Today’s script makes two critical screenwriting mistakes that doom it. Make sure to read the review so that you never make these mistakes yourself!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a high-profile murder threatens a multi-billion dollar hostile takeover, an embattled Wall Street titan emerges as the prime suspect and must win a war of perception in order to protect her empire at all costs.
About: This script was optioned by Imagine, Ron Howard’s company. They’re developing the project, which almost surely means Howard is considering directing it. The script appeared on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Joe Ferran
Details: 117 pages
She wouldn’t even have to act!
Let’s get right into it. Shall we?
If you’ve written a thriller and your thriller is 118 pages, you have not written a thriller.
Thrillers need to be 100 pages!!!
Thrillers need to… ya know… THRILL. And not enough thrilling goes on, per page, if your thriller is stretched out to 118 pages.
Look, I’m not a genre page nazi. One of the biggest misconceptions in screenwriting is that every long script is boring and every short script is exciting. Not true! I have read a million short scripts that are boring. While it’s true that I’ve read a lot less long scripts that are great, I’m reading a consultation script as we speak that’s 180 pages and moves like it’s 80 pages.
But when it comes to genres like Thriller and Comedy, you don’t want long page counts. They work against you in so many ways. I suppose you can become the exception to the rule. But why handicap yourself? I mean this is already a very unforgiving medium where almost everything agitates or bores readers. Line up the variables, as best you can, so that they work in your favor.
Oh, and this isn’t even one of the two mistakes I alluded to above. Those mistakes are much worse. I’ll share them with you after the plot breakdown. And this is going to be a tough one to summarize, guys, cause I did not understand a hell of a lot that went on here! Oh, and that isn’t one of the two mistakes either! That’s a totally separate mistake.
Evelyn Carter is the CEO of Veridan Capital, a private equity firm. I have no idea what private equity is. My brother tried to explain it to me once. Totally clueless. But Evelyn’s company is worth like 20 billion or something.
And she’s not happy with that. She really wants to buy up this company called Revio for 2 billion dollars. Revio is a software editing company whose primary app doubles as a social media porthole. I think? It’s confusing. Revio is run by a guy named Magnus Voss. And Magnus has no interest in selling his company to Evelyn.
At a high profile party that Evelyn and Magnus attend, one of the Revio board members, a guy named Grayson, is found stabbed to death. It will later be learned that Grayson was rallying the board to vote down Evelyn’s purchase. So the assumption is that Evelyn may have killed Grayson. Which she denies wholesale.
There are 8 days before the sale and it now becomes a behind-the-scenes chess game for Magnus and his ilk to stop the sale while Evelyn and her ilk do everything they can to make it happen. Magnus has the upper hand since the assumption is that Evelyn was involved in Grayson’s death somehow. All he has to do is use his billion dollar bank account to prove it.
The ice-cold Evelyn, who is a lone wolf with nobody close to her, is determined to make this deal happen no matter what. So as everyone schemes to expose her, she uses all the tricks in the PR handbook to take them down, one by one. But when she finally lets someone in, will that someone actually be able to be trusted?
Okay. What are these two things that destroy this script before it even has a chance to get out of the gate?
Problem Number 1 – Weak stakes. Why do we want Evelyn to succeed here? She’s already a billionaire. Her company is worth 12 times what this company she’s buying is worth. So it’s not like it’s that important to her success. She goes from a 24 billion dollar company to a 26 billion dollar company?? Why do I care about that?
Succession started its show out with a similar situation. However, the focus was on the unproven son of Logan Roy, Kendall. For Kendall, the stakes were enormous. He had to prove that he was able to pull a takeover like this off in order to succeed his father, who was retiring soon. In Leverage, it’s just a really rich woman trying to get richer. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be rooting for about that.
This is a particularly surprising problem considering that Ron Howard is the godfather of the rule: We must have a great reason to root for the main character. He notoriously lost Bill Murray as a friend when Murray sent him a script back in the 80s to direct and Howard said he wasn’t interested because there was nobody in the story to root for.
Problem Number 2 – The main character, Evelyn, is ice cold. It is extremely hard to make audiences root for ice cold characters. We just finished talking about this in regards to Julia Roberts’ character in After The Hunt. Everybody hated that movie because they couldn’t access her.
We need access to a person to root for them. We must feel an emotional connection with them. If they are cold and bitter and lack empathy… there’s no way in for us.
Now, here’s the thing. Very skilled screenwriters can make scripts work in spite of ONE OF THESE drawbacks. I actually liked Julia Roberts’ character in After the Hunt. But it’s basically impossible to make a script work when you have both of these issues in the same script. We have no emotional connection to your character AND it doesn’t matter if they succeed at their objective. Then what’s left to root for?
At first I thought the murder mystery was the stakes. But then I realized the murder mystery is here to serve as a distraction. If you’re wondering if Evelyn is the killer, it’s less likely you’ll be thinking about how cold she is and of how insignificant this takeover is. And the writer doubles down on his distractions. There’s also a cold open where a bunch of people at Revio get blown up by a bomb.
A lot of times, if you’re having to write flashy stuff like this, it’s because you’re insecure about your main plotline. Cause your main plotline should be able to work all on its own. And, unfortunately, none of it works. Like, literally, not a single beat within a single scene works here.
This script has way too many characters. It’s very confusing how everyone is related. For example, a major character named “Charles” is introduced. We’re told simply that he’s the “Chairman.” Chairman of what???????? Her company? Revio’s company? Some other company?? And what does that mean?? I don’t know anything about chairmen. Is a chairmen more important than a board member? There’s a LOT of that going on here, making it very hard to keep up with even basic plot developments.
I want to point something out from the reading side of things real quick because whenever I review one of these sloppy scripts, and I’m confused, a few commenters try to say I missed key stuff.
YEAH, I DID MISS KEY STUFF! I’M SURE OF IT!
Let me explain, as a reader, why that happens. I’m reading the script. There’s a lot of information being thrown at me. There’s a lot of setup. A lot of exposition. A lot of characters. And a lot of it isn’t being introduced in an entertaining way. So it feels like work when I read it.
And what often happens in that situation is that I’ll be on page, say, 7, and I’m so bored that I’ll realize that my mind has wandered during the last half page. So I go back and reread that half page. Then, a few pages later, the same thing happens. So I go back and reread from where my mind started wandering. And then it happens again three pages later, and then again four pages after that.
And you know what I do once that happens a fifth time? I stop going back to reread. Because if you’re not a good enough writer to have me focused on your story, it’s not my job to double my reading time so that I understand this clumsily written script. Especially because I don’t think the script is written well enough whereby if I did read it all, I would understand it.
This goes back to all of these problems that I’ve mentioned since the start of the review. The script is too long. Which means there’s a bunch of stuff that’s not important enough to be in the script anyway. There are too many characters. Which means I’m constantly having to strain my brain to remember who’s who, how they’re related to each other, and how their jobs are related to one another. I don’t like this ice cold main character. So my mind’s drifting whenever she’s in a scene. And she’s in every scene. And I’m not invested in her success because I don’t see how her success is important.
That’s a very fast recipe for a bad script. Which this is. So much so that it almost got a “what the hell did I just read?”
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s an old rule in screenwriting. It’s been around since the 80s. “Never make a billionaire your main character. People have no sympathy for billionaires.” Now, obviously, we have proof that this “rule” is not universally true. Tony Stark was a pretty popular character. Batman movies tend to do all right. But it’s a rule worth considering. Cause, generally speaking, the closer you create a character to the average person, the more we can sympathize with them.
