Last week I went all doom and gloom on you guys, giving you the ten specs-turned-movies that have placed us smack dab in the middle of a spec sale wasteland.
And I get it. Buying specs is a speculative business. A spec hasn’t proven itself to be successful in any other medium. So it makes sense, then, that picking a winner would be tough.
But as I’ve always maintained, the movie business is cyclical. Tastes change. Strategies change. There was a time in town when if you weren’t making a Western, there was something wrong with you. Try to push a Western through the system now and see what happens.
So the spec will have its day in the sun again. We just need a few spec hits to bolster the confidence of the execs making the decisions. And it will be up to you guys to provide those ideas. And to get you motivated, I’m giving you ten spec screenplays hitting theaters over the next couple of years that could change our fortunes.
A few of these movies will have to WAY over-perform and they’ll have to do so in close proximity to one another (Hollywood tends not to change unless it’s shocked into doing so). But if you show them that there’s money they’re leaving on the table? You’re damn skippy they’ll start buying specs again.
So with that in mind, here are those ten scripts, ranked in importance from lowest to highest. May every one of them make the box office their bitch!
10) The Last Witch Hunter (not reviewed)
Writer: Cory Goodman
Logline: (from IMDB) – The last witch hunter is all that stands between humanity and the combined forces of the most horrifying witches in history.
The Skinny: Getting a handle on this film is a little like trying to stab a peanut with a fork. No matter how many times you try spearing the thing, it keeps slipping away. It looks like they’re hoping for an Underworld like franchise here, but the Lionsgate angle has me worried. In the past, they’ve buried their genre ideas under a lot of murky CGI and dark shadows (i.e. Priest). The trailers for Witch Hunter look pretty good though. I’m hoping Lionsgate is taking some of that Hunger Games money and investing it back in their product. We shall see.
9) Burnt
Writer: Steven Knight
Logline: A selfish workaholic chef tries to get back into the restaurant game after a much publicized meltdown years ago.
The Skinny: For those who have been following Scriptshadow from the beginning, you know this project as, “Untitled Chef Project.” It’s a great freaking script but has had a lot of directors and actors attached to it before finally grabbing Bradley Cooper and getting a green light. This would seemingly be a good thing, as Cooper is one of the top 5 biggest actors working today. But what made this script so good was how dark the main character was. I like Cooper but I’m not yet convinced he can go to those places. My fear is that they play this more like a traditional romantic comedy, and that would be death for the project. You have to stay true to what made the material stand out in the first place.
8) In the Deep (reviewed in the Scriptshadow newsletter – sign up!)
Writer: Tony Jaswinski
Logline: When a young woman goes surfing by herself in a remote location, she finds herself being stalked by a shark.
The Skinny: This is one of the higher profile spec sales of the last couple of years. And since people freaking love sharks, this movie will definitely find an audience. The question is, how big will that audience be? This isn’t a sprawling story involving an entire town, a la Jaws, but rather one day with one woman who spends large swaths of time clutching a buoy. It’s decidedly more contained. Then again, a little movie called Gravity was about a single woman stuck alone in space.
7) Holland, Michigan
Writer: Andrew Sodroski
Logline: A Midwestern wife/schoolteacher begins to suspect that her husband’s cheating on her, so enlists the help of a fellow teacher she’s developed feelings for to catch him in the act. What she finds instead will change her life forever.
The Skinny: Audiences seem to love serial killers, despite how disturbing the thought of that is. In this top-ranked Black List script, Bryan Cranston plays our husband. Now before you roll your eyes and think this is yet another “Look at me, I can play a convincing serial killer” actor vanity project, know that this is one of the more original screenplays I’ve read. It’s dictated by mood and unpredictability and a story that constantly keeps you guessing. The wild card here is director Errol Morris, who’s found fame mainly through documentaries. But if he can bring the cinematic vision he brought to his breakout doc, The Thin Blue Line, there’s a very good chance this movie could be awesome.
6) American Ultra
Writer: Max Landis
Logline: A psychologically damaged slacker living in a small town with his girlfriend, soon finds that the CIA is trying to kill him for reasons unknown.
The Skinny: Say what you will about the Maxter and his narcissistic online rants, but the guy’s sold a ton of scripts. And he has a talent for finding marketable pockets in the Hollywood system that haven’t been exploited yet. This take on a Jason Bourne like story where the main character is a stoner is a fresh perspective that we haven’t seen yet. True, I didn’t love the script, but a big reason for that is I’m not into pot humor. And my friends who ARE into pot humor are telling me this looks hilarious. If Jesse Eisenberg can bring what he brought to Zombieland, American Ultra could be the sleeper hit the spec market needs. And that’ll keep the Landis Experiment going!
5) Sicario
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Logline: A female FBI agent is dragged into an undercover operation to take down one of the biggest drug tunnels in Mexico.
The Skinny: A lot of people are calling Denis Villeneuve the closest thing we’ll get to the next David Fincher. And you can already feel that. When Denis attaches himself to a project, everybody notices. This is great news for us spec screenwriters. Because even though I really liked Sicario, a part of me said, this could just be another run-of-the-mill border drama. Then I saw the trailer for the film and said, “Holy Shit.” This is a contender. Which is probably why they’re opening the movie this fall, right in that sweet spot where the Academy starts paying attention.
4) Bob the Musical
Writer: Multiple
Logline: When a buttoned-up company man is involved in an accident, the world around him becomes one giant musical number.
The Skinny: This project has been around for so long, I don’t even know who first wrote it. But it recently signed Tom Cruise up for the lead, which means we’re finally going to see the film. I may not have loved Rogue Nation, but like Will Smith and Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise (All You Need is Kill, Oblivion) is one of the few actors willing to take risks on non-IP material. As tough as this will be to pull off, it’s the kind of idea that if the elements do come together, it will be, as Lester Burnham says, SPECTACULAR. And when something this funky does well, it opens the floodgates for the industry to take lots of chances.
3) Collateral Beauty (reviewed in Scriptshadow newsletter – sign up!)
Writer: Allan Loeb
Logline: When a stubborn boss refuses to sell his company and make everyone in it millionaires, his employees devise a cruel plan to remove him from his position.
The Skinny: This was the highest profile sale of the year by far, selling for north of 2 million dollars, I believe. The script is very different, very unlike anything else out there. So it’ll come into the market with a zesty freshness the audience isn’t expecting. Will Smith has recently joined the project and the director of Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, will direct. This is one of those scripts that’s so unique that it’s either going to connect and become a sensation, or be so weird, it’ll turn everyone off and become the unofficial sequel to Seven Pounds. Let’s hope the former happens.
2) Section 6 (not reviewed)
Writer: Aaron Berg
Logline: The origin story of the British Agency, MI:6.
The Skinny: Universal bought this script for 7 figures, making its unknown writer a star. The project hit a legal snafu when MGM sued for infringement on its Bond franchise. But when the prospect of defining for all future interested parties the specifics of what did and did not constitute “James Bond,” they dropped that case quick. This project has two of the hottest young properties in the business on board, future star Jack O’Connell (Unbroken) and everybody-wants-him-due-to-his-massive-geek-cred director Joe Cornish (Attack the Block). If done right, this could feel like an old school James Bond film. Universal has the magic touch at the moment, so there’s reason to believe!
1) Passengers
Writer: Jon Spaihts
Logline: A spacecraft transporting thousands of people to a distant planet has a malfunction in one of its sleep chambers. As a result, a single passenger is awakened 90 years before anyone else. Faced with the prospect of growing old and dying alone, he wakes up a second passenger who he’s fallen in love with.
The Skinny: This spec, which was written almost 8 years ago now, is the project that made Jon Spaihts the go-to sci-fi writer in town. Your sci-fi project wasn’t legit unless you’d hired this guy. The script has just been impossible to make because it costs so much for a sci-fi movie that doesn’t have all the things in it that sci-fi audiences crave in order to put down their 12 bucks (aliens, space battles, adventure). This is a love story set in space. That made it unique as a spec but a nightmare as a studio project. For that reason, it literally needed the two hottest male and female movie stars in the world (Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence) to finally get a green light. The Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum will bring the vision this film needs to navigate its complex themes of love, time, and loneliness, and hopefully, it all comes together. This really is the movie that needs to hit big to give the spec market life. Outside of maybe Killing on Carnival Row, there isn’t a spec out there that readers haven’t wanted to see turned into a film. It’s time to find out if that desire was warranted.
