Time to review the 2025 Black List’s best script!
Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) In New York’s literary scene, a struggling writer, pressured by her famous novelist husband to have a baby, pens a tell-all article that goes viral. This sparks a dangerous battle of seduction, manipulation, and betrayal in the public and private spheres.
About: The 2025 Black List just came out last week. This was the number one script on the list with 48 votes. Details on the project are scarce, but with Jason Reitman attached as producer and a female writer with a raw, unfiltered voice, it suggests Matisse Haddad may be getting positioned as a potential “next Diablo Cody.” Cody’s “Juno” was famously celebrated heavily in one of the first Black Lists.
Writer: Matisse Haddad
Details: 99 pages
If you’re going to write an unlikable lead, then let’s go FULL UNLIKABLE with the casting!
I’ve spoken so much about the Black List that I don’t know if I have anything more to say, lol. As flawed as it is, it’s still the best list we’ve got for highlighting the best screenplays of the year. And it’s going to stay that way until I find the time to read all 350 scripts that the industry circulates every year.
I don’t know much about this writer other than she’s had one other script on the Black List last year that sounded very “Substance-y.” I don’t think I ever reviewed it. So this is going to be my introduction to Matisse Haddad.
Best Seller follows a 30-something New York married couple, Anya and Chris, both of whom are writers. Chris is the more successful of the two. He has several best sellers. He also teaches writing at Columbia University. Anya, meanwhile, writes fluffy articles. She occasionally writes books but nobody takes them seriously.
One night, when Chris stresses that they aren’t getting any younger and he wants to start a family, Anya writes an article about her husband called “Mommy or Me?” In it, she basically vents about her marriage and makes her famous author husband look really bad for wanting her to get pregnant. Even worse, she didn’t warn him ahead of time. So, when the article goes viral, Chris finds himself dealing with the fallout.
After speaking to his livid editor, Chris decides to write a counter-article which, just like Anya with him, he doesn’t show her ahead of time. And that article attempts to rebuild his reputation, all while dishing out a few secrets about his wife as well (she lied about graduating grad school!).
Their friends and family think they’re ridiculous (join the club!) and tell them to stop doing this cause it’s only hurting both of them. So they decide to joint write an article for The New Yorker to hash things out.
Amongst their viral feud, the two go to a lot of literary parties and talk it up with a bunch of jealous aspiring authors who enjoy gossiping. There’s a lot of gossip in this script for you gossip hounds! They’re also each tempted by hot people who aren’t their partners. Oh and, oddly, 5% of the script covers their kinky sex life, which feels like it was thrown into the script at the last second over a flurry of weekend writing.
Anya decides to cheat with the guy she’s flirting with, after which she finds out she’s pregnant. She threatens Chris, who she caught trying to kiss the person he was flirting with, that she’s going to abort the baby if he so much as looks at her sideways.
Soon after, the two get in a huge fight during which their large dog gets involved and bites off Chris’s fingers. Chris freaks out because this means he may never be able to write again (he must not have a computer with a microphone). The two decide to get separated and the last 15 pages of the script montages its way through Anya’s pregnancy until we get to THE END.
So, do we have the next Diablo Cody here?
In the now-immortal response to my first Blood & Ink logline pitch…
No.
You could make the argument that Matisse Haddad’s voice is unique, though, which is probably why her script finished number one on the list.
The problem is that that voice is so depressing.
Observing this relationship is so sad. And neither of the characters are very likable, especially Anya.
You’re putting yourself behind the 8 ball if you’ve got a sad script with unlikable protagonists. It’s very hard to make that work.
And what’s also a problem is that the concept is weak. An article “write-off” against your partner? Movies are supposed to be larger than life. This concept barely feels like it’s larger than a month.
But Matisse doesn’t stop there in making things difficult for herself. She’s also writing about writing! Which is inherently boring. It’s not that it can’t be done. We were just discussing Rob Reiner’s Misery the other day. One of the greatest horror movies ever written. And that was about writing.
But to presume that, in this day and age of TikToks and Instagram and Twitter and Youtube, that some written article is going to take over the world and everyone’s going to be talking about it… I can’t remember the last time that happened. The early 2000s maybe?
The script is really a tale of two halves. The first half struggles mightily because of the issues I just mentioned. Weak concept. Unlikable characters. Boring subject matter. And a plot that goes nowhere.
I kept waiting for a plot development that actually mattered. Instead, I got, “Let’s write an article together!” That’s when I mentally checked out. I knew the script couldn’t recover after such a weak creative choice.
Funny enough, Matisse ditches all this silly “viral article” stuff for the second half of the screenplay and just focuses on the fallout of the dissolving marriage. That was the best part of the script because it was the most honest. But, again, because these characters were so unlikable, you didn’t care.
And they kept becoming more unlikable by the scene!
When you have a wife who deliberately goes out and seeks sex from some dude she wants to bang, she finds out she’s pregnant, then comes back and screams at her husband that she can’t wait to abort the baby — I mean how do I even keep reading after that? We all detest this woman at this point, right?
Writing characters is a funny thing. Because you can take two routes. Route 1 is to write a character as honestly as you possibly can and never worry about how they come off. The idea with writing a character this way is that, hopefully, because the character is so authentic, other like-minded people will see themselves in that character. And there’s no doubt in my mind that that’s how Matisse is writing Anya.
And I won’t say that can’t work. I loved After The Hunt because Julia Roberts’ character was written exactly that way. And I understood her character, even though she wasn’t inherently likable. And I’m sure that that’s exactly why some of you hated the character. Cause there was nothing about her that was likable.
Which leads us to Route 2: Be aware of how the audience sees people and create characters with traits that make the audience like them. What I’ve found is that the more serious the writer, the less interested they are in writing these characters. Because they don’t want to be inauthentic.
But there’s a cost to that. Which is that you have may have created a character who’s so unlikable that nothing in your story will matter because we’ve already decided we don’t like the person taking us on that journey. And that’s the case here. Anya is a horrible person and I hated her.
But even if I liked her, I’m not sure the script could’ve been salvaged. There are so many things working against it – the biggest of which is that there’s nothing in this concept that says: this needs to be a movie. This is something that happens every day in the world. Relationships fall apart. And the sorta-viral-article thing is just not big enough or interesting enough.
With that said, the script should find some fans, particularly among a New York–based, liberal, literary-minded female audience. But outside of that specific demo, I’m not convinced readers are going to find this concept or subject matter palatable.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’ve discovered that when scripts have these long stretches where people can just hang out in bars, or coffee shops, or parties, and chat, the script is in trouble. Cause what that means is that there’s not enough plot to keep the story moving. In any feature screenplay, your characters should never have time to just hang out. Maybe ONCE in the first act before the shit hits the fan. But even then, that scene should be setting up parts of the story. There were too many scenes here of people just hanging out and chatting without the story going anywhere. It took an already weak premise and further weakened it.
Note: Please use the comments section to share the scripts you liked and disliked from the 2025 Black List. This will make it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff. And it would help me, as I would really prefer to review the good stuff over the bad.
