Genre: Horror
Premise: A workaholic toymaker’s life is turned upside-down when her sister dies and she gains custody of her young niece.  So, to keep her niece company, she creates the ultimate toy, M3GAN.
About: While the big box office story right now is Avatar reaching 1.7 billion and confirming that James Cameron truly is the king of all the worlds, M3GAN’s box office success isn’t so shabby itself. The film scored 30 million this weekend, surprising the industry, who thought it’d be much closer to 20. Screenwriter Akela Cooper now has two hit horror films on her resume. This and Malignant.
Writer: Akela Cooper (script) and James Wan (story)
Details: about 2 hours

Once again, we are reminded that if you want to break into this business with an original screenplay, this is the genre to do it in. Because where else can you make 6 times your budget on opening weekend than with a horror flick?

The frustrating thing about this strategy, though, is the unknown in regards to choosing your concept. Horror concepts are total wildcards. I mean, this is just an updated version of Child’s Play and Annabelle. And Child’s Play even had a reboot a few years ago, which, you would think, would make this movie irrelevant.

Sure, it’s an AI toy, which introduces a new twist. But not much of one. It’s still an angry killer toy. We’ve seen that before.

I think that younger demos who are looking for somewhere to go with their friends are always going to be into fun horror movies because they get to escape their parents as well as get their emotions stimulated.  You know what they say.  Fear is our most primal emotion.

So maybe the screenwriting lesson here is to write a horror script within a template that Hollywood has made before and, therefore, knows they can market. As we just established, Hollywood knows how to make Annabelle and Chucky sell tickets. So they can apply that same strategy to M3GAN. Make Hollywood’s job easy for them.

Aren’t we here for a movie review, Carson?  Was M3GAN any good?

Gemma is a cutting edge toy-maker who develops advanced computer-aided toys. She’s routinely blasted by her boss, David, for making these toys unaffordable. But Gemma doesn’t care! She’s determined to change the toy game, giving everything she creates that ChatGPT flare.

But single-and-not-ready-to-mingle-cause-families-are-for-suckers, Gemma, gets the shock of her life when her sister, brother-in-law, and niece get in a car crash and only her niece, Cady, survives. Gemma is given custody of Cady and, all of a sudden, she’s got to split duties between work and family.

As a way to ease her time commitments, she finishes up M3GAN, an artificially intelligent little girl that can act as Cady’s friend. M3GAN is an instant hit with Cady, who begins to hang out with her all the time.

M3GAN is a hit with Gemma’s boss as well, who realizes this can completely change the toy game. The two formulate a launch plan that will begin with a streaming announcement in two weeks (remember what I told you about movie timeframes staying within 2 weeks??).

But while Gemma gets ready for the big announcement, M3GAN starts to get more and more possessive of Cady, first killing the neighbor and her dog for threatening Cady, and then killing a little boy who’s mean to Cady. Also, when M3GAN gets really angry, she dances. Which I can totally relate to.

When M3GAN finally realizes that her creator is standing in the way of her and Cady being BFFs, she constructs a plan to kill her. It will ultimately be up to Cady to decide who’s more important in her life, M3GAN or Gemma. Let the best girl win!

So how do you write a professional level horror script?

Cause they look easy. But, obviously, not everyone can write them.

You’re basically looking at three things. One, you need a plot that’s tight and that moves towards a clear destination. Here, we have Gemma trying to launch this toy.

In reality, all the audience cares about in these movies is watching the doll kill people. Unfortunately, you can’t just go from doll-killing-people-scene to doll-killing-people scene. There has to be the illusion of some sort of story in the meantime. And that’s what the “toy launch” plotline is. It makes us feel like there’s an actual story here.

Going back to my Friday the 13th review – a movie I found to have had a terrible screenplay – you can see what happens when you don’t have that plot pushing the story forward. They didn’t have that in that movie, even though it was available to them (they could’ve focused more on having to get the camp ready for the arrival of the campers). Without it, it just felt like an empty excuse to create a bunch of gory kills.

The other thing you gotta do a FAIRLY good job with is the character struggle. You don’t have to nail this – M3GAN certainly doesn’t – but you can’t ignore it. You need something that the main character is unknowingly struggling with or actively trying to overcome. With Gemma, it’s that she’s super-selfish. She cares more about work than her own niece. And there’s this question of, is she cut out to be a mother?

Again, Cooper didn’t execute this very well. But she made it serviceable. And the reason you want to it to be, at least, serviceable, is because it makes the character feel more real. If you don’t include this, then the character becomes an empty vessel with nothing going on, and it’s clear that they only exist because the movie needs a main character.

The final thing you need is three great scary set pieces. Ideally, you want the set pieces to be specific to your concept. In other words, you don’t want some garden-variety haunted house scene in a cursed doll movie. You want your set pieces to revolve around stuff only a cursed doll movie could have.

What’s different about M3GAN is that the villain is, many times, also the hero. She’s getting rid of people we want gotten ride of. So she takes out the neighbor, whose dog viciously bites Cady. She takes out the evil kid who tries to beat up Cady. In a weird way, I guess you could call M3GAN an anti-hero. And that helped her scenes feel a little different than traditional scary bad guy scenes.

If we take the screenplay out of it, M3GAN was like an Eastern European gift basket. You got some things in there that are worth trying out and others that’ll probably send you to a military ER.

I can tell you this. The movie worked well with my crowd. Every time M3GAN started singing, my crowd howled with laughter. And they were always giggling at things M3GAN would say. So I can see why the film was so popular.

But if you look a little deeper, this was a super-cheap film. They must’ve spent all the money on M3GAN because there were 4 sets in this movie. It’s so overt that the big final fight takes place in a 10-12 foot basement.

And Allison Williams is about as convincing as a geeky toymaker as I am a professional opera singer.

There is no world in which this movie deserves a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s barely better than average. And most of that is attributed to how weird M3GAN is. I’m not even convinced that weirdness was purposeful, by the way. I think they got a little lucky with it.

M3GAN is a campy horror film that is way more appropriate for streaming than paying 15 bucks for. But it’s a fun harmless movie that feels like it would be a blast for the 12-17 crowd. This one just BARELY passes into ‘worth the watch’ territory.

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

What I learned: Dramatize your exposition, don’t state your exposition. Early in the script, we need to establish that both Gemma and Cady have voice control over M3GAN. This will be relevant later on when M3GAN starts ignoring Gemma. But you must first set that rule up.

Weak screenwriters will do this with a straight-exposition scene. They’ll have Gemma sit everyone down and carefully explain how M3GAN works (“You can have multiple people paired with M3GAN so Cady’s going to be paired with her and also I’m going to be paired with her…”). This can work but it’s boring and unimaginative.

Strong screenwriters look for ways to dramatize this information within a scene. So what Cooper does here is Gemma and Cady get into a fight while eating lunch and M3GAN is sitting next to them. M3GAN keeps trying to interject so Gemma says, “M3GAN, turn off.” And as the arguing continues, Cady says, “M3GAN, turn on.” Gemma continues to spar with Cady, and looks at M3GAN again, “M3GAN, turn off.” “M3GAN, turn on,” Cady immediately retorts.

What this does is it establishes that both Gemma and Cady have voice control over M3GAN, and it does so within a dramatic framework – the two of them arguing. This is so much more effective than a straight, “Let’s list out all the doll rules” exposition scene.

Genre: Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: A married couple attending a gender reveal party are quickly informed that they must stop the reveal party at all costs… or the world will blow up.
About: This script finished top 10 on the Black List. Jack Waz has been slowly working his way up the ranks. He was a writer’s assistant on Starz’s, Get Shorty. He wrote a small TV movie called, “Love Blooms.” And now he’s made it to the Black List.
Writer: Jack Waz
Details: 99 pages

Is it finally going to happen?

Am I going to genuinely laugh during a comedy screenplay?

It’d be a first.

Why is being funny so hard for people?

I’m hilarious. Just be more like me.

This script’s got a head start, though, cause I love the logline. As I stated in my annual Black List assessment post, I think gender reveal parties are HI-larious in how stupidly insane they are. Especially because of how much it sucks when you find out it isn’t a boy.

Carson, it’s 4 days into the New Year. Let’s not get cancelled!

Meg and Andy, both in their 30s and still acting like they’re in their 20s (getting wasted every night), reluctantly agree to go to Meg’s sister’s (Grace) gender reveal party. Since these two are not into kids, going to a gender reveal party is their own personal nightmare.

Of course, it’s about to become an actual nightmare, because once they get there and everyone settles in, a giant shipping container is opened and blue balloons shoot out into the sky. It’s a boy!

Except Air Force One happens to be flying by at that very second, the balloons get pulled into the engine, the engine explodes, the president dies, and the United States retaliates against Russia and China, who they think shot the president down, and ten minutes later there is no earth.

Luckily, right before Meg and Andy die, some guy named Tank shows up. He’s buff, naked, wears a fanny pack, and is from the future. He tells them he’s time traveled back here to stop this gender reveal party in the hopes of saving the world.

So Tank time travels them back to the morning, tells them they’ve got five shots at stopping the gender reveal party. And off they go. But in their initial attempt, which includes popping all the balloons ahead of time, the sister’s husband has a backup plan! A series of fireworks go off that, when they blow up, reveal the gender. Oh, except it triggers a massive earthquake and the earth splits in two!

The group quickly learn that there are forces bigger than them determined to make sure this reveal happens. They will have to outwit fate to save the planet. But, more importantly, put an end to this evil attention-seeking practice that soon-to-be parents all across the United States participate in – the gender reveal party!

Baby Boom, which definitely needs a title change with the words, “Gender Reveal Party” in it somewhere, is its own unique beast. It’s a quasi-time loop comedy with a spritz of Final Destination thrown in.

The script is written in a brisk effortless style, as every comedy should be. The structure is solid, as it’s divided into five sections, each with a big goal (prevent the world from blowing up).

But for me, it’s more of a “smile” comedy than an “lol” comedy. To be fair, most comedy scripts I read get nowhere close to “smile” level. They live closer to “neutral” and “scowl” level. So I don’t want it to sound like I’m dissing Baby Boom for only making me smile. That’s actually a compliment.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned about comedy.

It’s mostly about performance. It’s about the actor adding their own flourish to the action, to the line, to the performance. When you think about the funniest moments you’ve watched (imagine Step Brothers for example), virtually none of them work without that particular actor delivering that particular line or that particular action in that moment in that particular way.

So it’s hard to judge comedy on the page.

With that said, it goes to show that if you *can* manage to make a script funny on the page, you have something incredibly special. So I’m always looking for that. Even if it is a unicorn.

One thing that can really ramp up your comedy is stakes. The reason for this is that when stakes are higher, it creates tension. We feel that tension since more is on the line. This creates a tightening of your body and primes it for release, which of course comes in the form of laughter. When you don’t have that tightening, there’s no need for release.

Baby Boom low-key doesn’t have any stakes.

On the surface, it looks like it does. The world is at stake!

But they tell us, right from the beginning, that we’re going to get five shots at this. So we know we’re good for the next 75 minutes. They’re going to make it out of each world-ending catastrophe just fine.

Baby Boom has stakes in its fifth and final attempt. But you’ve asked us to endure four meaningless sections to get to the actual danger.

Just so you know, this is not a hard and fast rule. There are examples of screenplays that work with low stakes. To do this, though, you have to excel in other areas of your script, usually the character front. But I just wasn’t into the characters here. I mean, I thought they were fine. Meg and Andy did a solid job taking us through this journey.

But my ultimate character litmus test is, “Would they be interesting without this particular plot surrounding them?” Are Meg and Andy interesting as everyday people? If we were to follow them around for a day, would we be infatuated with them? Not really. There’s some late script stuff where they battle whether they’re ready to have their own child that’s pretty good. But as people, I only ever smiled at a few things they said or did.

Tank was clearly constructed to be the breakout character here but he was just too wacky for me. A naked guy from the future wearing only a fanny pack is a funny image but it felt like it belonged in a South Park episode, not this movie.

Despite all this, I thought the Final Destination angle was a stroke of genius. Waz seemed to anticipate a problem with all the repetition that came with the five similar sequences. So he made sure to keep us guessing on how the world was going to go belly up each time. My favorite was the AI takeover. I thought that was clever. And the Air Force One accident was fun as well.

As confident as I feel in my assessment, I’m aware that I haven’t laughed at a comedy script in forever so the problem could very well be me. Also, this script reminded me A LOT of the script Michael Waldron wrote to get on the Black List, The Worst Guy in the World and the Girl Who Came To Kill Him. And we all know how things turned out for him.

Anyway, did anybody read this? What did you think?

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

What I learned: It used to be that you could sell a comedy script pretty quickly by following the simple rule of capitalizing on a popular cultural trend. Remember when “Bromance” was a thing? There were like five comedy specs about bromances that sold. When Uber came out, we got a couple of ride-share comedies, with, “Stuber” getting produced. Wedding Crashers is another example. Baby Boom’s high placement on the Black List proves there’s still interest in this approach. So if you’re looking for a comedy idea, this is a good well to draw from. Maybe we can all brainstorm in the comments section current popular culture terms that would make good movies. Getting cancelled is probably a good starting point.

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: A young woman obsessed with eating healthy becomes convinced that all the food she puts in her body is rotting, leading to her having a meltdown at her sister’s wedding.
About: This script finished NUMBER 1 on the recently released 2022 Black List.
Writer: Catherine Schetina
Details: 94 pages

One of the more popular topics for a Black List script is the main character having an unhealthy obsession with something. A ton of these scripts make the Black List so it’s a topic worth considering if your goal is to make the list. In the past we’ve seen obsession over exercise, bodybuilding, porn, influencers.

It’s the car crash principle. We know the crash is coming. And we can’t help but keep looking. We want to see what happens when our hero’s crash finally comes.

30 year old Hannah Abrams works a retail job and bemoans the fact that she doesn’t have her life together. She’s in a relationship with her girlfriend, Cal, who’s a local school teacher.
The two have a great relationship except for one problem. Hannah has orthorexia, a condition where healthy eating becomes an obsession.

Hannah isn’t thrilled that she has to head up to Northern California to her perfect lawyer sister’s wedding but Cal going with her makes it a little easier. On the way up, the two stop to get food and Hannah buys a salad. She then flips out when one of the pieces of lettuce has mold on it.

Hannah tells Cal that the only way to deal with this poison going inside her body is to go on a cleanse. “During your sister’s wedding?” Cal asks. Yup, Hannah says. You see, to Hannah, all her little weird food solutions make total sense, even if no one else understands them.

Once at the weekend cabin, Hannah struggles mightily to survive during group meals. Everyone slurps up chemically-injected food sources. To Hannah’s horror, even her own girlfriend chows down on steroid-injected beef like it’s no big deal.

On that first day, Hannah is horrified to find that there are maggot eggs underneath her fingernails, no doubt from that rotten salad! So she tears away at her fingernails. But she doesn’t get rid of it all because, the next day, she finds maggots on her hands. And also underneath her skin!

Hannah goes into major damage control, scratching and clawing into her skin to capture the little buggers and pluck them out. She also stops eating, causing her to look more and more like a walking corpse. Things get so bad that clumps of her hair keep falling out.

Hannah repeatedly refuses Cal’s help and Cal begins to go through her own mental anguish as she comes to terms with the fact that she’s been enabling this behavior for their entire relationship. It’ll be up to Cal to step to the plate and get Hannah to the hospital before it’s too late. But that’s the problem. IT IS TOO LATE.

I like creepy obsession stories. If you look back through all my reviews of them, I usually give them high marks. I think it’s because we all feel like we’re close to being one of these people. We all have our unique obsessions. What would it take for them to become a legit medical condition? The line between the two is probably a lot smaller than we know.

But the fact that we aren’t yet as wacko as these jokers allows to watch them spiral out of control from a place of comfy schadenfreude. I think that’s another reason these concepts work. We can read them and think, “Well at least I’m not THAT level of crazy!”

I also personally know people who are obsessed with the super-clean food industry and they’re their own level of wacky. For instance, I knew a guy once who bought off-brand milk from Australia because Australia doesn’t pasteurize their milk, or something, and so the milk is the only legit chemical-free milk in the world (his words, not mine). It cost him, I believe, 30 bucks a gallon.

It seems to be this hole you go down that never ends. Cause first it’s Whole Foods since they’re organic. But then you find out that they’re only “certified” organic, which still allows for some light chemicals to be used. So now you start going to Erewhon, which has the truly truly truly organic food. Of course, all the food there cost five times as much. And that’s another element to this obsession. You’re soon paying 100 bucks a day for your habit.

As for the actual story, I give it mixed marks. The stuff that Hannah goes through – first the eggs in her fingernails, and then the maggots, and then the fly eggs, and then the flies coming out of her. I’ve seen that before. I read quite a few scripts where insects are crawling around underneath the character’s skin and they’re trying to scratch them out.

So nothing there really surprised me.

But I did think it was clever to build this narrative around a wedding. A lot of times with these weird indie scripts, the writer focuses so much on the bizarre stuff (like insects breeding inside you) that they overlook a solid defined narrative.

By constructing a script that happens over a single weekend, you take care of that issue. We now have form to our story. We know where the high-pressure points are (Hannah has to give a maid of honor speech). And, most importantly, we know where it’s going to end. It’s going to end in two days. Which means we know we’re not going to be lingering on endlessly.

It’s sort of like Meet the Parents, the I’mFlippingTheFu*kOut edition.

I also liked the relationship aspect of the story. We’ve seen scripts such as Magazine Dreams and movies like Joker that tackle these weirdo characters dealing with their obsessions in isolation. It becomes a different story when the protagonist is in a relationship. Because everything they do affects the other person. And you also have this other character who has to decide – do they stand up to their significant other’s delusions? Or do they nod their head when their partner says, ‘I’m fine,’ even when it’s clear they’re not?

Finally, this script made me think. There’s this moment where Hannah is listening to the radio and there’s a segment about how much micro-plastics we ingest every time we drink bottled water and we have no idea what the long term effects of these micro-plastics are. I drink a lot of bottled water. And now I’m thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t do that.”

Which I think is healthy. But if I start advocating to rip my skin off to take out the maggots crawling underneath my skin, you have permission to tell me I’ve gone too far.

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

What I learned: “Hannah smiles at her brother. Genuine love there.” You should never ever have to write the second sentence of this line. If you can convincingly SHOW that Hannah and her brother love each other through the actions they take or the words they say, why would you need to directly tell the writer that there’s “genuine love there?” Shouldn’t we already know? In the past, I’ve told writers this is okay, but I realize now that you’re just allowing the writer to be lazy. Do the hard work. Find a couple of moments that unequivocally show that there’s genuine love between Hannah and her brother. And then you never have to tell us in the action description.

Is today a holiday?

Somebody told me today was a holiday. That because New Year’s Day landed on a Sunday, they didn’t feel it was right that we should waste a holiday on a day we already had off, so they added an additional day off and called it New Years Day Adjacent.

Man, I thought screenwriters were the worst procrastinators. Apparently our government is angling to steal our title.  They don’t even want to start the year!

I’m curious what the new year is going to bring on the movie front. On the one hand you have the, “movies are dead, TV is king” crowd. And that’s a hard crowd to argue against. TV is pretty freaking amazing at the moment. You still don’t get the level of production value you do on a movie. But it’s close!

Then you have the, “Do you not see what Avatar is doing at the box office” crowd. And they’re pretty convincing too. Because you will never ever get the full experience of Avatar 2 at home. It’s so much better seeing it in the theater. And, apparently, a lot of people agree.

But once Avatar 2’s run is over, we’re in for some dark days, folks. They’re calling 2023’s movie line-up one of the worst in history. I don’t know if that’s true. But the very fact that some people think it’s true is scary.

With that said, I don’t want to get bogged down in theatrical prognostications. Instead, I want to highlight five interesting movie releases in 2023 and talk about the screenwriting obstacles they present.

As I’ve said many times before, every screenplay has its own unique challenges. One of the major jobs of a screenwriter is identifying these challenges and coming up with a game plan for how to tackle them. So let’s jump into it!

Cocaine Bear – Feb 24

Cocaine Bear has a classic screenwriting conundrum. It’s got a “poster-only” premise. What that means is that Cocaine Bear looks great on a poster. It looks great in a trailer. But because the story’s success is so dependent on its wacky titular character, what happens 10 minutes after the bear has been introduced and the shock factor has worn off?

I see this happen all the time in screenwriting. The solution is to come up with a plot that assumes the concept is weaker than it is. In other words, don’t mail in your execution. This is exactly what happened with Snakes on a Plane. It thought its concept was so great that they didn’t have to bother with good characters or a good plot. Never assume that the concept is going to do the work for you. You have to roll up your sleeves and give the reader a great story that could survive whether there’s a cocaine bear in your screenplay or not.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – June 30

(Spoilers) Rumor has it that this is going to be a time travel Indiana Jones movie. Anyone who has tried to write a time travel movie will tell you the same thing. It’s one of the hardest narratives you’ll ever have to write, cause you’re always dealing with a paradox. If the plan doesn’t work, you simply go back in time and try again.

Sure, you can come up with rules like, “You can only time travel two (or three) times,” but therein lies why the genre is so difficult. Cause the second you start adding hard rules, those rules need to make sense within the mythology. They can’t just be rules that the screenwriter needed to be there. That’s when movies start feeling fake.

So, with time travel, you have to outline like an insane person and rewrite like crazy. There’s no other way around it. A well-executed time-travel script will take you twice as long as any other genre script in order to work out all the kinks and make the time travel stuff as seamless as possible. If you’re willing to make that commitment, go for it!

Oppenheimer – July 21

When it comes to biopics, there are two versions you want to avoid. You want to avoid the cradle-to-grave biopic. It’s like the real life version of an origin story — predictable and bland. But you also want to avoid the two-years-in-the-life-of biopic. This is exactly what it sounds like. You’re covering two years of the main character’s life. The reason why both of these are bad is because movies don’t do well with extended timelines. They do well with short contained timelines. Most of the movies you’ve loved have taken place in under two weeks. Why? Because movies go hand in hand with urgency. When we feel like every minute spent onscreen is important, due to time running out, everything about the story feels charged. And if you’re going to write a movie about the biggest bomb in history, it only makes sense that you create a ticking time bomb element to it. If Nolan keeps this timeline tight, the movie has a chance at being good. If we do a slow-burn two-year lead-up to the bomb, I promise you the movie will fail. You can’t make slow-burn studio movies in 2023. You just can’t. And Nolan understands this. Dunkirk takes place in under two hours, right? Then again, Interstellar takes a year so who knows what Nolan will do.

Barbie – July 21

Barbie is, by far, the most challenging screenwriting assignment of the year. And it’s relevant because when you make it as a screenwriter, you will be given impossible assignments like this. And it’ll be your job to come up with an angle that’s compelling. The most notorious example of this is Charlie Kaufman’s, “Adaptation.” The book (about flowers) Kaufman was paid to adapt was so mundane, so boring, so without narrative, that he went crazy while adapting it, to the point of inserting himself into the narrative. I don’t see Greta Gerwig inserting herself into Barbie. But she’s going to have to come up with a really clever way to adapt this because not only is adapting a toy hard, but she’s adapting a toy that is thought of as a prime symbol of the patriarchy. Which means she’s going to have to change the character into something acceptable for modern-day audiences. And it never works when you change something that was super popular for being something else. Normally, that would be my screenwriting advice: Stay true to the character. There’s a reason the world fell in love with Barbie. Highlight that in your adaptation. But you can’t do that with Barbie. It would cause a Twitter meltdown. This is the one property that I have no solution for. If they hired me, I would not know how to turn this into a good movie. Which makes me all the more curious what they come up with.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 – July 14

If you are writing a big action movie, it is imperative that you have at least three set pieces that nobody’s ever seen before. Which is why I actually nudge people away from writing movies like Mission Impossible. Because Mission Impossible exists in the real world and, therefore, is going up against 100 years of action movies that have also existed in the real world. Finding three brand new set pieces in a 100 year old genre is its own mission impossible. Which is why I advocate for unique high budget concepts that grant you access to set pieces that haven’t been done before.

For example, if you make an action movie about dream heists, you’re providing yourself with a unique world that contains all sorts of new set piece possibilities. Mission Impossible has found the weirdest way around this issue, which is to promote Tom Cruise doing his own stunts. This way, even though we’ve seen the set piece before, we’re watching it with the knowledge that Tom Cruise really did the stunt, which heightens the experience. If you don’t have the greatest movie star in history to do his own stunts, though, you need to put off writing a traditional action film UNTIL you have three set pieces that have never been seen before. Because, I promise you, if your best set piece is something the reader saw last year at the movies, they’ll forget your script the second they finish it. Another thing to remember is that one hands-down amazing set piece can be enough to get a producer to want to make your movie. Even more incentive to take your time and come up with great original set pieces!

Keeping with the theme of lists this week, I’m going to share with you my ten favorite scripts of the year. These are scripts that I read this year and not, necessarily, scripts that were written this year.

One of the defining tools for me to be able to identify a good script is, do I remember it three months later. Just like movies, sometimes you can see something and enjoy it in the moment, yet that movie quickly evaporates from your brain. You can’t even remember a scene from it two months later.

So as I was going back through all my reviews this year, I was surprised at a few of the high grades I gave scripts because I could barely remember them now. Meanwhile, all the scripts here have moments or characters that are tattooed on my brain. They’ve stayed with me.

I tried to find a consistent theme to all the picks, but unfortunately, they can’t be distilled down into one unifying lesson. The scripts do, however, hit key categories that tend to do well with me, and with professional readers in general.

Those are…

A really likable main character.
A really interesting/weird main character.
A really fun concept that stands out from the pack.
A well-plotted story that moves along at a brisk pace.

Are you ready? As always, if you’re interested in reading these scripts, go ahead and ask in the comments. Someone usually has them. If you still can’t find them, you can e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Let’s do it!

NUMBER 10

Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel by Michael Shanks
A man wakes up trapped in a mysterious hotel room. All alone in a mind-bending prison, his only chance for escape is through teamwork… with himself.

Thoughts: I read so many scripts that are clearly desperate directors trying to come up with the cheapest best idea possible that entails one room and one actor. Most of these scripts can barely get past page 10 and still be interesting. But Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel manages to keep throwing weird plot developments at you that keep the story fresh and fun. It’s one of the more inventive scripts I’ve read.

NUMBER 9

Classified by Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan
A mysterious terrorist takes over a top secret U.S. mountain military base that contains within it every ancient artifact that the U.S. has ever collected.

Thoughts: One of the flashier projects that was purchased this year. This script represents the pure unadulterated fun that is going to the movies. It evokes the kinds of feelings you got when you went to see Jurassic Park for the first time. It’s got some of that high concept old movie swagger to it. It’s sort of an imperfect script in a way. But it’s so darn fun, you overlook its weaknesses.

NUMBER 8

Van Helsing by Jon Spaihts & Eric Heisserer (newsletter review)
Famed vampire hunter, Van Helsing, is searching for his white whale, Dracula, but is thrown for a loop when he realizes he has a much bigger foe.

Thoughts: This screenwriting super-team wrote a script that’s even more fun than Classified! I always say that it’s the key creative choices you make in a story that decide its fate. And Van Helsing makes a key creative choice to go away from what would be the most obvious direction of the film, and in the process, creates something much better. This should’ve been the movie Universal used to begin their Monsterverse.

NUMBER 7

Challengers by Justin Kuritzkes
Two former best friends, at opposite ends of their sport’s success spectrum, take each other on in a match for the ages in front of the woman they both love.

Thoughts: Luca Guadagnino has hit a speed bump with his latest film (Bones and All). So the decision to follow that up with a tennis movie, the sports genre that has yet to produce a classic film, isn’t looking so great. But Challengers is definitely the most unexpected script on this list. It’s hard to categorize because it seems to drift in and out of sub-genres. Sometimes it’s a tennis film, sometimes it’s a drama, sometimes it’s a sexually erotic flick. But it’s that weird combination of elements that make it such a memorable read. Can’t wait to see how this film comes out.

NUMBER 6

The Bee Keeper by Kurt Wimmer
When his elderly neighbor is duped out of her entire life savings by online scammers and subsequently commits suicide, a bee keeper goes on a rampage to take the scammers down.

Thoughts: Is there a sale that had more buzz in 2022 than this one? Come on, I had to do it. What I love about Kurt Wimmer is he writes these premises that are right on the border of being ridiculous, but because his craft is so tight, he can walk right up to that line and never fall over it. We’ve got an entire agent showdown scene in this script where the agents use bee puns. And yet it works. It’s crazy. Maybe the most fun script I read all year.

NUMBER 5

Drive Away Dykes by Ethan & Tricia Coen
Two lesbians, one slutty, the other conservative, head down to Florida on a road trip, unknowingly carrying a high profile suitcase that belongs to some very bad people.

Thoughts: Never EVER count out a Coen Brother. This is the rare script that follows the cheap Hollywood formula of combining an over-the-top character and a super-reserved character, but leans into the authenticity of each, allowing their relationship to feel genuine as opposed to ridiculous. Also, this script has the best dialogue in the top 10. Not surprising when you have a Coen Brother manning the typewriter.

NUMBER 4

Horsegirl by Lauren Meyering
A unique young woman enters a hobbyhorse dance competition that she’s way too old for while dealing with her mother’s cancer struggle.

Thoughts: Weirdest character in the top 10 by a country mile. I know some of you didn’t like the main character. But here’s my rebuttal to you. You REMEMBER this main character. And you will continue to remember her for many months to come. Do I have to remind you how difficult it is to create even one memorable character in screenwriting? Newbies can write six scripts averaging 20 characters a script and not write a single memorable character. So when someone figures out a way to create an impossible to forget character, that’s worth something in screenwriting. And, also, I just thought this was a tragic story. It really stays with you emotionally.

NUMBER 3

Mercury by Stefan Jaworski
A ride-share driver who’s just purchased his dream car, a 1969 Ford Mercury Cyclone, goes on the Tinder date from hell.

Thoughts: Best plotted screenplay of the bunch. If you want to know how to keep a screenplay moving from page 1 to page 100, read this script right now. Pay attention to everything Jaworski does because he knows how to make you turn the page. And it’s not just in-script decisions. He purposefully came up with this idea because he knew it would allow him to create a fast-moving plot. He planned ahead. Too many writers pick slow ideas and try to create urgency around them. It doesn’t work. If you want your script to move, you gotta pick concepts like Mercury.

NUMBER 2

Air Jordan by Alex Convery (newsletter review)
In 1984, an out-of-shape bulldog of a sports executive at a small shoe company called Nike attempts to sign the hottest basketball player out of college, Michael Jordan.

Thoughts: It’s Hustle meets Jerry Maguire. Which is a great pitch. It’s also a great script to study to see how to write a fast read. But, unlike Mercury, there are no action sequences here. It’s just a guy trying to get a deal done. But the choices the writer makes – such as making the action description super lean so all the pages read fast – and being so dialogue focused, which also helps the script read fast. This is another writer who understands the burden a reader goes through and does everything within his power to make the script as accessible as possible to anyone who opens it. Plus it’s just a really great underdog story.

NUMBER 1

Galahad by Ryan J. Condal (newsletter review)
One of the Knights of the Rounds table, Galahad, must fight for his life when he is erroneously accused of assassinating the king.

Thoughts: Relentless. Brutal. Intense. Not afraid to offend. Not afraid to take chances. This script literally does everything that every writer is terrified to do today. So it’s not surprising that it was written and sold back in 2008. But this script was a revelation to me in that Condal wrote it before our society turned into a big giant p-word. And you can see how fearlessness – which is something all screenwriters used to have and should have – creates much better material. We need to go back to this fearless place if we’re going to start writing good scripts again. Cause everybody’s writing afraid now and art doesn’t work when you’re afraid. It only works when you’re bold. Even beyond that, though, it’s a killer concept with some killer execution. This is what a spec script should look like.