheral spoiler here for The Diplomat. So, if you don’t want to spoil this show, stop reading. This show had the single worst cliffhanger to a season that I’ve ever seen in my life, and Allison Janney was directly connected to that cliffhanger. So, am I mad that she didn’t get a nomination? No. I don’t want any bad writing to get recognized. And the writing of that twist was — I can’t even imagine being in that writer’s room and everybody putting their stamp on it. If you want to know what bad writing looks like, Youtube search for the last scene of season 2 of The Diplomat.

The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Deadline is Thursday, July 31. Get those scripts in. Here’s how to submit!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a feuding rap group’s tour bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, three
hip hop superstars find themselves locked in a life-or-death struggle to survive the
night as they are hunted by a group of locals with a hidden agenda.
About: This script made last year’s Black List. The writer, Will Widger, has one credit, a co-writing credit on the 2020 animated movie, “Wish.”
Writer: Will Widger
Details: 104 pages

Is there any better predictor that a bad script is coming than a first page wall of text?

Maybe number 1 on the “bad script coming” list is a large page count (anything above 125). But wall of text on the first page is a close second.

Okay, “bad,” may be a strong adjective to describe “Detour.” Cause it’s not bad. And it has a fairly marketable premise, which is more than I can say for a lot of amateur scripts I read.

But the real problem here is that it’s so unimaginative! This is an outline that a freshman in high school could’ve come up with. Band travels in tour bus. Tour bus breaks down. Band gets stuck in town. People in town attack them. They try to get away.

What good writers do is they take age-old story templates and play around with them. They massage them. They play Twister with them. They move things around. They try new ideas.

A basic example is Twilight. Before Twilight, vampires couldn’t walk around in daylight. That was a new twist on an old trope. And it changed the game. It allowed the vampires to go to high school, where things could happen that hadn’t happened before with vampires.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Detour” follows a 2025 version of The Fugees, Re-Up, with selfish Lil Slip at the helm. Then you have the shy and thankful to be in this group Mayday. And, finally, you have the lone girl, Sanskrit, who resents Lil Slip getting all the attention.

After one of their concerts (and a wild after-party), the trio, along with their security guard, Charlie, and manager, Isaac, jump on their tour bus to head to the next city. At the last second, they learn that their long-time bus driver has been replaced, but don’t think anything of it.

Once in the middle of nowhere, a tire blows out. The next town is several miles away. They figure they’ll hang there until the bus situation is fixed. Lucky for them, an Uber driver, Ally, is driving by. She recognizes the band and offers to drive them into town.

During this time, Lil Slip and Sanskrit bicker over the fact that Lil Slip wants to do a solo album next. He’s promising he’ll come back to the group but she has doubts. Trouble is definitely brewing in paradise.

Once they get to town, they eat at a barbecue diner that’s surprisingly packed for a small town. Several people seem to know them and are big fans. But they’re all acting a little too nice. You don’t have to read through Robert McKee’s “Story” to figure out what comes next.

The town offers for them to stay at the lone AirBnB, which is suspiciously decked out in all new furniture and decorations. And the next thing you know they’ve been kidnapped and beaten up by the town members, who all wear white masks. It’s a little unclear if they’re supposed to be the KKK since I don’t think they’re in full white regalia, so I guess you could consider them the KKK Lite?

Anyway, it’s now a fight for their lives as they have to find a way out of this crazy town! Will they make it? Or will they succumb to these townies who, it turns out, may have a legitimate reason for killing our hip-hop group.

The most disappointing reading experiences I have are the ones where I’m way ahead of the writer. The more pages I’m ahead of them, the more bored I am. I had this template tabbed immediately and was a good 60-70 pages ahead of the writer.

That’s unacceptable if you want to be a professional screenwriter. Put something in there – ANYTHING IN THERE – to throw me off the scent.

Even beyond that, I knew this script was in trouble immediately. The first four pages show a concert where nothing out-of-the-ordinary happens. It’s all setup and exposition. Then an after-party where nothing happens. It’s all setup and exposition. These are the first 4 pages of your script and you’re already boring your reader. That’s unacceptable.

Contrast this with the opening of Superman, which I reviewed on Monday. We meet Superman right after he’s been beaten to an inch of his life. That’s how you start a story off with drama. You’ve created a problem that the reader must continue reading to find out if it’s resolved.

Will Superman be okay?

We must keep reading if we want the answer to that question.

What question has been posed after the first four pages of this script? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Where is the drama? Where is the suspense? The uncertainty? Why isn’t there a carrot being dangled in front of us? ANYTHING to get us to the next page.

It’s unacceptable.

This is why there are levels to this game. Yeah, I didn’t like aspects of the Superman screenplay. But those were PROFESSIONAL PROBLEMS. The problems in this script are AMATEUR PROBLEMS. Not knowing how to use your opening pages to create a dramatic scenario that will make a reader want to keep reading? That’s Screenwriting 101.

To the writer’s credit, he starts to set things up after that that give the story a little bit of suspense. There’s a rift in the band. There’s a crazy fan sneaking around. There’s a brand new driver for the next leg of their trip. That started to pull me in some.

But then we just know everything that’s coming after that. When we get to the diner, we know everybody there is on it. They’re all acting too suspicious not to be. When Sanskrit finds a hidden camera in the AirBnB bathroom, it’s the most unsurprising reveal in the history of screenplays.
I get that some writers are still early on in their journey and they’re still learning. I know that’s always going to be the case.

But if you’ve watched even a medium amount of movies, you should be able to recognize when you’re writing a common plot beat. Every common plot beat you consider, you need to ask yourself, “Should I be doing something less cliche here?” The answer isn’t always yes. Sometimes you want to use cliche because it can help you lure the reader into a false sense of security. It makes them believe they know where the story is going, which better enables you to shock them later.

But if ALL of your plot beats are cliched, then we’re just bored. You need to be more on top of that as a writer.

By the way, all you truly need is one STRONG unexpected plot beat and that can be enough for the whole movie. A great example of this is Companion, one of my favorite movies of the year. When we find out that (spoiler) the girlfriend is a robot, it throws us off-kilter. Even if no other surprises pop up the rest of that movie (there were), we know that they could pop up because the writer has established that something like that can happen.

Being stuck in the middle of nowhere with killers pursuing you will always give your story enough steam to persist. It’ll do the job. But it’s the difference between the middle manager who “gets the job done” every day at work and the aspiring CEO who goes above and beyond to come up with new exciting ways to expand the company. Both employees are doing their jobs but only one is trying to be great. Don’t be the equivalent of the middle-manager writer.

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

What I learned: I will give credit where credit is due. If you write at least one thing that I haven’t seen before, you get Scriptshadow respect points. There’s one moment late in the script where Ally, whose face has been caved in and she’s dead, still holds the key to escape – the band needs to get into her phone for information. They try to use her facial recognition to open the phone but it’s not working, so they have to rearrange her face by pushing it back together and holding it up in a way where it looks like a face again. It’s totally gross cause her face has basically been cut in half. But it’s also really funny.

What I learned 2: You know that moment in your script that feels like magic? Maybe it’s a scene. Maybe it’s a moment between your main characters. Maybe it’s this page of dialogue that sings or a really clever moment that worked perfectly? THAT NEEDS TO BE THE FLOOR FOR YOUR SCRIPT, NOT THE CEILING. When you come up with a great moment, like the above “face cut in half phone recognition” moment, that should be one of many many awesome moments in your script. It shouldn’t be the lone one. When you write a moment like that, let it inspire you. Make it the bar for all your other scenes and characters and moments. Cause one strong moment in a script means nothing. You need a lot of them.

Two weeks left to enter the Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Contest! Which is FREE! Here’s how to enter!

Genre: Drama/Prison
Premise: When a wealthy white family man accidentally kills a driver who nearly collided with his wife and child, he’s sent to prison for manslaughter. There, he’s taken under the wing of a black gang leader who plans to control him long after his sentence ends.
About: A big sale to Amazon of Don Winslow’s short story, “Collision,” that will be available in his short story collection, “The Final Score.” Jake Gyllenhaal will be starring. Stephen King says that Winslow’s book was “the best crime fiction I’ve read in twenty years.” The Final Score will be available September 17.
Writer: Don Winslow
Details: 92 pages

Collision was a weird story to read because the level of the author’s (Don Winslow) technical know-how is off the charts. You have to understand that I read scripts all day where the writer hasn’t even gotten to the point where they can introduce a character effectively.

With Don Winslow, this is a guy who’s mastered his craft – and I’ll give you an example.

This story starts off with a fair share of setup. Winslow is setting Brad McAlister up for us, Rachel up for us, Brad and Rachel’s marriage for us, their kid. He’s setting up Brad’s job and his overall approach to life.

If that’s all you do, that’s bad writing. It’s boring to read setup. So Winslow keeps hinting at this big meeting that McAlister’s bosses are bringing him in for. Brad can’t stop obsessing over what this meeting is for. The rarity of it implies something big is coming.

What this does is it CREATES SUSPENSE during the setup portion of the story. Which makes it more dramatic. Which makes us want to turn the pages.

You see this sort of technical writing mastery throughout the story.

So then why does the story never elevate above “solid?”

It’s a question I kept asking myself because I wanted to turn the pages in each and every section. I wanted to know what happened next during that opening portion. I wanted to know what happened next in the prison. I wanted to know what happened next when he got out of prison. And I wanted to know what happened when Blanton reentered his life.

But, I kept waiting for some BIG STORY POINT (aka ‘the inciting incident’) to arrive that would kick this novella into high gear. You may say, “But Carson, isn’t him going to prison the inciting incident?” It would be if the prison portion were the main story. But it isn’t. It’s just a passage of time he has to get through.

So when that inciting incident didn’t come, I found myself asking the question, “What is this story about?” It wasn’t until Mcalister’s old prison frenemy showed up and we entered “traditional movie territory” that an “official” inciting incident occurred (frenemy wants Mcalister to kill someone). But, by that point, we’re all the way at the end of the book! So the structure is all out of whack.

Maybe I should tell you what the story is about, huh?

Brad McAlister is a white-collar white dude who runs a hotel. He has the perfect wife in Rachel. And they have a perfect five-year-old boy named Willis.

Brad is excited because corporate is flying his whole family in for dinner. Which can only mean one thing. He’s being offered a promotion. Imagine McAlister’s surprise when he learns that he isn’t just getting to run a better hotel. He’ll be the operating manager for five hotels in the region! The promotion is way bigger than he assumed.

The family goes out to celebrate afterwards and McAlister has a few drinks. Later, when they’re walking to their car, Rachel and McAlister’s son walk first and a car comes out of nowhere. McAlister pushes them out of the way and the car stops inches from him. McAlister starts yelling at the driver for almost killing his family. The driver gets out and gets in his face. McAlister levels him with a punch and the man goes down awkwardly, hitting his head, killing him.

The activist judge for the case wants to make an example out of rich white guys who think they can do whatever they want and gives Mcalister the max – 11 years for manslaughter.

McAlister goes to prison where he quickly learns that it’s populated by three dangerous gangs – the Whites, the Blacks, and the Mexicans. The Whites come to him first but he doesn’t like them. The leader of the Blacks, Blanton, sees an opportunity. As he puts it, “White people can get into places black people can’t.” So he recruits Mcalister into his gang and protects him for five years, when Mcalister gets out on parole.

Once out, McAlister is the happiest man in the world. He can finally be with his family again. As luck would have it, someone at his old job is still a big fan and gives him his job back. So he’s still going to live just as nicely as he did before all this craziness began.

That is until Blanton is waiting for him outside his work one day. Blanton says there’s a guy who’s going to be staying at his hotel who’s a major drug dealer – one who encroaches on Black drug-trading. So he needs McAlister to kill him. McAlister vehemently rejects the proposal, until Blanton tells him if he doesn’t do it, he’ll kill both his wife and kid. Turns out you never truly leave prison.

Every time this story seemed to be leaning towards a “hook,” it would run away from it. Which was frustrating because I kept trying to figure out what the concept was. The closest we got was a white guy joining a black gang in prison. I thought, “Hmm, that could be interesting. We haven’t seen that before.” But McAlister does one thing for Blanton and then we get a quick montage of the next five years and McAlister is all of a sudden out of prison. And I guess we’re telling another story?

At a certain point, if you’re not going to choose a clear direction, then it becomes a character piece. The one constant is this character’s journey. So, the question becomes, is McAlister fascinating enough as a character for us to shoot by all the potential concepts we could’ve latched onto and, instead, watch him endure this?

The answer is: He’s just interesting enough that we care and nothing more. Again, Winslow is a pro. He knows how to make you like a character. So we like McAlister. But, this isn’t Arthur Dent in “Joker.” This isn’t Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. This isn’t even Richard Williams in King Richard.

It’s just a family man who had to go to prison and, once he gets out, in the last quarter of the story, he has to kill someone. It’s compelling in a low-key way and that’s it.

For me, I wanted a hook here. I literally wanted to hook my hands into a juicy fat concept. Everything here is too vanilla for my taste. But, it’s really well-packaged vanilla. Like the kind you get at Salt & Straw. So, for that, I’d say it’s worth checking out.

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

What I learned: In the last, I’d say, 20 scripts I’ve read that have involved crime, the antagonist threatens to kill the protagonist’s family to get him to do what he wants him to do in 75% of those scripts. It’s a strange motivator because it works so well – as soon as the reader reads it, they understand why the hero must do this. But it’s used so consistently in storytelling that there’s an unavoidable eye-rolling quality to the choice. I encourage writers to work harder and come up with far more creative motivators for bad guys to make the good guys do something.

What I learned 2: Whenever I read a script that has a late-arriving inciting incident, I assume that it’s an early draft and the writer is still figuring out the story.  This is often how stories are written.  You kind of figure them out along the way, and then in the rewrites, you keep pushing the main plot beats up earlier in the story until they align with traditional structure.  If you’ve been writing for 50 years, like Winslow, you can probably get away with a late-arriving inciting incident.  But, for the rest of us, I’d recommend rewriting and moving plot beats up earlier in the story.

Genre: Superhero
Premise: When Lex Luthor tries to take over a country in Eastern Europe, it will be up to Superman to stop him.
About: It’s finally here, James Gunn’s Superman, the movie that will launch an entire reboot of DC. Estimates for the opening weekend box office were all over the place. In the end, Superman settled for 120 million dollars. It is currently at an 82% RT score and a 95% Audience score.
Writer: James Gunn (Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster)
Details: 2 hours 9 minutes

It’s been a while since I’ve sat and stared at the blank page this long before a review.

I’m not really sure what to say about this movie.

I guess if you pushed me to give you a definitive verdict, I would say it’s good.

But the more I delve into the specifics, the more hesitant I am to endorse it.

With that said, there are some fun screenwriting discussions to emerge from this movie. So let’s get into it.

Superman has been here on earth for many years and he’s recently gotten into some controversy. He showed up on the border of Boravia and destroyed a lot of stuff to prevent a war. A lot of people around the world are wondering if he’s allowed to do that.

Including Lois Lane! Oh yeah, Clark and Lois are already together. Actually, they’re in a situationship. And she already knows he’s Superman.

A remote-controlled dude who recently beat Superman up was controlled by Lex Luthor and a bunch of his minions. They’ve developed an AI app that’s logged all of Superman’s moves from his past fights and can, therefore, predict what he’s going to do ahead of time, giving them a huge advantage over Supes in any fight.

Meanwhile, Lex is trying to gain control of half of Boravia. Once he gets Superman out of the way, it should be a cakewalk. Especially because Lex has created a “pocket universe” for his secret hideout. Lex eventually snags Superman and places him in a prison in his pocket universe, leaving it up to Lois and the Justice Gang to save him. But once they save him, will it be too late?

The first big screenwriting risk Gunn took here was starting deep into the story. This is not new to screenwriting. It’s known as “in media res.” You throw the reader into a story that’s already going on.

When you do this well, it’s fun because the reader has to play catch-up, which gets their minds spinning right away. However, it’s easy to do poorly. If you’re too far ahead of the reader and you don’t give them enough information about what’s happening, they can get left behind and never catch up. Be ready for the scorn of the reader if that happens.

I know exactly what James Gunn was thinking here. He thought: the audience knows who Superman is. They know who Lex Luthor is. They know this whole mythology like the back of their hand.  So he realized he COULD start the move in media res, and it would be easy for the reader to catch up.

But a bigger question emerges here. Did we start too deep into the story in general? James Gunn loves the original Superman, as do a lot of us. One of the best things about that movie was the interplay between Lois Lane and Clark Kent due to the fact that she didn’t know he was Superman and we did. There are very few opportunities as a screenwriter to play with a dynamic that powerful. And Gunn just threw that all away by having Lois already know Clark was Superman AND to already have them dating.

I think this was a really poor choice as it turned Clark and Lois’s relationship into one of the worst things about the movie. It wasn’t bad. But it was BORING. Which is way worse in my opinion. I did not care about these two AT ALL.  And it clearly goes back to that choice.  Think about their kiss in the movie.  WHO CARES!  They’ve been kissing for months.  Bad decision here by Gunn.

What’s weird about screenwriting is that a bad choice can, ironically, give you good writing opportunities. We all know how challenging exposition can be. Well, by having Clark and Lois already be together, it allowed for this scene where Lois interviews Clark as Superman. It’s one of the better exposition scenes I’ve read all year because it cleverly uses Superman’s dual-identity to add details we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.  During the interview, if a question was tough, Superman would stop the recorder, transition to Clark, and talk to Lois as her boyfriend (for instance, he might say, “Hey, we talked about this with each other – you agree with me!”  And she’d say, “Yeah, but I’m not talking to Clark.  I’m talking to Superman.”).

I advocate for scenes like this in my dialogue book. Interview-type scenarios (or therapy scenarios) are perfect for covertly disseminating exposition.

Regardless of any reservations I had early in the script, I liked the opening act. I thought it was the best act in the script.

From there, things got sloppy. I know a lot of people have said that this story was overstuffed. I disagree. I didn’t think that was the case at all. I never once couldn’t follow what was going on. Contrast that with the last three Mission Impossible movies where I lost track of what was going on within half an hour.

The problem with this movie was not that it was overstuffed.  It was that the storyline was lightweight. Maybe this is because I’m too “inside” to see this objectively. I know that this movie isn’t just a Superman movie. It’s a movie that needs to launch a 20-film franchise. And, for that reason, I was expecting way higher stakes.

Lex Luthor wants half of some tiny third rate Eastern European country? Who cares? Even if the argument is that that was a decoy move to take out Superman, it still feels small.

James Gunn must navigate a very tricky reality here. He’s trying to go back to basics and tell a great simple superhero story about the greatest superhero ever. But, unfortunately, that’s not the movie world we live in. We’ve seen every superhero imaginable over the last 15 years, many of which raised the stakes from previous films. The audience doesn’t understand going backwards on that.

Another screenwriting paradigm Gunn went up against was how strong to make your hero. This is something we’ve discussed many times on the site. Do you make your hero Robert McCall, in The Equalizer, where he’s so powerful nobody can so much as scratch him? Or do you make your hero Indiana Jones, who constantly fails and gets beaten up and has to work for every inch of what he gets?

Traditional screenwriting thinking says the latter is the better way to go. The more uncertain the reader is that the hero can survive in any moment, the more drama there’s going to be. Think about it. How much drama is there when you know your hero is going to easily win every single time?

So, technically, by making Superman so easy to beat up in this movie (heck, we meet him having been beaten up), you’re making the “right” screenwriting choice.

The problem is that Superman is different. He’s supposed to be THE MOST POWERFUL SUPERHERO OF ALL TIME! And yet he’s getting his ass whipped by predictive AI. It just feels… wrong.

And the thing is, Superman stories have always had this ace up their sleeve to counteract Superman being too powerful.  Kryptonite!  Kryptonite makes it so he’s got to be more clever in how he wins. But, in this movie, he’s already getting his ass kicked multiple times by the time kryptonite enters the equation.

Here’s why it’s a big deal for DC Films. One of the coolest moments in Superman sequels is when Superman finally meets somebody who’s stronger than he is. We didn’t think that was possible. So when the situation arrives, we’re shocked and scared.

But with this Superman not even being able to defeat a glorified robot, you can’t make this moment happen.  No matter who you bring in, it’s now embraced with a shoulder shrug (another super villain who’s going to beat Superman’s ass).  It’s a controversial choice Gunn has made because, again, in a vacuum, it’s the right choice. But for a Superman movie, it’s probably the wrong choice.

I mean, there are two superheroes in this movie, Mr. Terrific and Green Lantern, who are way more powerful than Superman! Is that the smartest creative choice to make?

If you want to make it as a big-budget screenwriter, one of the things that will be required of you is great imagination. Your imagination cannot be on par with everyone else. You need to prove that you are MORE IMAGINATIVE than the average scribe.

Gunn’s big imagination play here was the pocket universe. From a writing perspective, I thought it was clever. But from a movie perspective, it was a fail. It’s a fail because superhero movies have become terrible at creating totally made-up locations. They’re all CGI vomit at this point. But the bigger problem it creates is that we (the audience) have no bearing for what we’re looking at.

It’s like the microscopic universe in Ant-Man 3. We don’t have a single constant to latch onto so it all seems like muck. And when you layer on top of that bad CGI effects, it just feels like we’re in a computer. Superman completely lost me when he was floating down a horrifically fake-looking rainbow river, holding a badly modeled CGI baby. It was the kind of CGI scene you’d expect in a film from 2003. It was just bad. And when something is that poorly constructed, it takes the audience out of the movie.

Contrast this with the fight against the dragon earlier in the film. We have actual bearings in that scene. We see buildings. We see parks. We understand the mechanics of a city. We’re familiar with enough elements in the set piece that we can play along. I wish Gunn had stayed more “real world” with this story. Because it’s Superman. It’s supposed to be pure and simple. It’s not supposed to be pocket universes.

Truth?

The new DC universe is in trouble.

I thought this movie was going to open like gangbusters at 170-180. 120 is not embarrassing but it’s definitely not the number you needed to be at to launch a 20-film franchise. When Iron Man came out, it massively overperformed, which gave Marvel the confidence to go all in with their plan. 120 is the same number as Man of Steel. May I remind you that Man of Steel never even got a sequel.

Maybe that number is just the ceiling for Superman. This is as big as it gets no matter what you do.

I still think this is a good movie. I just wish it had been better.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Playing with the sexual tension of a potential relationship is one of the more powerful scene engines out there. So, assuming all else is equal, if you have the choice between that or already placing your characters together, go with the sexual tension.