Sometimes, you have to get dirty to convey a great sceenwriting lesson.
Before I get into what I mean, let me share with you the impetus behind today’s article.
I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately and many of them have this “tame” feel. They’re pleasantly executed stories that never push the hero beyond mild irritability.
The truth is, most scripts are tame. This is because most writers treat their main characters like friends. Cause if they do that, writing the script is like going on a journey with your best friend. And that sounds a lot more fun than going on a journey with your enemy.
Yet, that’s how you should be seeing your hero – as the enemy. Your job, as the writer, is to try and destroy them.
Now, I’ve written several articles about this. And yet I continue to receive these pleasant casual stories where the main character is never pushed far enough. So I’m obviously not doing my job.
I think I finally found a video that can effectively get my point across.
Now, if you’re afraid of flying, I STRONGLY recommend avoiding this video and the remainder of this article. Cause things get dark. There is no happy ending here.
But, if you can stomach it, it’s one of the most valuable lessons you will ever learn in regards to how to write a great screenplay. So, with that in mind, go ahead and watch it.
Now, before I get into today’s lesson, let’s take note of how perfectly this situation mimics a screenplay. It has the ultimate GSU. A problem arises (a fire), which creates the story’s goal: Get the plane back on the ground. The stakes are enormous (they will definitely die if they fail). And then you’ve got extreme urgency (Estimates are that a plane has roughly 17 minutes to get on the ground once a fire starts before the plane becomes unflyable).
But, there’s a key difference in this story compared to the stories you write. In this story, which is based on a real life event, the heroes do not win. This is not Apollo 13. The two pilots flying the plane die. But not before enduring a harrowing and heroic attempt at survival.
One of the things that struck me while I was watching this story was the number of times the narrator would say something akin to, “But a new problem emerged.” Or, “But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.” These phrases kept coming again and again.
It started with the fire alarm. That was the first moment when the pilots realized they were in trouble.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
Three minutes later is when smoke first enters the cabin, making it difficult for them to see and forcing them to put their oxygen masks on.
“But a new problem emerged.”
The captain realizes that his control column no longer controls the pitch. Which means he can’t steer the plane up or down.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
The smoke in the cockpit starts getting thicker and thicker, making even small tasks overwhelmingly difficult. Because now they can barely see the control panel in front of them.
“But a new problem emerged.”
The fire has become so bad that it has eaten through the captain’s oxygen tank line, cutting off his oxygen supply. The captain has no choice but to head to the back of the cockpit to get the supplementary oxygen tank. But the toxic black smoke has gotten so thick that he can’t find it and, within seconds, he dies of smoke inhalation.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
The communications go down. So, the first officer can’t talk to the Dubai control tower to find out where he is. This forces him to call another nearby plane, to relay his messages to a second control tower, which then manually calls the Dubai control tower to ask the question the first officer needs to ask. And then this whole process is reversed to get the information back to the first officer. This, for a situation where every second is precious.
“But a new problem emerged.”
The first officer can’t see out the window or see the instrumentation due to the black smoke and learns, too late, that he’s way too high up to land at Dubai. So he begins a desperate process of getting the plane lower.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
When he gets the latest info from his wacky communication process, he learns that he is directly over the airport, still at 4000 feet. And he doesn’t have time to loop around and try again. Which means he’ll have to try and land at a nearby secondary airport 10 miles away. The controller gives him the coordinates to put into his plane to get to that airport.
“But a new problem emerged.”
After putting the new heading in, the co-pilot watches, horrifically, as his plane turns in the opposite direction of the second airport. In all the chaos, and because he could barely see the control panel, he accidentally put in the wrong heading, sending the plane in the wrong direction.
And then the final problem emerges. The plane gave out on him, plunging into the desert sand.
Okay, so why am I going into the gory details of this event here? Because here’s the truth of the matter. There were eight “things got worse” moments here, all of which placed our pilots in a more precarious position than they were in before.
In fictional screenplays, the average screenwriter may include ONE “things got worse” moment. The more experienced screenwriter might have TWO. But EIGHT??? Nobody includes eight. Why? Let me explain.
In this recreation, the writer/narrator knows the pilots are going to die. Because of this, he doesn’t have to worry about saving them. All he has to worry about is telling the audience what happened. This allows him to write in as many “things get worse” moments as showed up that day.
If, however, our narrator was creating a *fictional* version of this story, where the pilots had to survive at the end, he probably never would’ve went past the third “things got worse” moment because, the more dire the predicament you place your characters in, the more you have to work, as the screenwriter, to figure out how to get them out of it.
In other words, most screenwriters are terrified of painting their characters into a corner. And, therefore, they make sure to leave a big unpainted trail that allows them to walk to the exit.
What’s the lesson here?
WRITE YOUR MOMENTS LIKE YOUR CHARACTERS ARE GOING TO FAIL AS OPPOSED TO WRITING THEM LIKE THEY’RE GOING TO SUCCEED.
If you have a “characters must succeed” mindset while writing, you subconsciously place protective armor around them to make sure that they can get out of any bad situation they’re in. You mainly do this by limiting the number of bad things that happen to them, or, if there are bad things, you make sure they’re only kind of bad.
But if you write sequences like your characters are going to fail, or, in this case, die, then you’ll keep adding more and more “things get worse” moments. Which digs your characters into deeper and deeper holes. The deeper those holes get, the more captivated the reader gets. Readers are never captivated by a 10 foot hole. They figure the character is going to figure out *some way* to scale those 10 feet. But if you put them in a 100 foot hole?? Now they have NO IDEA how that character is going to succeed.
This will create more work for you on the back end to get them out of that hole. But I promise you, it’ll be more dramatically captivating for the audience.
From now on, when you write your characters into tough situations, which you should be doing many times throughout your screenplay, I want you to remember this video. And ask yourself, “How can I make things even worse for my hero here?” Smoke in the cabin? Let’s make that smoke so thick he can’t see three inches in front of his face. Need to get the plane down? Let’s take his controls away from him. Needs oxygen? Let’s have the fire burn through his oxygen mask.
The more peril you put your hero through, the more captivated we’ll be. :)
Carson gives notes on just about everything related to screenwriting – feature scripts, pilot scripts, first acts, first ten pages, first scenes, loglines, outlines, and e-mail queries. If you’re interested in getting some help with your writing, shoot him an e-mail at carsonreeves1@gmail.com
One of the more fascinating scripts I’ve read all year!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A CIA agent must impersonate himself in order to fend off the most daring Russian double-agent plan in espionage history.
About: This was a big 7 figure spec sale that went to Ryan Coogler’s team and Skydance. Writer Aneesh Chaganty is one half of the “Searching” team and a graduate of the Scriptshadow approach to screenwriting (he and his writing partner used to read the site all the time and, to my knowledge, still pop by) so it should be no surprise that I was very into this one.
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty & Dan Frey
Details: 113 pages
Hey, Superman might as well parlay all his buzz into as many sexy projects as possible
Note: This is definitely one of those scripts that you’ll want to read FIRST before reading the review as it has a lot of twists and turns. Someone in the comments may be able to help you find it.
I’ve been reading a ton of scripts lately.
And what I become very sensitive to when I’m reading a lot of scripts is originality.
Is the writer giving you exactly what’s expected? Or are they going above and beyond to outthink you?
Cause that’s part of the job description of being a good writer. You have to outthink the reader.
As one of you just pointed out in the comments yesterday, Jon Watts got lazy writing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He had to come up with a way to bring in the other two Spider-Mans (Toby and Andrew) and he thought it would be a cool idea right after Aunt May’s death to do it right on the top of a building in the middle of New York.
But then he was reading Spider-Man subreddits and saw that someone already came up with that exact assumption of how they would be introduced. The poster even generated an image of it. Jon Watts said, “Well I can’t do that anymore.” And he changed it to what we eventually saw in the movie.
None of us are fortunate enough to be guiding franchises that have subreddits where commenters can keep us honest. But we can keep ourselves honest if we’re honest with ourselves.
There’s a version of today’s concept that 99 out of 100 writers would’ve gone with. Today’s writers would be the 1 out of 100 that pushed the idea a step further. Which is why the script sold. I’ll talk about that in a second. First, let me summarize the plot for you.
Veer Miller is a CIA agent who has a wife and two kids. Although we don’t get to see him a whole lot with his family, we get the sense that he might not be the best husband or father. He also may not be very good at recognizing that.
One day Veer is shocked to be brought into the CIA Director’s office, who tells him that he’s been picked for a very unique mission. The Russians have located a man in Brazil, Pedro Barbosa, who looks identical to him. Their plan is to get Pedro and teach him to be Veer. They will then kill Veer and replace him with doppelgänger Pedro so that they have a mole inside the CIA.
The CIA’s counter-plan is to send Veer to Brazil to secure doppelgänger Pedro, then take his place, pretending to be Pedro. This way, the Russians will recruit him instead, and replace Veer with… Veer. This will mean that Veer will be in constant contact with the Russians, who think he’s Pedro, and the U.S. will be able to manipulate Russia by having Veer tell them false information.
So, Veer is sent to Brazil. Pedro is secured and sent back to America, where he’ll be forced to play Veer while Veer is gone. Veer then meets up with the Russians, who pose the first big snag to Veer’s mission. There are three other doppelgängers!!! That was not part of the intel. The Russians want to make sure that they send the perfect double-agent. So this is a six-month competition to become the most convincing Veer. Whoever wins, goes to America.
Naturally, you would think that Veer has a leg up on everyone. But as the training begins, he constantly fails all of the tests, many of which amount to seeing what he would do in a specific situation. Veer gradually realizes that he has always viewed himself as an idealized version rather than his true self.
In order to win, he must see who he really is and become that person. And who Veer really is, is the person Veer least wants to be.
This is one of the more clever setups to a movie I’ve read in a while. Going back to what I was talking about earlier, I receive spy ideas a lot. But the version of this story that I receive (99 out of 100 times) has the US using our protagonist CIA agent, who they realize looks similar to a Russian KGB agent, to replace that agent in order to accumulate intelligence. In other words, it’s the straight-forward version of a doppelgänger idea.
Chagantry and Frey ask themselves, “What’s the next iteration up from this idea?” And that’s how they come with this really clever version of a spy concept.
I can already hear some of you chirping about the believability of the doppelgänger conceit. But these guys actually do a perfect job of setting that up. They play footage of a real Russian theorist who had this obsession with how many people in the world look exactly like each other, and that’s the basis for how the Russians came up with this idea.
One of the things that all good writers do is they take risks. These writers could’ve written “Salt,” here. “Salt” was a gangbusters spec script from Kurt Wimmer that was just a good old fashioned fun spy thriller. And we could’ve gone that same route with Doppelgänger.
But Changantry and Frey took this giant risk and decided to make this a character piece. This story is more about who Veer is and how we, as human beings, see ourselves, versus how the world sees us.
And there’s some good stuff in here. There’s an actress playing Veer’s wife in the training and he has to have deep conversations with her about their relationship and the specific circumstances help him realize that he’s the world’s worst husband and has been terrible to her.
There’s a lot of that.
I’m not going to lie – I wasn’t 100% onboard with this decision. I understood why they did it. But I assumed, at some point, we were going to go back to the US and see some cool spy shit. We never did, though, and I had some FOMO about that. Or, since we didn’t go, maybe it’s the opposite of FOMO. Cause FOMO is when you’re missing out on something. Or maybe that is the appropriate way to say it—
—ANYWAY!
It doesn’t upset me that much because I SO respect the risk the writers took because it made this script different from any script that’s been written in the past three years. It’s unique. And how often do we get unique scripts? We don’t. If we would’ve gone back to the US and had some US-Russian spy set pieces, then it’s just like John Wick. It’s just like Mission Impossible. We think we want those things until we get to the theater and we watch the film and we say, “That was just like every other action movie I’ve seen.”
Also, if you have a movie idea that allows a director to cast the same actor in multiple roles, SEND IT TO RYAN COOGLER. This is clearly his thing now. And this has even more roles than Sinners. The actor gets to play 4 roles!
This is an imperfect script. It becomes a character-driven story and I’m not convinced they nailed the character-driven parts. But it’s such a fresh premise with a fresh execution – two things you RARELY SEE TOGETHER in scripts these days (I see fresh concepts with standard executions and standard concepts with fresh executions, but I never see fresh concepts with fresh executions) and, for that reason, I have to recommend this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Double up interesting plot beats and exposition delivery devices. Doppelgänger has an early scene where they need to test Veer so they can make sure that, when he returns, he’s the real Veer. So they ask him all these questions (i.e. what was your happiest memory, what was your saddest memory). This allows us a quick and easy way to deliver exposition (Veer’s backstory) via an entertaining, and necessary, scene. That’s good writing!
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
