You may not know this but the box office whispers to us. Sometimes it whispers softly. Sometimes it whispers loudly. But it’s always trying to tell us something. As I scrolled down through this year’s releases, I could feel the list massaging new thoughts and opinions directly into my abgudala-medula. The first two months of the box office has given us four main successes and four main failures. They are…

Successes
1. Anyone But You ($88 million)
2. Mean Girls ($71 million)
3. The Beekeeper ($63 million)
4. One Love ($71 million)

Failures
1. Madame Web ($37 million)
2. Argylle ($35 million)
3. Lisa Frankenstein ($9 million)
4. Drive Away Dolls ($3 million)

What is the box office telling us with these movies? Well, first of all, let’s make something clear. Just because a movie bombs doesn’t mean that all movies that are like that movie will also bomb. That’s because there’s still something called “execution” in play. Your execution can be bad or it can be good, and that will obviously play into how much audiences want to see your movie. Air and Jerry Maguire are very comparable movies. But while Jerry Maguire hit a grand slam, Air hit a double. It didn’t have that sizzle-factor you want when you see a trailer.

I bring this up because Madame Web will end up being one of the biggest box office failures for a superhero film ever. And while I pointed out the other week that it was plagued by an all-female cast at a time when audiences are starting to rebel against that casting approach, the more likely reason for its failure is that it simply doesn’t look good. Going by the trailer, it literally brought nothing new to the table. And if there’s any theme to this list, it’s the act of RISK. You have to put something on the line if you want audiences to show up. Madame Web put nothing on the line.

Ironically, Sydney Sweeney, who has a part in Madame Web, also stars in the biggest hit on this list, Anything But You. Anything But You is about as old school a concept as it gets. It’s an assembly line romantic comedy. Ah, but here’s the irony: studio released romantic comedies are so rare these days that Anything But You IS a risk. The last 20 studio rom-coms failed. The prevailing thinking was you could only release these on streamers these days and you had to skew super young with the casting. Apparently not.

By the way, side note. Sydney Sweeney promotes the hell out of everything she’s in. All she did for Madame Web was show up at the premiere. That shows you her people were trying to distance her as far away from the movie as possible. But hey, some moviegoers are saying this film is in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category, a la Showgirls. I *will* check it out when it hits streaming. Which, at this rate, will probably be by the time I finish writing this post.

Mean Girls is the biggest anomaly on this list, a wild card if I’ve ever seen one. The film is a sequel, a remake, and an adaptation, all wrapped into one, whose genre (musical) was purposefully hidden in the marketing. Huh?? Chalk this one up to passionate fans who just wanted some nostalgia. Steven Spielberg once said, “The only sure thing in Hollywood is a sequel. Everything else is a gamble.” He may want to add “nostalgia” to the sure-thing list.

Okay, prepare for some box office logic hoop-jumping cause we’re about to discuss Argylle. Argylle is a super-bomb. Depending on who you talk to, it cost around 150 million to make, and it’s only brought in 35 million. Now, if we’re going off our previous talking point – RISK – Argylle is pretty darn risky. It’s a weird action-comedy combo that seems to be based around a cat. So, Carson, you said risk was good, right? Why was it not good for Argylle?

Well, unfortunatley, risk doesn’t only have positive outcomes. It has negative outcomes as well. That’s the risk. And from everything I’ve heard, this is a baaaaad movie. It’s a movie built around fun that isn’t fun. But I think the biggest reason for its poor (first weekend) box office was the fact that, when you watched that trailer, you didn’t get the plot. All you got was that there was a crazy cat in a backpack. True, you’re focusing on the element of your movie that’s the most unique. But if we don’t understand the plot, it doesn’t matter. Check out Sandra Bullock’s The Lost City, which had a similar premise. Their marketing did a way better job conveying the premise (which is a fun premise!).

The reason I harp on this stuff is because clarity is one of the most overlooked elements in screenwriting. Writing that isn’t clear, characters who aren’t clear, plots that aren’t clear, scenes that aren’t clear. Loglines that aren’t clear. We can’t enjoy stories if we don’t know what’s going on. That extends to marketing as well.

The Beekeeper’s success is more complex than a block long honeycomb. Here’s what shocked me about The Beekeeper. Late last year, Expendables 4 came out. Jason Statham was in that movie as well. That movie has a long list of famous older action stars (wait a minute, did this just turn into the botox office report?) as well as being part of a franchise. You know how much money that movie made? 17 million. Not even a third of this film. Why is that? I know some of you hate to hear this but I’m going to argue it comes down to simplicity. The Beekeeper has a simple easy to understand concept with a simple easy to understand plot. Expendables is big and unwieldy and there’s a thousand different things going on. The Beekeper is clean. Throw in just enough of a twist on the secret agent trope – the bee stuff – and you have that requisite “risk” you need.

That’s another trend I noticed with these eight films. Three of the four successes (Anything But You, The Beekeeper, One Love) are easy-to-identify genres that audiences clearly understand. The stories are simple. Even Mean Girls was marketed as a simple genre (teen comedy), despite the fact that it was secretly a musical. With the busts, Argylle exists as some weird action-comedy hybrid that’s hard to categorize. It’s also big and unwieldy with a lot going on. Lisa Frankenstein exists in a genre that’s an incredibly tough sell (horror-dark comedy). Has there been a successful horror-comedy since Zombieland? Drive Away Dolls is a black comedy lesbian road trip? It’s completely out of the purview of mainstream audiences (good script though!). And Madame Web… it has too many issues to count.

So the lesson I’m getting here is: Pick a genre that audiences are familiar with. Try to find just enough of a spin to make it different. And then write a simple story. If you want to add complexity, add it to your characters, not the plot. Hmm, interesting. This is the same advice I’ve been giving you for TEN YEARS!

What else has been going on out there? The Iron Claw ($32 million) has slowly creeped up to a respectable cume. These dark dramas are touuuuuughhh sells and one of them getting to 30 million is the equivalent of a romantic comedy in 2024 getting to 100 million. It’s a huge accomplishment. A couple of people have told me it’s great but I’m just not in the headspace for depressing movies these days.

Next week we’ve got Dune 2. Guys, I really want to be a Dune-Head. I promise you I do. But that 35 minute scene with Timothee Chalemet and his mom in the tent in Dune 1 broke me. I’ve had better experiences at the DMV. Maybe if every single person who sees the movie says it’s the greatest movie they’ve ever seen, I’ll go see it. But I’m guessing nobody here wants to spend next Monday hearing me complain about how boring Dune is. That’s the thing about Dune. It’s not bad in a “make fun of it” way. It’s just boring.

March 21 is Roadhouse and Freezy McTicklebottoms (Ghostbusters). Apparently Doug Liman is furrrrrrrrrrious that Roadhouse isn’t coming out in theaters. I’m right with him. That movie would pull in 50 million easy. It’s got nostalgia oozing out of its booze-soaked pores. The movie I’m most curious about, however, is Civil War. I love Alex Garland but I admit his movies are inaccessible to those outside the industry. Will this be the movie that breaks him out as a director? It’s a realistic look at how a civil war in the United States might go down. It may hit that sweet spot of being both politically charged AND entertaining. The latter is most important though. That goes for everyone. I don’t care how important your message is. Your script must be entertaining first!

What are you guys looking forward to?

I kind of wrote myself into a corner here. I created a Showdown month that was just like every other Showdown month (send in your logline and the best 5 get picked) except that I told you you’d also be judged on the first line of your script. Thus, it became confusing for me to choose which writers to highlight this weekend. Am I basing their entry on the logline or am I basing it on the first line?

I quickly realized that people who sent in the best loglines were not always the ones who sent in the best first lines, and vice versa. If I was to try and find entries that only had good loglines AND good first lines, there would probably be only one entry this month. So I went back to the tried and true – best loglines get featured, then whatever first line they gave me, they gave me. I’ll let you guys decide if those first lines are dealbreakers or not.

If you haven’t played Logline Showdown before, the rules are easy. I give you five loglines and you vote for your favorite one in the comments section. Votes will be tallied and the logline with the most votes gets a script review next month. You are encouraged to give reasons for why you chose your winner and feedback to the losers (but neither is necessary). Just so we’re clear: You’re voting for the best logline. But if you think the best logline has a weak first line, you’re free to let that influence your vote.

Let’s do it, shall we? It’s time for… FIRST LINE SHOWDOWN.

Title:  RAZORBACK
Genre: Action/Thriller
Logline: After his only daughter dies of a fentanyl overdose, a vengeful Arkansas hog farmer purges his town of drug dealers and then ventures into the jungles of Sinaloa to dismantle the lab and confront the drug lord responsible for her death.

Title: Mal — War-dog
Genre: Action adventure
Logline:  After stealing a traumatized K-9 from the army, a washed-up veteran battles a relentless posse through an inhospitable mountain range to give her a new life in the wilds.

Title: Bunker Mentality
Genre: Zombie comedy/satire
Logline: At the outset of a zombie plague, a group of high-ranking government officials struggle to manage the emergency response and petty feuds after they inadvertently trigger an overnight lockdown and seal themselves inside a secret military bunker – with zombies inside.

Title: Animosity
Genre: Horror
Logline: After he discovers the body of a murdered 9-year-old girl near his house, a popular horror author’s neighbors decide he must be guilty of the crime and take justice into their own hands.

Title: Tomorrow Never Knows
Genre: Thriller
Logline: In the aftermath of the Roswell crash, a hardboiled mortician who’s fallen for an army nurse must rescue her from being lobotomized by the military after she witnesses an alien autopsy.

Week 8 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act

Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow is guiding you through the process of writing a screenplay. In June, you’ll be able to enter this screenplay in the Mega Screenplay Showdown. The best 10 loglines, then the first ten pages of the top five of those loglines, will be in play as they compete for the top prize.

We are moving into week 8 today. But we’re still at a stage where, if you haven’t started writing your script, you can catch up. We’re only through the first 30 pages. So, if you can manage 5 pages a day, you’ll be all caught up within a week. Again, we’re taking our time with this one. It only requires 45 minutes a day, writing 2 pages, and then you get two days at the end of the week to catch up or rewrite stuff.

Some of you have expressed confusion about including these extra days. “Why not just charge through the script and never look back?” You ask. That’s totally fine if you want to charge through. But what I’ve found whenever I’ve written anything is that, because you’re learning about your script as you’re writing it, you’re constantly changing direction. You thought you were going down this street when it turns out it was better to take the alley. If you stop, go back, and change a few things, you can better set up that alley.

Of course, you can wait all the way until you’re finished with the script, then start addressing issues in the next draft. But I find that, personally, if a first draft is too messy? If it zigs and zags and drops characters and adds characters randomly throughout the story due to my changing moods and changing ideas, the read is discouraging. And if I read a draft that’s straight up dreadful, I’ll never go back to it. It’s too depressing.

One of the things nobody talks about when you start this screenwriting insanity is that every good script gets crafted over an elongated series of rewrites. With every rewrite, you become more and more numb to your story and its charms. The screenwriters who can stay inspired in spite of these lulls are the ones who end up writing world-beating scripts.

One of the best ways to stay inspired is to write good drafts. If you pick up a script after a break and you read a great scene or a great character or some particularly awesome dialogue, you get pumped! You realize that there’s a reason to keep working on the script. You need those moments because inspiration creates motivation.

But it works in reverse as well. If you read a draft and it sucks, you’re uninspired and less likely to go in there and try to fix it. At no time is that a bigger deal than after the first draft. Tens of millions of screenplays have died because writers have read that first draft and said, “Nope. This straight up blows.” So I say, if you have the time while writing that first draft to go back in there and make some positive changes that help your script read smoother, do it!

Okay, onto this week.

Pages 31-40 have always been some of my favorite script pages to write. That’s because they’re smack dab in the middle of the “Fun and Games” section. What is “Fun and Games?” Whenever you come up with a concept, what you’re doing is you’re making a promise to the reader that if they come to your script, you are going to give them what you said you would give them.

One of the more unfortunate script experiences I have is a writer will send me a script about a really specific premise – like a time-traveling ballerina who yields nunchucks – and the first set piece rolls around and it has nothing to do with time-traveling, ballet, or nunchucks. The Fun and Games section is literally for you to show off your premise. So show it off.

Using the Hero’s Journey as a template, this is the moment in the script when they first go out on their journey. So, obviously, they’re going to start experiencing the very thing you promised in your concept. If it’s a dinosaur movie, our heroes will first meet the dinosaurs. If it’s Barbie, it’s Barbie’s first foray into the real world. If it’s Poor Things, it’s Bella’s first foray into the world of sexuality. It’s sex sex sex all the time. If it’s Cocaine Bear, you’re going to give us a gnarly set piece where Cocaine Bear attacks and kills people in a way that only a bear high on cocaine can.

If your script is a brand new Porsche, this is the first time you get to take it out on the open road and rev that engine. So rev it!

Now, what if you’re writing a non-traditional script. Does the Fun and Games section still apply? Not really. If you’ve got a scooter, I don’t want you driving on the Autobahn.

But, if you are writing a slower script or something that’s more character-driven, this section of the script should feel like *THINGS ARE RAMPING UP*.

So if you’ve written Anatomy of a Fall, you don’t even really have a concept to deliver the promise of the premise on. But that doesn’t mean you can just make up your own structure and think it’s going to fly. Chances are it will crash and burn.

When you hit page 30 on Anatomy of a Fall, a movie about a woman whose husband suspiciously commits suicide by jumping off their home’s roof, this is the period of the script where the first walls should start closing in on the wife. The cops have questions about what happened. It’s clear they’re less and less convinced it was a suicide. It might be time to get a lawyer, which are heroine does. In other words, you’re beginning to tell us what this movie is going to be about. What we can expect.

Another non-traditional movie was Coda, which won best picture a few years ago. That movie started off being about a high school girl who was the only person in her family who could hear. Everyone else was deaf. The family made money by fishing. That was the first act and while it was all kind of interesting, we’re sitting there going, “And?”

The movie begins ramping up when the daughter starts pursuing her singing at school. She’s really good but she’s going to have to work at it. That emerging storyline of her singing teacher laying out what would be required of her to compete for a scholarship was the “ramping up” process that, all of a sudden, gave the script direction, and by association, energy.

Some writers think I’m too restrictive when I talk about this stuff. But nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t care how you get it done as long as you get it done. I once told this extremely talented but unorthodox professional writer, “I don’t think you should follow what I teach. You come at writing in such a unique way, that way is probably going to serve you better.”

All I’m doing is laying out the way 95% of working writers do it in Hollywood. I promise you there isn’t a working screenwriter in town who doesn’t intimately understand the 3-Act structure. Or character arcs. Or personal vs. overall stakes. Or what on-the-nose dialogue is. Why? Because they have to! They get notes on it from someone at the studio. “Your second act doesn’t move fast enough and there’s zero shift at the midpoint.” You’ve gotta know what that means if you’re going to address the note.

So as long as you know that “doing it your way,” is dangerous and untested, that’s fine. You have to take risks somewhere. You have to do things different somewhere. That’s how you create a script that feels unique. But almost all of your favorite movies have followed the formula I’ve laid out so far.  And the ones that haven’t, I can almost guarantee that the writer was also the director on the film (aka, they weren’t spec’ing their script out on the market). Let that marinate. :)

5 days to write 10 pages
2 days to do rewrites of those pages or catch up

Genre: Thriller/Survival
Logline: A famous former extreme skier attempts to re-ski the mountain that ended his career, this time with the son of his old rival, with the threat of an avalanche looming.
About: If the name Kevin Sheridan sounds familiar to you that’s because he used to visit the site frequently. He’s since become a regular on the Black List. I reviewed his last script about police corruption last year. A strong “worth the read.” Well, he’s back on the Black List with another script, this one more fun.
Writer: Kevin Sheridan
Details: 105 pages

The new script trend is here. Are you ready for it?

Extreme sports!

I don’t think you’re ready.

Free Solo changed the game. We had five big rock-climbing specs (two of which are being made) after that film came out. We had that extreme running spec from Colin Bannon. And now we’ve got an extreme skiing spec.

I ain’t complaining. Anything with the word “extreme” in it is tailor made for storytelling. Nobody wants to watch a movie about “calm” sking. Right? You want extreme!

Brooks used to be the greatest extreme skier on the planet. But then one day, he skied the hardest mountain on the planet, Alder. And it destroyed him. He went flying off the side of the mountain, broke nearly every bone in his body, and was never the same skier again.

Cut to present day and Brooks’ old rival, Rick, comes to him and asks Brooks if he’ll take his 16 year old son, Zack, down Alder mountain. Zack is a rising superstar in the skiing world and if he skies Alder, it’ll be his coming out party. Brooks say, ‘no way.’ Until Rick, a successful real estate developer, offers him a quarter of a million dollars. That money could put his daughter through college. Brooks changes his tune.

Brooks and Zack head to the top of the mountain while Rick, Brooks’ wife Annie, and Annie’s husband, Teddy, stay near the middle, much safer, part of the mountain, so they can be part of the camera crew that’s going to capture Zack’s descent. Ready, set, go.

Despite a few hiccups, everything goes fine. That is until Brooks and Zack make it down to their families. Right then a giant avalanche hits and there’s nothing they can do but prepare their emergency equipment for being swallowed up by this snow tidal wave.

Brooks and Rick get lucky. They don’t get buried that deep and are able to get to the surface. But when they look at the destruction before them, they’re convinced that no one else made it. Still, they’ve got to try. So they waddle up the mountain looking for any signs of their family. And they’ve got to work fast since both of them know… another avalanche is coming.

My whole thing with any movies that pair your hero up with someone else is that that pairing be interesting. What you’re looking for is two things. What pairing generates the most conflict? And what pairing generates the biggest emotional punch?

With Zack, you don’t really get either. Zack adores Brooks. So there’s zero conflict there. And when it comes to any emotional beats to mine, there’s no history between Brooks and Zack. So there’s nothing they get to resolve during this movie that’s going to send our tear-ducts into overdrive.

Also, I can’t tell what to make of the plot. On the one hand, we know what’s going to happen from page 1. We know because before we even get to the story, a title card tells us there were more people killed in avalanches in 2021 than any other year in history. So we know an avalanche is coming.

But then if an avalanche is coming, that means Brooks’ journey to reconquer the mountain that destroyed him means nothing. We know before the story starts that he’s not going to ski it successfully since the avalanche will come first. But then what is the character journey if it’s not about defeating the mountain?

I guess you conquer it in a different way if you survive an avalanche. But is that as satisfying as skiing it successfully? I’m not sure it is. I think this is a better movie if he beats the mountain at skiing once and for all.

All of this changes, however, if you view the script the same way you watched Titanic. In Titanic, we know the ship is going to sink before the first page and that script still works brilliantly. Here, we know the avalanche is coming so, from a dramatic irony perspective, it creates a ton of suspense. We know our group is doomed. And just like in Titanic, the plot is about how the characters handle it. Whose actions lead to survival, and whose actions lead to death?

But since that’s the story engine that’s driving our interest, I’m not sure what all the setup was about. The setup is literally setting up an entirely different movie. If this is going to be an avalanche movie, we should be building the plot around that. Probably a group of skiing friends who decide to challenge themselves on one of the most dangerous ski runs in the world.

I also wanted more uncertainty in this story. For some reason, I knew everybody was going to be okay. Kevin would use these phrases like, “There’s no way someone could’ve lived through that,” which made me certain that that’s exactly what they had done. In a movie like this, you have to kill some people off. And not the least most important character. Cause, to Kevin’s credit, he does kill off Teddy. But Teddy is the character we care least about. If you’re going to kill someone off, kill off Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whenever you kill off a serious character, it tells your reader you mean business. No one is safe.

Remember when Game of Thrones was at is most unstoppable? It was after the Red Wedding, right? When major characters were slaughtered. We watched that show after that thinking no one was safe, which created an exciting undercurrent to every episode. But in those final seasons? Nobody important died. All of a sudden, the show wasn’t as cool.

Kevin does a good job describing the crappy situations our characters are in. For example, he doesn’t just say that a character is “buried.” He reminds us that they’re buried under snow that has been compressed so tightly due to the pressure of tons of it all racing down the mountain that it is the equivalent of being buried in concrete.

And there’s some cool stuff you learn about avalanche airbags and beacon trackers. It reminded me of James Cameron’s brilliant alien trackers in Aliens. Beep…beep…beep…beep. Except now you’re trying to get to the beacon instead of get away from it. And time is of the essence because they probably can’t breathe under there.

There’s one moment where they track Zack’s beacon, which beeps them to the spot where he’s buried. Brooks digs furiously, finding the airbag and tracker but… no Zack. They realize Zack has been separated from his beacon. He could literally be buried anywhere. It was a harrowing moment.

But what happened next is the epitome of what was wrong with this script. Seconds later, Zack stands up a few hundred feet up the hill and yells out to them. Zack is fine. Not just that. Zack is fine… without our hero’s help. If our hero isn’t solving problems, why even have a hero? Especially in a movie like this, people shouldn’t be miraculously fine without our hero lifting a finger.

Having said that, there currently aren’t any movies like this on the market. Extreme skiing and avalanches are marketable. If I had to guess, I’d say that this script is rewritten to lean into one or the other so it feels more singular. But it could definitely be a film. What’s more cinematic than extreme skiing in the face of an avalanche?

[ ] tumble off the side of the mountain
[x] get stuck on the ski lift for two hours
[ ] A cozy ski down the mountain
[ ] pull off your first ever backflip
[ ] double diamond mastery

What I learned: Be careful that you don’t telegraph what’s going to happen with the way you’re describing things. If you keep writing phrases like, “There’s no way anyone could’ve made it through that,” or “Even if they can get down to her in time, there’s a one-in-a-million shot she’s alive,” trust me when I say that we know the character is alive.

What I learned: When writing about things that have a lot of subject-specific technical terminology, which this had, don’t leave the reader behind. Give them an alternative reading of that stuff we understand. Kevin does that here. After giving us a technical visual of our two skiers barreling down the slope, he says this: “If this means nothing to you, that’s okay. Just know that this is a run no human being should ever attempt to ski.” I bring this up because I always had this issue when writing tennis scripts. I’d think, “Nobody knows what a topspin serve is. Or a slice backhand crosscourt winner.” I should’ve tacked on more sentences like Kevin wrote here.

February Showdown Deadline is THIS THURSDAY! It is the “First Line Showdown.” Details are here at this link. Get those submissions in!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A Pentester (ethical hacker who plans cyber attacks to help organizations identify security vulnerabilities) is set up in the murder of one of the richest most influential men in the world.
About: This script finished with 12 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is also a director. His most recent movie is the 2020 film, Cagefighter.
Writer: Jesse Quiñones
Details: 122 pages

On-the-run thrillers are tough to pull off because your hero is doing so much running that it’s hard to add plot beyond the typical, “The cops are getting closer.” “The hero barely escapes them once again.” “Got to get the MacGuffin.” So the scripts end up being front-loaded. The first act where all the espoionagy stuff is happening is fun. Then, after that, it’s run-run-run-as-fast-as-you-can.

It still shocks me how good The Fugitive was at evading this trap. One thing it did better than any chase movie I’ve ever seen is it made Richard Kimble look like he was for sure caught in every set piece. And then, somehow, he would escape at the last second. That image of Samuel Gerard shooting Kimble in the head but the bullets are stopped at the last second by the bulletproof glass – that was movie heaven.

Anyway, let’s see if today’s script can dance on the same floor as The Fugitive.

30-something Kris is a pentester. He’s hired by companies to break into their systems and retrieve data. He’s helped 200 companies expose where their weaknesses are. He’s got his own “Q” in Maria, who guides him through an earpiece whenever he goes into a company. And there’s a budding romance between the two as well.

Kris is hired by a guy named Noah who is a 3rd party security advisor for a social media site called Kinetic. Kinetic has a unique “Mission Impossible 1” type security system that can’t be breached remotely. So Kris goes in to breach it from the inside, using an unsuspecting employee named Gwen to gain access.

But while downloading data from their server, he hears a scream and runs into the office area to find that the CEO, Milton Metcalfe, has been stabbed. A masked man attacks Kris, trying to grab the jump drive he used for the company server, but is unsuccessful and flees. Kris quickly puts together that he’s been set up and will now be the primary suspect in Milton’s murder. So he hides the jump drive before getting arrested.

When Kris realizes the cops aren’t buying his story, he escapes. From there, it’s a classic Fugitive scenario. He has to evade the pursuing cops while trying to figure out and prove Noah’s ultimate plan. His ace in the hole is that hidden jump drive. If he could get that, he may have the information he needs to prove he had nothing to do with this. But how exactly is he going to get that drive?

The Pentester is one of those script reads that has you gritting your teeth and balling your fists because it’s always on the cusp of being good but then something comes along to hold it back.

The first half of this script is really fun. It’s a little light in the way that it deals with its subject matter. But it’s still fun. And you love the irony. This guy who makes a living by making people look like fools has a fool made out of him. For once, he is the mark. Everything throughout those first 30-40 pages delivered on the promise of that premise.

But then the first hiccup arrived. Kris kills the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg. And there are… how many cops looking for him? Two cops. Two local cops are hunting down the prime suspect who murdered Mark Zuckerberg?

I remember with The Fugitive that Richard Kimble’s face was all over the news in Chicago because he was a wealthy doctor and it was a salacious story that he “killed” his wife. Well, I would imagine that this story here would be 1000 times bigger? Possibly 10,000 times with social media? But the script never addresses that.

As you’re digesting that oversight, the script pulls you back in. The cops toss his place up and find out he has a father in prison. They go get the father, release him in a trade for information, and the father starts putting together his own little mobile tech station to help out his son. It was cool! I was back in!

But then Kris mopes back into Gwen’s life, Gwen being the one he tricked during a fake date in order to GET access to Kinetic and “kill” the CEO, and she not only lets him into her place… SHE SLEEPS WITH HIM!

Just hang with me for a second on that one. You work for Elon Musk. Some guy cons you into giving you info that allows him to break in and steal vital information from Twitter – a mistake that will come back to you if the police learn you’re involved. And then you sleep with the guy when he comes back later. The guy that the entire world is talking about as the killer of Elon Musk. Put legal ramifications aside. In 2024, with the way social media attacks and cancels people, you wouldn’t be able to do anything for the rest of your life, you’d get raked over the coals so badly. I understand carnal desire. But no one’s that stupid.

We often talk about delivering on the Promise of the Premise. But you also must deliver on the Promise of the Genre. If you’re writing in the comedy genre, you gotta be funny. If you’re writing in the Action genre, you gotta have great action set pieces. And if you’re writing in the espionage thriller genre, you need the plot beats built around espionage to be convincing. The laziness of that plot point was the dagger that made this script stagger (more on this below).

I’m not saying it killed the script. But it wounded it.

That’s what was so frustrating about this script is that it *did* have good thriller moments. You need to shock and surprise readers in this genre. And the writer did so consistently. (Spoiler) He built this really likable character in Kris’s partner, Maria. So when she’s killed off in a quick and brutal way, I didn’t see it coming.

But the writer took too many scenes and plot beats off. “Taking scenes off” means, “Oh, I wrote a good scene there. So the next two scenes don’t have to be great.” Or, “I wrote a great set piece there. So it doesn’t matter that the next one is only kind of good.” You can’t take scenes off in a script. I mean, you can. But you decrease the chances of hitting that home run that wins everyone over.

I was so down the middle with this script that I knew it was going to come down to the ending. If it was good, the script gets a positive grade.  Average or bad, negative grade.  The ending was… okay. A Russian warlord comes in but it makes sense. This movie is about controlling information over social media and a Russian wanted access to Kinetic users in order to manipulate the next election. And we even get an unexpected twist in regards to Gwen that helps us, retroactively, explain A LITTLE of that earlier behavior I bashed. But the ending didn’t feel airtight. And it needs to be airtight in a movie like this.

Close to a “worth the read” but not quite there.

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

What I learned: A common piece of advice you hear in screenwriting is to KEEP YOUR SCRIPT MOVING. What does that mean, though, exactly? Here’s a good example of it. We have this fun cold open where Kris steals a security guard’s info in order to break into the company he works for. Now, normally, after a big fun scene like this, the writer will slow down. He’ll cash in on the credit he earned from that fun scene to make you slug through a few character intros or setup scenes. But notice how Quinones doesn’t do that. He keeps the momentum going…