Does anybody really know why Scream 7 made 60 million bucks? The answer is no. So instead of focusing on that, I’m going to focus on the success of a certain underdog show, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Some people are saying this is already the show of the year. Cancel all voting. The decision has been made. With scores like 9.5 and 9.6 for episodes on IMDB, it’s a hard case to argue against.

A few weeks ago, I talked about how risky this show was. It took this giant franchise and eliminated almost all of its giant variables. You’re never going to see a dragon on Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. What’s funny about the success of the show is that this is exactly what the people at Lucasfilm originally said they were going to do with Star Wars on TV. They could finally tell these small intimate character-driven stories. And then they just completely freaked out and went in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, the entire budget of Knight could fit into the cost of one episode of Andor.

Why is this relevant? The answer to that is something it’s taken me 30 something years to figure out. Which is that franchises are built on characters, not on spectacle. And the mistake that 99% of them make is they never restock the character cabinet. Don’t get me wrong. They try. But they try in the same way that I try and cook fish for dinner. I put in solid effort. But am I determined to make the best fish dinner ever? No. And when it comes to billion dollar franchises, you have to try and create the best characters ever. That’s not an exaggeration. Great characters are part and parcel with the best franchises of all time.

This is the first time in a long time that I’ve seen a big franchise truly say “screw everything else. we’re going to build a story on character alone.” But that approach is a blessing in disguise. Because when you know that no spectacle is coming to save you, you have no choice but to build characters who can carry a show all on their own. It really makes you think: What kind of characters do audiences truly fall in love with?

And the most time-tested archetype is the underdog. So Knight of the Seven Kingdoms built two of them. The giant teddy bear of a man, Dunk, and the defiant undersized boy, Egg.

A common question I ask writers in my screenplay consultations is: Would we still want to watch your protagonist even if you stripped away this story that was happening around him? And, with these two, the answer is a resounding yes. The world kicks them around so much that we’re determined to see them overcome that adversity.

This is why I think, if Lucasfilm were smart, they’d hire twenty writers, shut down for two years, and come up with 200 characters. Really draw out who these characters are, what makes them likable or interesting, what flaws are holding them back. And then, at the end of the process, vote on the Top 10. I GUARANTEE YOU if they did that, they’d come up with characters ten times as good as any characters they’ve created in the last decade.

Cause Lucasfilm has lost sight of the fact that Star Wars was not built on spectacle. It was built on character. And until they refill the character coffers, they’re deluding themselves that they’re going to make another good Star Wars movie.

Getting back to Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, I suggest everybody here watch it. It’s only 6 episodes long. Which is another great creative choice the show made. It knew how long its story was and wasn’t going to artificially stretch it out and dilute things for more episodes (cough cough, Andor).

But what you’re watching the show for is to get to those final two episodes. Cause the final two episodes are really special, each in their own way. Unfortunately, there’s no way around giving you these screenwriting tips without discussing the specifics of the episodes. So major spoilers follow.

In the 4th episode, Dunk beats up one of the members of royalty, I think a Targaryen (I’m not a Game of Thrones nerd so bear with me). So he’s slotted to be executed. However, he can challenge the guy to a duel, which he does. But the Targaryen kid he attacked is a wuss, so he invokes the Rule of 7. What that means is that the kid and six other Targaryens will take on Dunk and six other fighters he recruits.

The situation is a joke. The Targaryens are far superior fighters, of course. So destruction is a formality. But Dunk isn’t a guy who gives up (yet another likable trait about him) and he goes around town, trying to recruit fighters. The writing cleverly pays off many of the people Dunk met along his journey since the first episode, and he’s able to get five other fighters together.

Unfortunately, the rules state that you must have seven fighters. Any less and you forfeit. So, here’s where the major screenwriting lessons begin. We’re on the day of the fight. We’ve reached the battlefield. Dunk has minutes left to somehow find another fighter.

So he makes a plea to the galley. In a Braveheart-like speech, he begs someone to be brave and join him. And after this emotional speech, this giant man stands up. Dunk’s plea actually worked. He’s got his seventh guy. And then this giant man lets out a giant fart. The whole galley laughs. The man was fucking with him. Dunk will have to forfeit.

What the writers do so well here is they make you believe that our hero is safe, that he’s found his solution. And then they rip that solution away from us. And what we feel is, “Oh my god, what now?” I cannot emphasize how powerful that question is. When you have a reader asking, “Oh my god, what now?” They genuinely have no idea how your hero is going to survive. That’s storytelling gold right there. That’s when you have the reader in the palm of your hand.

But it gets better.

One of Dunk’s fighters shows up and he’s acting strange. As he’s getting his battle armor prepared, Dunk asks him a question about how he’s going to fight. And the guy says, ‘that’s not relevant anymore.’ And then he takes his horse to the other side of the battlefield. He’s switched sides to the Targaryens!

This is true excellence in writing.

“Oh my god, what now?” has just turned into “Holy shit, how the fuck is he going to get out of this??”

So many writers are TERRIFIED of doing this because it means extra work. They’re already unsure of how they’re going to solve the “one knight down” problem. Now they’ve got to find TWO KNIGHTS in five minutes! Writers don’t want to do all that work. So they never create that level of doubt, despite the fact that that level of doubt turns drama into super-drama.

But it gets better.

I don’t want to make this post 5000 words long so we’ll jump ahead. Against all odds, Dunk is able to get his two extra knights.

So, when the battle starts, the very first thing that happens is Dunk gets slammed off his horse. I mean he gets obliterated. The man doesn’t even get in one good swing. And then, as he’s stumbling to get up, he gets whacked in his helmet by a mace, tumbling to the ground again. And then he gets hit again. And then he gets hit again. AND THEN HE GETS HIT AGAIN.

Every time he’s hit, he becomes more and more injured. More unable to move.

And now we’ve taken “Holy shit, how the fuck is he going to get out of this??” and turned it into, “Holy Christ, this man is done for, there is no way in any scenario even with plot armor that he can get out of this.”

Keep in mind, I don’t know anything about the actual book covering these characters so I don’t know if Dunk dies in the book. I was genuinely convinced he was toast. Cause there was absolutely nothing he was doing that indicated he could survive.

But it gets better.

Dunk finally stumbles into a showdown with the Targaryen kid. And this kid just wallops him. He stabs him in the leg. He stabs him in the stomach. He stabs him in the eye. If Dunk’s situation was abysmal before? It had now turned calamitous.

I’ve never been so sure that someone was a goner.

And again: THAT IS STORYTELLING NIRVANA. It is the place where you most want your reader – convinced that there is no way out.

The crazy thing is, the writers add SIX TO SEVEN more moments that make Dunk’s situation EVEN WORSE. So it keeps getting worse for him. I haven’t seen a writer create that level of uncertainty for the hero since Osculum Infame, which is why I fell in love with that script.

Since there’s no way for me to cover the next screenwriting tip without spoiling the episode’s ending, I’ll just say that, against all odds, somehow, Dunk succeeds. But like any well-written story, there are scars that will live on forever in his life. Good people in the seven die. It’s not all ponies and roses by any means.

It’s a great example of how to push your hero to the limit and convince the reader that they won’t survive, so that when they finally do, it’s the best feeling in the world.

Look man, there aren’t many movies or shows these days that can truly make me feel something. Only because whenever I read a script, I’m always aware of the screenwriting matrix as I’m reading. I know what the writer is doing at all times and am judging whether they’re succeeding or failing.

But this battle? I was completely and utterly lost inside of it. I was so worried for Dunk and convinced he was toast. I was just hoping he somehow someway would find a way to survive.

Okay, moving on to the final episode. I’ve never seen a final episode like this! It was short. It had almost zero story to it. It only existed to wrap things up because ending the show after the Rule of 7 battle would’ve been too abrupt.

As a result, I’m watching this final episode with a lot of curiosity. Basically, Dunk just goes around and says bye and thank you to everyone he met on his journey. I was trying to identify some sort of structure that was holding the episode together.

And then I finally realized what the episode was about. It was about: Are Dunk and Egg going to end up together or is this it for them? It’s a powerful question. But there’s no doubt that it’s a tiny story engine to build your season finale around. I would go so far as to say, this is the tiniest story engine I’ve ever seen for a season finale.

But then it clicked. This was a show built on character, always had been, and so of course it ended on character. What’s remarkable is that it pulled that off inside a franchise the size of Game of Thrones, where audiences show up expecting spectacle, shock, something enormous. And yet the finale asked nothing more than a simple question about who these two people are to each other, and it was enough. More than enough. That only works if you’ve done the foundational work first, if you’ve built characters so vivid and so specific that the audience is genuinely invested in the answer. Do that well enough, and you can get away with the impossible.

Did you guys watch Knight of the Seven Kingdoms? What did you think?

Okay, so last week I put out an open call: anyone could query me and pitch their screenplay. The best query would win, and I’d review their script on the site.

But the script review wasn’t really the point. The point was the query itself. Learning how to reach out to agents, managers, producers, anyone, is an essential skill that’s rarely talked about. It’s discussed so infrequently that I thought I’d dedicate an entire week to it.

I’ll be reviewing the winning script tomorrow. But today, we’re going to talk about the winning query.

This turned out to be harder than I anticipated. When it comes to querying, 90% of the query is the logline itself. Often, that’s what the recipient will be jumping to. Because even if they like you or like your personality through your writing, that doesn’t matter if they don’t think the script itself works for them.

But, at the same time, if I only went off the loglines in these queries, then it’d be a logline contest. So I had to pass over some of the better loglines in order to focus on the point of this exercise: the query itself.

With that said, there were a couple of really good queries with really poor loglines. And since part of the deal here is that I review the winning query, I wasn’t about to reward a query with a weak concept/logline.

Exhale Carson!

Needless to say, I’m happy to report that I located the best of the bunch.

***********************************
In third place is Patrick McNulty!

Subject Line: QUERY – A DARK BREED

Dear Carson Reeves,

I’m reaching out with a contained horror feature, A DARK BREED (90 pages).

Logline:
After a blizzard traps a family in a remote mountain cabin, they rescue a caged pregnant woman being held on the property—only to discover she’s not the prey, she’s the predator. And she’s not alone.

A DARK BREED is a single-location survival horror built around clear rules, contained scope, and escalating siege tension. It’s written with practical production in mind while delivering strong suspense and trailer-driven set pieces.

I’d be happy to send the script at your request.

Thank you for your consideration,
Patrick McNulty

***********************************
In second place is David Lamberston!

Subject Line: QUERY – WHEN AN EMOTIONALLY WRECKED STAR TREK NERD DECIDES HE MUST BECOME MR. SPOCK

Hi, Carson:

Title: IN SEARCH OF VULCAN

Logline: After a socially awkward science teacher and lifelong Star Trek collector is left at the altar and robbed in a memorabilia scam, a near-fatal electrocution leaves him convinced he’s Mr. Spock — forcing his recently retired military brother to take him on a road trip to Vulcan, Canada to recover a stolen Bitcoin fortune and convince him he’s human again.

Comps: Rain Man – meets – Lars and The Real Girl

Why I am sending this request to you

I believe IN SEARCH OF VULCAN fits the lane of commercial, character-driven high-concept comedies that balance big set-pieces with real heart — and your track record in that space makes you an ideal match.

May I send IN SEARCH OF VULCAN to you for your review?

Thanks in advance for your consideration.
Sincerely,

David Lambertson
dlambertson@hotmail.com

***********************************
And in first place, our winner is…. CALEB HERMANN!

Subject Line: Horror Feature Query

Hi Carson,

My name is Caleb Hermann, and I’m a screenwriter based in Kansas City, MO. Through a writing program over the past year, I wrote and polished a horror feature under the mentorship of a literary manager from Navigation Media Group.

I’m currently seeking representation, and I’ve seen that some of your clients are in the genre space!

Title: Godforsaken

Logline: When a young preacher’s wagon train to Oregon becomes trapped in a frozen valley, he must confront his waning faith and ally with a Native guide to protect the survivors from starvation and a monstrous Wendigo that hunts them.

Comps:
The Witch
The Ritual (Netflix)
The Revenant

I would love to send you my script if it is of interest!

Best Regards,
Caleb

Okay, so let’s break our winning query down because, if I’m being honest, it’s not perfect. But it’s strong where it matters most.

What I like about Caleb’s entry is that it’s simple and to the point. I want all of you to internalize that. Cause that’s the key to writing a strong query. I’d say about a third of you stashed too much text inside your queries. People in this business don’t have time to read all of that.

Caleb gets right to the point. He says hello. He tells us just a teensy bit about himself (where he’s from). He gives us a very succinct backstory about the script (writing it with a literary manager). He then gives us THE MOTIVATION for his query (he’s seeking representation).

Now, if I’m being fair, I wouldn’t include the mentorship stuff. You never want to give out too much information, especially information that might hurt you. I have no idea who Navigation Media Group is. So that hurts the writer. Cause it indicates they’re working with “nobodies.”

I can’t emphasize this enough. Every extra word you write is more information that the recipient can use to dismiss you. In that sense, a query is similar to a screenplay. You only want to write as much as you have to and not a word more.

With that said, I had a handful of writers who queried me with just the logline alone and that’s not enough. You still have to provide context and include basic professional etiquette.

Luckily, Caleb’s logline is strong. It’s a unique movie scenario. It’s a marketable idea. And, in the end, that’s the name of the name. If you’ve got a good screenplay idea, you just don’t want to get in your own way when querying people about it. So many of you got in your own way. You wrote and wrote and wrote about stuff that just wasn’t relevant.

Now, Caleb also gives us comps after the logline. You don’t have to do this. But what I like about his strategy is that the comps take up no space at all. I can read all three of them in under a second. Some of you went on these long paragraphs describing other movies that inspired your script. This is better.

And then he says exactly the right sentence to end the query. If you’re interested, I’d love to send the script to you.

It’s such a clean, to-the-point query and that’s why it won.

If you want to clean up your own query, I do query consultations for 60 bucks. That includes three follow-up e-mails where we make adjustments to your query until it’s perfect.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested.  Or, if you need a consultation on your entire screenplay, we can do that too.

As for this week, what we’re going to do is: Tomorrow I’m reviewing Caleb’s script. Wednesday I’m writing an article on crafting the perfect e-mail query. And then Thursday, I’m going to include some of the queries that didn’t make the cut and explain why, as well as what the writers could’ve done to improve them.

In the meantime, here’s a link to Caleb’s script so you guys can all read it and participate in tomorrow’s discussion!

Genre: Erotic Thriller
Premise: A couples therapist is drawn into a dangerous triangle of lust, lies and manipulation when she begins an affair with a stranger—who turns out to be the husband of her new client.
About: This script was a spec script that was purchased by New Regency. The writers, Erika Vázquez & Siena Butterfield, wrote on the Netflix hit, Wednesday.
Writers: Erika Vázquez & Siena Butterfield
Details: 110 pages

Kendrick for Pau?

Today’s script actually covers a lot of great screenwriting topics. It’s packed with them! So let’s jump into it!

40-something Dr. Paulina Cuevas Strom is just minding her business as the great couples therapist she is when, one night, at a party, she’s propositioned by a sexy man with a wedding ring named Oliver. She almost has sex with him in the bathroom but thinks better of it.

Paulina (Pau), can’t stop thinking about Oliver though. It doesn’t help that her marriage with the weak and wimpy Anders contains a lot of boring sex. So one day, she texts Oliver back, meets him at a hotel, and they start banging.

Meanwhile, Pau is trying to help a fairly new patient, Mare, fit in better at work. Mare is tall and beautiful and looks like a model. But she’s also a bit crazy and controlling, which is what they’re working on.

Well, that work gets a bit tougher when Mare shows up to her session one day with her husband, Oliver. Pau tries not to freak out and, after that session, Oliver sneaks back in to apologize. He didn’t know. And then they have sex again.

Pau knows what she’s doing is bad but can’t quit this sexy guy! She can’t get away with it forever though (spoilers) and, one day, Mare comes into their session telling Pau she knows she’s sleeping with her husband. But it gets worse. It turns out, Mare orchestrated all this from the beginning. She’s been controlling her helpless husband, who does whatever she wants.

Pau knows to get the fuck out of the situation now. But it may be too late. The State Licensing Board gets a complaint about Pau’s practice and now she considers this all-out war. But war with Mare is not a war you want to be in. Pau may be way in over her head.

For some weird reason, Hollywood keeps forgetting that sex sells. I mean, that phrase (Sex Sells) was born in this town. So I don’t know why they go through these giant time chunks where they completely forget how thirsty people are. Especially women.

I know a female friend who STILL TALKS ABOUT the film, Unfaithful, to this day cause of the sex scenes. And if you’ve seen that movie, you know that they really don’t show that much. That’s the thing with this erotic-romance genre. It’s more about the lead-up to the sexual acts than the acts themselves.

This is exactly why Wuthering Heights is being hyped up. And “Fixation” wants to be the next movie in this very lucrative genre space.

The first thing I want to talk about when it comes to Fixation is AMPLIFYING CONFLICT.

You want conflict in every movie you write. But there are levels to conflict. And good writers look for ways to amplify conflict so it’s more powerful.

For example, if you’re covering infidelity, like this script is, you could write about a woman being unfaithful and that’s it. Which is, ironically, the plot to Unfaithful. But why not “plus it up?” You achieve this by amplifying conflict.

So, instead of just having a man and a woman cheating on their partners, why not make it so a therapist is unknowingly sleeping with the husband of one of her patients? Notice how that amplifies the conflict in two ways. She’s betraying the trust of someone paying her to be the most trustworthy person in their life. And she’s also risking her career.

Now, getting caught isn’t just about two people cheating. It’s about a lot more. Which means getting caught has bigger consequences, which is how you raise the stakes.

In order to make this sort of setup work, though, you have to solidify a couple of things. The bond between Pau and Mare has to be super close. Mare needs to trust her with her life. And Pau’s self-identity has to be built around how professional she is. These two requirements were not met. But they would’ve amplified the conflict even more had they been.

One of the reasons I love therapy-focused scripts is because they’re a cheat code for character development. Creating characters who are deep and who the reader feels like they know, is one of the harder things to do in screenwriting.

Therapy scripts allow you to do this easily. Cause you can ask characters very direct questions about what’s going on in their head. “Why do you feel like you need to control everything?” The answer to that question is going to tell us a lot about Mare. But if Mare was in a non-therapy screenplay, asking a question like that feels on-the-nose.

Another thing you might notice about this script is that there’s no goal. The main character isn’t trying to achieve some primary objective. So then you might ask, “Well, what’s the engine powering the story then?”

In a script like this, the engine is that we know the train is going to crash at some point and readers will always keep reading until the crash. It’s a classic story engine and it works very well. It works here too. I wanted to see what happened when this tightrope walk came tumbling down.

Another thing the script executes well is its midpoint. You have to make a decision with a script like this whether you’re going to take the train all the way to the third act or if you’re going to take it to the midpoint.

If you’re going to take it to the third act, it has to be a really compelling situation. And, to be honest, I think this script had enough juice to take its infidelity storyline to the third act. But they opted to come clean with the cheating at the midpoint. And this is usually what you want to do because it creates an amazing midpoint scene and it changes the nature of the story going forward so that the second half feels different from the first half.

So, here, Mare storms into Pau’s office, says she knows she’s sleeping with her husband and they fight it out. The scene takes some unexpected turns and becomes what will be the most talked about scene in the movie. So that’s good!

However, if you’re going to end your movie’s hook at the midpoint, you need to have a stellar plan for what’s going to happen in the second half of the movie. And this is where Fixation stumbles.

It’s not a catastrophic stumble. But here’s the problem. Everything up to the midpoint was authentic. You could imagine something like this happening in real life. After the midpoint, the writers fell victim to what I call “the movie-logic seduction.”

This is when a script quietly stops behaving like humans would… and starts behaving like a movie that knows it’s a movie. For example, Pau and Anders get away for a remote vacation (so Pau can escape the madness). And then, the next day, Mare and Oliver show up, saying they just happened to be in the neighborhood.

That’s not happening in real life.

And I’m not saying you can’t get away with this sometimes. But something about it feels sloppy, and most of your audience is going to feel that too. Worse, that kind of sloppiness is usually a warning sign. The Sloppy Monster almost never shows up alone. It brings friends.  Which is exactly what happens here. By the end, the movie doesn’t even make sense.

Spoilers ahead. The two women are easily the worst people in the story. They are the ones doing all the terrible things. And yet Oliver and Anders are the ones who get punished, with Oliver turned into a handy scapegoat so everyone else can emotionally move on, consequences optional.

Despite that, the script was still good overall and a great example of exploiting marketing blind spots in Hollywood, which occasionally happen. Although I don’t know how you can forget that sex sells. I mean, duh.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: In addition to all the other great screenwriting tips in this script, another is dramatic irony. This is a great dramatic irony situation. Pau is doing marriage counseling therapy sessions with a couple while sleeping with the husband. Every word she utters in these sessions has dual meanings. That creates great subtext which, in turn, leads to compelling scenes.

Best pitch gets a script review next week!

While I’m tempted to spend 1500 words chastising Jon Favreau and Disney for spending 10 million dollars on the most poorly produced trailer in the history of Star Wars (and potentially cinema)…

WE’RE HERE TO BE POSITIVE TODAY!

Next week, I want to focus on the query letter. It’s a little talked-about component of screenwriting but an insanely important one. I’ve probably received more query e-mails than anyone else in Hollywood so I consider myself somewhat of an expert on what makes a good one.

I’ll get into the secret sauce of a good query letter next Thursday. But, the skinny of it is this. Most writers overdo it. And, in overdoing it, they expose their writing weaknesses. What you need to remember is that the star of your query is your logline. That’s the only thing that the person receiving your query really cares about. So, you want to make sure that’s featured.

This is how this is going to work.

You’re going to pretend I’m a producer at Scriptshadow Productions. And you’re going to pitch me a REAL SCREENPLAY. That’s it. And whoever has the best query, I will review their script next week.

A couple of caveats to this. Don’t pitch me your Blood & Ink screenplay. We’re saving those scripts for the official contest. But you can pitch me any other script.  Also, include an attachment of your screenplay.  In a real query, you wouldn’t do this.  You would wait for them to request your script.  But since I’m going to review the winner on the site, I need the script.

Send all query e-mails to carsonreeves3@gmail.com. You have all the way until Sunday at NOON PACIFIC TIME to query me.  You can only send one query.

If you’re not interested in putting your script out there for the world to see but you’d still like to know how to write a good query letter, I offer a query consultation service. It’s 60 bucks and includes three follow-up e-mails, allowing us to make a couple of extra tweaks beyond my initial fixes. If you’re interested in that, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Can’t wait to see what you guys have got!

I’M GIVING OUT TWO SETS OF SCREENPLAY NOTES FOR 40% OFF!!! E-MAIL ME AT CARSONREEVES1@GMAIL.COM TO CLAIM ONE – YOUR SCRIPT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE READY YET TO CLAIM THE DEAL!

So, the other day, I was listening to a sports podcast (Pardon My Take for those interested) and they were talking about how an external mouse instantly makes you look more professional. Not better at your job. Just more serious. Put a mouse next to your laptop and people assume you’re working 20 percent harder than you are, even if you’re doing the exact same thing as the trackpad person. It was actually a funny five minute bit.

Afterwards, something hit me. This is the sort of thing that only used to be available in movies. If I wanted a thoughtful funny bit about the minutia of life, I would’ve had to go to the theatre to watch When Marry Met Sally. Or, more recently, The 40 Year Old Virgin. But now, even daily podcasts are giving me the equivalent of what I only used to get in the theater.

I think about stuff like this all the time because I see cinema as being in a war. And, every day, we’re losing ground to the enemy. Unlike other people, though, I’m not Mr. Doom & Gloom. The reason I want to know what we’re up against is because I want to figure out how we fight back. How we regain ground in this war.

And that question boils down to: What can we give people that no other medium can? Or, specific to this site, what can we write about that creates a movie experience that can’t be experienced anywhere else? To be honest, that was one of the big reasons I went all-in on Osculum Infame. And it’s been echoed back to me by everyone who’s come onto the film. This is an experience you will not be able to get ANYWHERE ELSE but in film. Period. End of story. Not even close.

With that said, it’s a shocker of a film. And I don’t want to think that’s the only way to write a script that becomes a movie in the future. I want there to still be versions of movies in the romantic comedy genre, the thriller genre, the supernatural genre, the sci-fi genre, and yes, even the drama genre, that people go and see.

One movie that got people to the theater that no one was expecting was this weekend’s Iron Lung. Iron Lung was written, directed, starred in, and produced by a video game streamer, Markiplier.

The story behind the movie is interesting. Markiplier played this little-known video game years ago about steering a submarine through a sea of blood and thought it would be interesting to turn it into a movie. In the spirit of every smart aspiring filmmaker, he kept costs low by starring in it himself and setting it in one location (the sub).

After finishing the film, no distributor would give him the time of day. He could only get into 60 theaters. So he called on his followers to call every theater they know and demand the movie. The campaign worked. He was eventually able to get a wide release (3000 theaters) and finish with the highest per-theater average of the weekend, finishing number 2 overall, with 18 million dollars.

It’s a true do-it-yourself triumph.

But what does it say about screenwriting?

A couple of things actually. One thing I’ve always said is that there are TONS – we are talking TONS – of overlooked IP in the book, comic book, and video game space. If you had a cool take on one of these IP, the rights would cost you NOTHING. And now you’re working with something that’s already been proven and that provides a little more cachet whenever you’re pitching up the Hollywood ladder.

Clearly, the weird moodiness of this unique video game made Markiplier believe it would strike a chord with audiences. And he was right! It did.

Also, this is another reminder that when you film your own script, you skip the line. I mean, if we’re being one-hundred here, this movie looks awful. It looks like your typical “stuck in a room and goes crazy” narrative, which are essentially impossible to do well past the 20 minute mark. Even when Hollywood puts its biggest stars and highest production value into them (Solaris 2002), they’re horrible. So, I’m guessing this is a much worse version of that.

But that’s actually more inspiring than you think. Cause you guys actually know how to write! I would be shocked if Markiplier has spent more than 30 hours on screenwriting in his entire life. And that’s including writing this script!

If you could write a GOOD version of a contained thriller that’s cheap to produce, and then somehow found a way to make it? Then you’ve just made an actual good movie while all the other writers who used to be on the same level as you are still holding their hands out waiting to be given permission to step forward.

But if you’d rather stab yourself a thousand times in the eyes with an ink-tip pen than direct a feature film, I got good news for you. Send Help, about a boss who crash lands on a deserted island with his psycho assistant, won the weekend box office! It took in 20 million dollars. Not only that. It was basically a spec script! And that means, if you had written a script like it, you could’ve sold it.

This script is part of a new subgenre I want to officially title now. I’m calling it an “Expanded Contained Thriller.” What I mean by that is, we’re not constrained to a single room (Iron Lung) or a single indoor space (10 Cloverfield Lane). We’re still contained (in this case, we’re on an island) but the area is larger and gives us more to play with.

The downside to a Send Help is that it’s definitely going to cost more to make than an Iron Lung or an Osculum Infame. So that’s the risk. You’re going from a 3-5 million dollar movie to a 15-25 million dollar movie. And less production houses can afford that kind of cap hit. But, it’s still a better strategic option than writing a 100 million dollar sci-fi script.

Want more good news? Between Send Help, Mercy, The Housemaid, and Shelter (Jason Statham pic), you’ve got four movies that either were, or which could’ve easily been, spec screenplays. Throw Primate in there as well. In other words, there are opportunities for writers to sell their scripts and get them turned into films. I just gave you proof!

BUT! Notice how sexy all of those pitches are. Each one of them is a clear “this could be a movie” pitch. You’re not getting to this place with your thematic mood piece about a dying middle-aged couple who try and sell their farm before they kick the bucket.

Back to my original question. What can we give people, as writers, that they can only experience in the world of film? I don’t know the answer to that yet. But I do know this. The margin for error has gotten exponentially slimmer. And Hollywood hasn’t accepted that yet.

They’ve gotten into this state of denial where they’ve cozied up with Rotten Tomatoes and still believe that a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score means you’ve made a good movie. And it’s just not true. I don’t know if it was ever true but it certainly used to be more true.

Audiences are clearly demanding something closer to a transformational experience, and not just something that passes the time. Because there are a million things out there that allow you to pass the time now. Movies are no longer the only game in town.

Which benefits writers who are dedicated to the craft and determined to keep learning and keep getting better.

I will say that, from what I can tell, writing doesn’t seem to be under threat from AI. I’m actually starting to think that the filmmaking space is way more under attack than the writing space. But AI doesn’t seem to know how to elicit emotion or create compelling drama or create affecting characters. So I suspect that as the AI filmmaking world continues to improve, screenwriters will be more and more in demand.

But that’s an article for another time. :)

What did you guys watch this weekend? Anything good?