Ant-Man is the riskiest studio bet of the year. Did its rocky development process ultimately doom it? Or did the little superhero film that could pull off a cinematic miracle?
Genre: Action/Heist/Super-hero
Premise: A high-profile burglar is recruited by a famous scientist to break into his old company utilizing a cutting-edge shrinking technology.
About: When newly-formed Marvel Studios came up with their game plan (create an interconnected universe of movies just like they’d done with their comic books), Hollywood laughed. And why wouldn’t they? The town is infamous for ignoring any model outside of the ones they’ve carefully cultivated themselves. Boy were they thrown when the prodco then rode their model to become the most successful in the business. But even the biggest Marvel supporters did a double George Takei when the caped company announced they’d be making a film about Ant-Man. The character seemed to embody the opposite of what made super-hero characters so cool (being big, strong, having powers, not talking to ants). So putting 130 million dollars into a super-hero version of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” seemed about as smart as casting Rick Moranis as Thor. Complicating the matter even further, geek superstar director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), who had been developing the movie for ten years, was axed by Marvel Don, Kevin Feige, at the last second. Rumors were that Wright’s vision of the story was too weird and wouldn’t fit into the Marvel universe. He was replaced by a director with only slightly more notoriety than your average craft services table – Payton Reed. This coincided with comedy writer Adam McKay (Step-Brothers, Anchorman) coming in to rewrite the script with the star of the film, Paul Rudd. All of a sudden, the industry wondered whether Will Ferrell would be playing the film’s villain, More Cowbell. While the movie didn’t do typical Marvel-like numbers, it made a respectable 57 million dollars this weekend, and introduced the world to one of the more unique super-heroes in Marvel’s antsenal.
Writers: Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd. Story by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish. Based on the comic book character created by Stan Lee & Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby
Details: 110 minutes
Ant-Man may seem like a tiny movie in the grand scheme of things, but there’s actually a lot to learn from the film and its much-publicized development. The biggest thing I took away from it was how hard it is to do something different in this business.
As I’ve been saying for awhile now, if superhero movies are going to survive, they’ll need to evolve. We’re getting to the point where a new super-hero film is coming out every month. It’s only a matter of time before the Marvel methane bubble bursts.
That’s why Feige is introducing a character like Ant-Man. It’s why DC decided to make Suicide Squad. It’s why we’re getting a foul-mouthed vigilante super-hero in Deadpool. It’s why Warners feels they need to put both of their prime-time super-heroes in the same movie. “Different” may be the only way to survive in this oversaturated market.
But watching the delusional development of Ant-Man go down proves just how terrified Hollywood is of “different.” They said to themselves, “We already have a super-hero who’s different. Do we want a director who’s different too? Wouldn’t that make things… too different?” So they got rid of Edgar Wright and brought in the most vanilla director this side of an oversized teaspoon.
What was the result? Well, a pretty vanilla movie. A lot of safe choices. A lot of film school 101 shots (oh, here comes that establishing crane shot that starts 1 story high then cranes down to street level just as the car door opens and our hero gets out!).
But what’s interesting about Ant-Man is that it still contains echoes of Wright’s original vision. So we get these moments of divine inspiration that seem like they belong in a different movie. And that’s because they’re from a different movie – the movie the previous director wrote. I mean, I’d be very surprised if Reed had anything to do with the kid’s train set action piece in the film’s climax.
So what’s Ant-Man about? Glad you asked. An old scientist named Hank Pym, who used to run one of the biggest companies in the world, becomes concerned when his successor, the potentially crazy Darren Cross, shifts all the company resources into creating shrunk-down super-soldiers who can infiltrate enemy lines without being noticed.
Little does Cross know, Pym figured out how to do this 50 years ago, and already has one of these super-soldier suits, which allows whoever wears it to shrink down to the size of an ant. Fearing Cross will use the technology for evil, Pym recruits local burglar Scott Lang to wear his suit, sneak into his old company, and steal Cross’s prototype suit, a jacked-up version of the Ant-Man suit code-named “Yellow-Jacket.”
Lang trains with Pym and his hot daughter, Hope, who happens to work with Cross. There’s some sexual tension there. We learn that Pym and his daughter have a strained relationship. Oh, and let’s not forget that Lang learns how to work with and control different species of ants to aid him in his heist. In the end, Cross catches on to what’s happening, hops into the Yellow Jacket suit, and the two micro-battle their way to a sub-atomic climax, which is the same way most of my sexual exploits end.
While the execution is freakishly vanilla-extract throughout the bake sale that is Ant-Man, there are a few lessons to learn here. For starters, in the blockbuster world, you want to try and find ideas that allow you to do things that haven’t been done before.
Having super-hero battles take place on a living room rug is a very unique set-up. We haven’t seen that before and it allows you to try things that haven’t been done in this genre. This doesn’t apply exclusively to super-hero movies either. You should be looking to do this with any movie idea.
And often that opportunity is right under your nose. That’s because people see genres the way they’ve always been, not the way they could be. When I say “super-hero movie,” you probably think capes and large city battles, right? Why? Why can’t a super hero battle take place inside the hard drive of a desktop computer?
Your job, as a writer, is to look to the future, not the past. Find the angle that makes a well-established genre fresh. People were making the same freaking Godzilla movie for 40 years until someone decided to tell the story from a hand-held camera POV (Cloverfield). That fresh new angle is there for the taking. Take it!
Next up, super-hero movies don’t have an official format outside of maybe “origin movie.” But origin stories have become so standard, audiences are bored with them. For this reason, you want to look for a genre within the genre.
Ant-Man’s smartest decision was becoming a heist film (one of Wright’s ideas). Once you have a genre, you can go back through all the other movies that have operated in that genre, see how they did it, and use their structure as a blueprint for your own movie.
This is the same thing the insanely popular “Captain America: Winter Soldier” did. They made that movie a conspiracy thriller. This allowed them to go back to movies like “Three Days of The Condor,” see how they made them work, then use the same principles to make their film work.
If you don’t have a genre to guide your movie, you’re flying blind. You’re making up shit as go along and hoping it works. Every once in a long while, someone pulls off a miracle, but usually if you don’t have that blueprint to guide you, you crash and burn.
Finally, commit. It doesn’t matter what kind of story you’re telling. If you don’t commit to it 100%, it’s not going to work. Ant-Man is, in a lot of ways, a ridiculous idea. I mean, Scott Lang chums it up with ants and trains them to help him execute a heist. But you know what? That’s the story you chose to tell. If you’re scared to tell that story? If you dance around it? The script will never work. So you gotta commit. And they did.
And that goes for ANY idea. When I read “Bubbles,” the script about Michael Jackson told through the eyes of his chimpanzee – that script doesn’t work if the writer thinks his idea is too weird and decides, midway through, to switch the point of view over to Jackson. This is your premise. Embrace it 100%. That’s the only way a weird idea works.
And you know what? That commitment is what led to Ant-Man’s best scene, the showdown between Ant-Man and Yellow-Jacket in a child’s bedroom. A writer who was scared of this idea surely would’ve looked for a “cooler” place for Ant-Man and Yellow-Jacket to fight. Maybe in one of those industrial warehouses we never ever see in action movies (note to all: this is sarcasm. There is nothing Carson hates more than action movies that end in industrial warehouse locations). So despite many of Ant-Man’s faults, I have to give them credit for fully committing to the idea.
To sum up, I’m really torn on this movie. On the one hand, I’m so happy that Marvel took a chance and tried something different. On the other, I’m disappointed they neutralized that choice by going with such a vanilla director. I mean, this appeared to be shot with the same lens package and character blocking that gave us Reed’s, “The Break-Up.” And I’m not saying Wright would’ve saved this. In reality, he probably would’ve made it too weird. But this movie needed a director (and writers) better than the ones it got. It was okay. But it could’ve been so much better.
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of a matinee ticket
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Embrace the movie you’re trying to write no matter how strange it is. If you’re scared of it, if you try and give us the sanitized version of it, the audience will feel let down. Imagine Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind without the beach house crumbling around our characters. Life of PI without the tiger on the boat. Inside Out is a wonderful example of how to do a weird/unique idea right. It committed to an extremely complicated working model of the mind that included physical embodiments of feelings, memory balls, islands of happiness. I mean they went ALL IN. In general, when you’re writing something weird, anytime you put something down on the page that could be considered “safe,” press delete, go back, and give us the more daring version.
I haven’t slept in three days. But that’s not going to stop me from offering some amateur screenplays! Rhyme alert. This is the section of the paragraph where I usually write something witty or funny. I will leave that up to you though. Write something funny for me in the comments and I’ll insert the best sentence. huhuh. “Insert.” We’ve got some good scripts this week, too. It should be an entertaining battle. Read, vote, critique!
Title: ENDWAR
Genre: Action-Thriller
Logline: When every major city across the United States is attacked by an overwhelming paramilitary force, a Special Ops team has less than 24 hours to breach the war zone of New York City in a last chance attempt to retrieve a device that could turn the tide of war, before the US government takes drastic action and initiates the ‘Endwar’ protocol.
Why You Should Read: Hey everyone! I was recently inspired by a similar type of script that was recently featured on Amateur Friday with it’s use of artwork, so I’ve decided to do a similar thing myself, featuring the images on standalone pages, rather than behind/beside the text (so don’t freak out at the page count, it’s not as long as it might look). I have long had a fascination with war stories, but where this is different is that it takes place on American soil (something only very few films have explored in the past). The script was kind of an experiment in going big, unlike my previous scripts which were much smaller in scope. I want to take this script to the next level, with your notes Carson, and with the notes of the SS community. Thank you to everyone who can help.
Title: Kill Order
Genre: Action thriller
Logline: A retired CIA hitwoman is given 72 hours to assassinate a heavily-guarded African despot before her own husband and daughter are executed.
Why you should read: Kill Order is a marketable action thriller with a clear GSU and a kick ass female protagonist (studio bait right now) capable of leading a Taken-style franchise. The script has been optioned twice in recent years but I’m hoping that this latest draft will take it to the next level. Any comments / suggestions from the Scriptshadow readers would be greatly appreciated!
Title: God Dammit!
Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: After discovering that her oven is a portal to the afterlife, a grieving loser teams up with her psychotic friend to rescue her dead brother from heaven.
Why You Should Read: I’ve been writing for awhile now, and it’s very rare that I write something where I think, “This is actually good.” But, I really feel good about this. And, I know every writer thinks their script is the best thing ever written. But, I really feel good about this one. It’s a big, broad comedy with real characters, real emotions, and real ideas behind it. And, it’s got a fight with a dead Jimi Hendrix if that’s any incentive.
At the very least, I need to know if it sucks.
Title: Virulence
Genre: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi
Logline: After a mysterious virus ravages Los Angeles, a father and daughter trapped in the evacuated city attempt to escape from a horde of infected canines.
Why you should read: I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and creative writing. This is my attempt at a feature-length screenplay. The premise is World War Z meets Cujo. Here’s a tagline for the movie: “Welcome to the dog days of summer.”
Title: The Medusa Room
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: After an accident exposes him to an unknown contagion that leaves its victims permanently “inert” rather than dead, a once-renowned doctor must use the limited resources at his disposal to solve a mysterious outbreak and prevent a worldwide plague- all while trapped inside the world’s most advanced quarantine chamber.
Why you should read: I knew I had a killer concept, and wanted to make sure I was making the absolute most of it. As such, I purchased coverage from Carson to look at what amounted to my first serious draft (from Carson: you can learn more about consultations here). His feedback was by far the best education I’ve ever received in the art of screenwriting, and that feedback in turn led to a page one rewrite. After some positive reception to that version from fellow writers, I decided to hit the cold query circuit. Within eleven (!) minutes I had my first of several read requests…
And that’s when the real work started. Those read requests came from some of the best managers in town, but resulted in passes of both the silent and vocal (but polite) nature. Still, though, I refused to give up, and went looking for further feedback from fellow writers/readers- feedback I’ve used to hone the screenplay accordingly.
I know that some of the most beloved scripts required years of rewrites (see Future, Back to the) before they landed on solid ground, but I feel this one is worth the effort. It’s a high concept that balances really cool tech with really tight character development inside of a tense, ticking-clock scenario, and it’s a movie I’d watch in an instant. I think a larger audience would, too, and I’m open to any suggestions on how I can maximize the potential of my idea.
This has been one of the busiest weeks for me that I can remember. I was going to rush a read of amateur script, Leadbelly, and put a review up, but I don’t think that would be fair to the writer. I just wouldn’t be able to give it the time and attention it needs. So as hard as this is to say, there will be no amateur review this week (I’ll put up Leadbelly next Friday).
The silver lining here is you have MORE TIME to work on your Scriptshadow 250 entries. The deadline is now 13 days away. If I were you, I’d catch one of the new flicks this weekend, Ant-Man, or Trainwreck – both look good, then write yourself into submission. It’ll all be worth it when we’re planning what you’re going to wear to the premiere of your movie next year.
Make sure to check out yesterday’s article about slow burns. It might be the final piece of the puzzle for your screenplay. I will try and post amateur offerings for tomorrow morning but no promises. I’ve barely been able to come up for a non-work breath of air over the last 96 hours.
One of the big complaints with last Friday’s amateur screenplay was that it started too slow. In response to this criticism, the writers, Greg and David, turned it around on the readers. In their opinion, it was the reader’s fault for being so impatient. They were going with a “slow burn” and if people couldn’t handle that, they weren’t reading the script properly.
I’ve encountered this reaction from a lot of writers over the years. If I point out that something’s too slow, they say they’re going for a “slow burn,” as if that phrase is a magical suit of armor that allows anything that’s slow or boring a free pass. It’s as if they believe they’ve earned some right (maybe because they’ve been at this screenwriting game for a while?) to drag us through forty minutes of plot and character set-up before they get to the “good stuff.”
Unfortunately, that’s not how a “slow-burn” works. Slow-burn is a technique. Its purpose is to build a slow and steady interest, using each scene to pull the reader further into the story. As opposed to, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which yanks you in right from the start, a slow-burn is more like a seduction. You’re not even aware it’s happening until you’re abolustely infatuated with the person.
So what’s the key to a good slow-burn? It’s pretty simple actually. SUSPENSE. If you can imply or outright tell the reader that something intriguing is coming down the pipeline, they’ll stick around to find out what it is, regardless of how slow your script is. If there are no hints at an exciting future at all – if you’re, once again, just setting up characters and only covering the present moment of your story, your reader is likely to get bored.
Suspense is sort of like making a promise. You tell your reader, “I’ve got something cool coming around the corner. Stick around to find out what it is.” And this is where, probably, the biggest mistake is made in terms of writing a slow burn. You see, in order for that promise to work, THAT PROMISE HAS TO BE GOOD.
For example, if my mom said to my friends and I, “Okay, everyone, if you’re patient until I finish my work, you all get an apple,” that’s not exactly an exciting promise. I’ll be easily distracted, looking for ways to get into trouble. But if she says, “If everyone waits until mommy finishes work, I’ll take you all out for ice cream,” that’s a promise that resonates. I fucking like ice cream.
So let’s go back to last Friday’s script. My guess is that Greg and David would’ve pointed out that the early scene where their political figure being murdered and replaced by a doppleganger was their “promise” – that’s the suspenseful story point that allowed them to take their time going forward. They’re right in saying it was a promise. But the promise was more of an apple than it was ice cream. We didn’t know this political figure. The act itself was kind of cliché (we’d seen this sort of thing happen in Mission Impossible movies and the like hundreds of times before). Just like any screenwriting technique, a slow burn must be pulled off originally, creatively, and with imagination. If your promise is an uninspired one, you can expect an uninspired reaction.
And this extends beyond the world of slow burns to choices in general. If your choice is standard or cliché or not nearly as exciting as you think it is, it’s going to land with a thud. And worse, a bad choice causes the elements around it to fall apart as well. It creates a domino effect. For example, we talk about conflict a lot. You want to inject some form of conflict into every scene to give it life. But let’s say, 30 pages previous to that conflict-laden scene, you created a cliché unlikable main character. Well, 30 pages later, putting that character in a conflict-heavy scene won’t matter, no matter how well the conflict is written. Because we already don’t like this character. We don’t care about their journey. Therefore, everything around that character crumbles as well.
And I think this is one of the biggest learning curves in screenwriting. Is finding out what’s a compelling choice and what isn’t. If something feels too familiar, too cliché, too unimaginative, it doesn’t matter what device you’re using to try and keep the reader’s attention. It probably won’t work. That’s why people who stick with screenwriting tend to be better than people just starting out. Their bar is higher. They’ve already tried all those boring choices. They learned what doesn’t work. Therefore, when they write a script now, they challenge themselves to come up with fresher more interesting ideas.
Getting back to slow burns, one of the most famous slow burns is The Sixth Sense. Some might even argue that the entire movie was a slow burn. The film never really accelerates its pace. But it worked because the elements included in the burn were compelling ones – namely the mystery behind this child. That was a cool promise. This kid could see ghosts that no one else could. Was he seeing things? Were they real? Could this man help him? The promise (as well as the elements SURROUNDING the promise – like good characters) was very compelling.
Another thing with slow burns is you want to hedge your bets. Try not to give us just one promise (unless that promise is gigantic), but rather a handful of them. And suspense shouldn’t be the only tool you use. You can also, for example, use something called “leading.” This is where you literally tell us something is coming down the pipeline. This creates a natural desire in the audience to stick around until we get there.
So let’s say you’re writing a small town drama and want to start with a slow burn. You might “lead” the audience by mentioning an upcoming fair. Just have your characters talk about “the big fair” that’s coming up this weekend. It doesn’t have to be a mystery or some huge plot point. But just the fact that we know the fair is coming is going to create a desire to get there. This is preferable to implying that nothing is coming. Because then there’s nothing for the reader to look forward to.
And you can use multiple leads, small and large, to create little checkpoints the audience will want to get to. For example, if your script starts with a married couple who clearly aren’t happy with each other, you could lead by having the wife call the husband at work and say she needs to talk to him about something important tonight. This is a conversation that sounds like it’ll be interesting, so we’ll want to stick around until it happens. And again, a lead doesn’t have to be singular. Who’s to say you can’t have the fair lead and the “we need to talk” lead in the same screenplay?
Another way to make a slow-burn work is mystery. A murder has been committed. A child has gone missing. The power has gone out in town. Every dog in town has run away. Someone comes home to find that their bedroom has been ransacked. Mysteries are one of the most powerful tools (and another type of PROMISE) in keeping the reader’s interest. Much like leading, they create a desire to find out what’s going to happen. If you’re going to have a really slow burn for the first 40 pages of your script, starting out with a good mystery can go a long way.
Another good “slow burn” tool is a looming sense of dread. If we get the feeling that something bad is just over the horizon, we’re likely to stick around. This approach actually works hand-in-hand with a slow burn – since the very nature of “looming” is deliberate. Once horror sensation “It Follows,” establishes the rules of its universe, it rests very comfortably on the “looming sense of dread” approach. Anybody anywhere could be one of these demons. So we fear it’s only a matter of time before one of them comes along. Most people who watch that film will tell you it was slow. But they still loved it. Why? Because the entire story was built around this looming sense of dread.
Now that we have a sense of what TO do to create a good slow burn, let’s talk about what not to do. When I first started reading scripts, I was shocked by just how SLOW most of them were. And so I was giving readers a lot of this note: CUT OUT ALL THESE USELES SCENES! GET TO THE STORY FASTER! And on a certain level, that’s good advice. Screenwriting is about cutting out the unnecessary – getting to the meat as soon as possible.
But a lot of times, that note wasn’t addressing the underlying problem. It wasn’t so much that we were taking too long to get to the story. It was that the writer wasn’t doing anything to make the lead-up to the story interesting. Again, the writer was just setting characters up, setting plot up, conveying exposition. All of these things are necessary, of course. But what’s required (which most writers don’t do) is to do all that IN AN ENTERTAINING WAY.
So they weren’t setting up mysteries, they weren’t leading, there was no impending sense of doom, there was no suspense, no promises. Or if there were any of these things, they were cliché or obvious versions of them, which, while better than nothing, still ineffective. So it’s important to recognize that when someone says your script is “too slow” or not getting to the story fast enough, it might not be the actual number of pages that’s the problem. It may be HOW YOU’RE WRITING THOSE PAGES. It may be the fact that you haven’t used any tools to give us a reason to keep reading.
Another common ineffective solution to a slow script is the classic, “Start with a big flashy action scene.” Writers think that if they blow us away with some super-awesome action scene to start off, it will allow them to take their time for the next 30-40 pages and slowly set up their story.
This is faulty logic for a couple of reasons. First, a big action scene can be just as boring as a small talky scene. In fact, action scenes can be some of the most boring to read in the entire script. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read, “And then the car CRASHES into the pole, spins, then REVS up again, NEARLY GETTING CLIPPED by a TRAILING COP CAR, before RACING OFF.” You know how boring it is to read 10 pages of that?! So don’t think of these scenes as magic beans by any stretch of the imagination.
And second, it still doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Let’s say you have a slow burn where you aren’t leading, setting up mysteries, creating any suspense, or injecting an impending sense of doom. That doesn’t just magically get fixed because you placed an action scene before it. You still need to address the real problem – which is offering the reader a series of promises. Letting them know that good things are coming around the corner.
I guess the final question here is: When does the slow burn end and the story begin? And I think the answer to that question is: WHEN THE GOAL OF THE MAIN CHARACTER IS INTRODUCED. Once you give us that goal, you’ve shifted over from “slow burn setup” to “full-fledged story.” Take the recent hot spec sale, Collateral Beauty. We start by seeing this CEO who mopes around his office all day building giant domino trails. That’s the first mystery to keep us hooked during the slow-burn phase (Why is he doing this? What happened to this man?). Then we learn that his employees are going to try and oust him so they can sell the company. That becomes the MAIN GOAL that drives the story. We’re no longer in “slow burn” phase from that moment on.
I know this is a lot to take in so let me just finish with this. In order for a slow burn to work, THERE HAS TO BE A BURN. Too many writers – especially writers just starting out – only give us the “slow.” And that’s where they run into trouble. Slow-burns are actually one of the most nuanced forms of storytelling there is. It takes a lot of skill to pull them off. Start by mastering the basics first (introduce a strong goal for your main character quickly) and once you’ve figured that out, you can play with suspending that main story and adding some slow-burn elements before we get there. It can be done. It just takes practice. Good luck!
Yesterday I pulled a Forest Gump. I went out for a quick jog and then just… kept going. And going and going. Until I ended up at some place called Tito’s Tapas. I met a young lady there named Margo and we spent the next three hours discussing Euler’s Equation. We came to the conclusion that the answer was 12. I then hitched a ride back home in a shared-ride Uber that ran out of gas in West Hollywood. So I bought an Astro Burger, took the bus home, and promptly fell asleep for the next five hours. Which is why I don’t have a fresh review for you today. Instead, I’ll share with you a review from my newsletter (sign up here!). Hope you enjoy!
Genre: Comic-Book/Action
Premise: After an evil gangster tortures and maims an innocent man, that man turns into a fast-talking psychotic superhero who will stop at nothing to get his revenge.
About: Hollywood works in mysterious ways. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick lit the world on fire with their unexpected hit, Zombieland. All of a sudden, everyone associated with that film was the hottest thing in town. But after an ill-advised trip into the G.I. Joe franchise and a failed attempt at turning Zombieland into a TV show, Reese and Wernick found themselves right back where they started: desperate for Hollywood’s attention. Here’s where things get funny. After Zombieland, Reese and Wernick wrote Deadpool, an off-beat superhero script that quickly became one of the most beloved scripts in Hollywood. But writing something everyone loves and writing something that a studio wants to plunk down 150 million dollars for are two different things, and after doing some test footage, 20th Century Fox deemed the material too off-kilter, effectively killing the project. Then, five years later, that test footage leaked online and quickly became persona geek grata, with thousands of online chants that all said the same thing: “Why the hell aren’t they making this movie???” In the five years since the script was written, super-hero films had become the prom king of genres. And it just so happened, studios were now looking for new angles into the genre (remember what I was talking about yesterday? Angles!). Dare I say they were looking for superhero movies that were a little… off-kilter. So Fox grabbed box office mysterioso Ryan Reynolds to play the lead and Deadpool was off to the races.
Writers: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Details: 112 pages (April 12, 2010 draft)
I’d always been curious about this screenplay because whenever the topic of “best unmade screenplays” came up, Deadpool was mentioned.
Now the history of “best unmade screenplays” is a funny one. Before Scriptshadow, there were about 30 scripts over the last 30 years that you’d always hear were “the best unmade screenplays in Hollywood.” These scripts had taken on an almost mythical status, and I was desperate to get my hands on them.
But what I quickly found was that the scripts weren’t all that good. They had a good scene here and some interesting ideas there, but as entire screenplays, you could clearly see why they were never made.
Like that famous script, The Tourist. That screenplay was an idea-machine but it read like a B-movie version of a bad David Lynch film. It just wasn’t good at all. And I realized that a lot of these scripts were propped up by the mere fact that no one could read them.
It’s like hearing about those playground basketball legends from the 70s. In 1979, Bats Jackson scored 55 points in one game. Ten years later, people recall that it was 75 points. By 2015, he’d scored 130 points and performed a triple back flip slam dunk and rode off on a triceratops.
Point being, it’s a lot harder to write a “best unproduced script in Hollywood” these days. Too many people have access to the scripts and therefore, can sniff out the bullshit.
Deadpool was one of the few scripts that seemed to survive this internet-age scrutiny. So I wanted to see how it fared.
Wade Wilson is an angry dude. And he has a right to be. He has to wear a suit and mask wherever he goes because he’s been burned, maimed, and mutilated to the point where even catching him in your peripheral vision would send you vomiting into the nearest storm drain.
We meet Wade (as his alter-ego, Deadpool) slamming into a car going after some guy named Francis, a local bigshot gangster who’s just been released from prison after ten years. As Deadpool tells us (in his ongoing voice over), he’s been waiting for this day forever. Finally, he gets to do to Francis what Francis did to him.
What did Francis do to him? Well, many years ago Francis chained him into his own little personal torture bay, and constructed a series of machines designed to torture Wade as much as a person can possibly be tortured without dying. Remember the Pit of Despair in The Princess Bride. It’s like that times a billion.
Francis even created the perfect torture device. A water tank that would drown Wade, but then, as soon as Wade was about to pass out, pump oxygen into him to keep him conscious, so he could go right back to drowning again, until the point where Wade was about to go unconscious, where he would pump more oxygen into him again, repeating that process for… OVER A YEAR.
So when we jump back to the present and Wade learns things like he’s been diagnosed with cancer, you understand why he’s not that phased. This man has been through way way worse.
The script essentially uses a parallel timeline structure where we follow Wade in the present as he goes after Francis and then cuts back to the past, where we see Francis enslaving Wade. We also see how Wade met the love of his life (Vanessa the hooker) and eventually transformed into his alter ego, Deadpool. Will Deadpool finally get Francis? The script’s online in plenty of places if you want to find out.
So why is this script so admired? Well, it’s got a lot of geek-friendly things going for it. The story itself is actually very simple. This isn’t Avengers where superheroes are trying to save the world. This is a revenge story. A guy wants to kill the guy who maimed him.
But it’s the way the story is told and the flash in its delivery that makes it stand out. Reese and Wernick knew if they told this simplistic story linearly, it would induce mass sleepage. Much better to introduce a mystery in the present (why does Deadpool want to kill this dude so badly??) and dole out hints to said mystery throughout the flashbacks.
The script is also very self-aware. Wade plays with an action figure of himself from one of the Wolverine movies, is absolutely infatuated with Hugh Jackman, collects Deadpool comic books, and at one point, even watches the first act of his own movie (yes, this movie) in his apartment.
The script is ruthless in its violence (note the drowning torture device I mentioned earlier), has an ongoing commentary track in the form of Wade’s comedic voice over, and does things that you just don’t see in superhero movies. For instance, we get a hardcore fucking scene with a superhero.
And then there are things that are just… weird. And that’s good. Like I always say, you have to take some chances with your screenplay. If you’re playing it straight down the middle, expect to see a lot of bored faces staring back at you.
Here we have Deadpool sawing his arm off in one scene and then that same arm growing back later. What?? Deadpool also casually hangs out with Colossus, an 8-foot tall man made out of pure steel. Which would seem normal in a superhero movie except for the fact that everybody else in this story is a flesh and blood person.
Couple all this with some balls-to-the-wall action starring a superhero who uses katana blades to dismember evil villains, and you get the kind of thing that 16 year-olds like to brag that they snuck into. It basically checks all the boxes on the geek checklist.
And yet…
Something was missing. I think all these devices are fun but if there isn’t an authentic core to the movie, if all it is is a bunch of wackiness, then how do you connect to it? How do you care? That’s what I kept waiting for. To care.
There’s something to be said for being relatable. If an audience relates to a character or his situation or his problems or his flaws, they’re much more likely to care what happens to him. Deadpool’s issues were so unique to his particular predicament (being tortured for no reason) that even though the man was dished out some extreme injustice, I didn’t really care if he succeeded in his revenge or not.
And also, the scope of the story bothered me. I don’t know if I’ve been conditioned in superhero movies to expect a goal with some actual consequences, but the fact that Deadpool ONLY wanted to get this one little tiny bad guy made this all feel so small. I didn’t feel like the story mattered enough.
I can admire this screenplay but it’s so jokey, so meta, so focused on the external rather than the internal, that that’s all I could do, is admire it. I never felt it. And that’s what kept this from being great. Still, this is worth the read just for how nuts it is.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you have a really really simple story, like here, a man trying to enact revenge, consider infusing an offbeat structure into your screenplay. Offbeat structures can KILL a complex storyline (you don’t want to make something that’s complex even more complex). But for simple plots, they’re perfect. Here, we jump back and forth between the past and the present, using the flashbacks to inform the audience on how we got to this point of our hero wanting to kill our villain.
