How to come up with better movie ideas
We’re about two weeks away from our first showdown of the year, the 5 Loglines Showdown. You come up with 5 loglines, submit them to me. If any of them are awesome, they will be featured during Showdown weekend, where your writing peers will vote for the best logline and hopefully crown you the winner. Wanna compete? Here’s how…
What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 30
Deadline: Thursday, January 31, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
You better come correct because there are a lot of writers taking this assignment seriously. They’ve been generating ideas EVERY DAY so that they send in 5 strong contenders.
If coming up with movie ideas isn’t easy for you, don’t worry. We still have plenty of time. So, today, I’m going to give you some tools that will help you generate the best ideas possible.
We’re going to start by going over a list of the best original movie concepts that have come out over the last several years.
Keep in mind, I’m not factoring ‘execution’ into this. Just because you come up with a good idea doesn’t mean you’re going to write it well. Or that the director will direct it well. But these are all the ideas I felt had the potential to be good movies due to their strong concepts.
They are….
Heretic
65
Red One
Here
The Zone of Interest
Cocaine Bear
The Last Voyage of the Detemer
Sisu
The Menu
The Platform
Don’t Worry Darling
Speak No Evil
Free Guy
Old
Promising Young Woman
Leave The World Behind
Copshop
Nine Days
Now, I can already hear some of you moaning, ready to attack my choices. But I would challenge you to look back through the last few years and find more than three original movie ideas that you think were great concepts. It’s hard because the industry has moved so aggressively towards IP, leaving less original ideas out there.
So, after you’re done confirming that I’m right, let’s look at why these ideas are good.
Heretic gameifies the concept of selling religion via a contained horror setting that packs a ton of tension and surprises. 65, which sends its characters to earth 65 million years ago, with less than 24 hours before the infamous ‘dinosaur-killer’ asteroid crashes into the planet, is about as high concept an idea as one can come up with.
Red One mixes spy movies with saving Santa Claus. Genius. “Here” makes the incredibly bold choice of locking its characters into one room over the course of their entire lives. That’s a creative concept if I’ve ever heard one.
The Zone of Interest shows us the power of irony. A movie about a happy care-free family living five feet away from Auschwitz during the height of World War 2. Cocaine Bear shows us what happens when you mix ‘fun’ and ‘bananas,’ going all in on its wild concept.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is one of the best uses of a contained horror location that I’ve ever come across. Sisu shows us that you can adjust the John Wick equation (make the hero older, set it in a popular time period) in a way that gives you an unexpectedly kick-ass action premise.
The Menu builds mystery around a subject matter that doesn’t typically engage in mystery (high end restaurants and chefs). Not only is The Platform the most inventive high concept on this list, but it somehow manages to say the most about humanity.
Don’t Worry Darling uses time and technology to explore the patriarchy in a unique way. Speak No Evil is what I call “stealth high concept.” It’s a small idea that feels huge due to its nifty setup and continuous reveals.
Free Guy shows us that concepts fly highest when they’re simple. A programmed character inside a game wants free choice in his life and will risk anything to get it. “Old” uses the dependable high-concept variable of time to explore aging, placing a bunch of people on a beach where they’re all aging 20 times faster than the rest of the world.
Promising Young Woman shows us what the intersection between high concept and character-driven looks like. A young woman pretends to be blackout drunk at bars in order to expose rapists, part of a bigger plan to take down those responsible for her friends’ rape and subsequent suicide.
Leave The World Behind has the best ‘end of the world’ premise I’ve come across in five years. A mystery country is attacking the U.S. in a manner that makes it turn against itself.
Copshop is a clever little action movie idea that asks, what happens when bad guys chasing other bad guys end up in the jail cells right across from each other one night. And finally, the thinking man’s high concept, Nine Days, which pits 9 people against one another, all of whom are vying to prove their worthiness to be born and live a life on earth.
These are all good movie ideas. But how do writers come up with them? Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer to that because everyone has their own methods for coming up with ideas.
But the most common method I’ve heard, and one that I’ve found to be true with myself, is an “when inspiration strikes” idea. You’re doing something and the idea just hits you, like a bolt of lightning.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to rely on random moments of inspiration. You can actively generate them by keeping your ‘movie idea generator’ running in the background of your brain wherever you go.
Armed with this weapon, everything you see or experience throughout the day will automatically pass through the “could this be a movie?” filter, allowing you to spot potential stories in even the most ordinary places.
In other words, you should never just see a building. You should see a building that could be taken over by terrorists on Christmas Eve. You should never just see a man acting strangely in the park. You should see an alien from another planet attempting to acclimate to the oddities of his new human body.
If you’re someone who travels a lot, you often find yourself in the most tense anxiety-ridden spaces in the world. There are movie ideas everywhere you look. We just saw one, with “Carry-On” on Netflix. Or “Plane” with Gerard Butler. Or “Hijack” with Idris Elba.
You even want to take this generator into your movie and TV watching experience. A lot of times I’ll be watching a bad movie only to come up with an adjacent movie idea that’s much better. Or an idea that improves upon the many tropes that that genre typically gets trapped in.
For example, what if you were watching a cliched heist film only to come up with the idea of: what if it wasn’t the heist itself that was the difficult part, but rather transporting the money that you stole afterwards (Triple Frontier).
Movie ideas are everywhere! You just have to have your movie generator running in the background to find them. The 2022 Best Picture winner? That idea was literally built on top of an everything bagel (Everything Everywhere All At Once). Yes, you might have won an Oscar the last time you ordered a pastrami sandwich had you been a little more attentive.
So, keep testing those loglines out in the comments. The bigger picture here is to find your next script, which I’m hoping you’ll enter in June’s Mega-Showdown. So, this isn’t just about finding a fun little logline. It’s about writing a script to win a contest, which will get you representation, which will lead to your script getting sent around town, which will lead to directors and actors signing on, which will lead to your movie getting made.
It all starts with a great logline. So, what are you waiting for?
P.S. Feel free to share some good movie concepts that came out over the past five years that you felt I overlooked.
