It’s time to learn WHY certain loglines didn’t have the power to push past my discerning eye and make it into the Logline Showdown.
Remember that I’m one person and, just because I didn’t like a logline doesn’t mean someone else won’t.
Which is the main reason I like posting these articles. It gives you some insight into why I choose (and don’t choose) certain loglines.
Let’s get into it!
Title: The Big Return
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: Determined to right his father’s wrongs, the son of a legendary master thief embarks on an impossible mission: returning everything his father ever stole — without anyone noticing.
Analysis: I’ve come across ideas similar to this before. There may have even been a Black List script with an adjacent idea. My issue with these ideas is this: What are the stakes? Who cares if he succeeds or not? Let me give you a similar idea that uses stakes to make the concept a lot more exciting. You may recognize it. A history professor recaptures ancient artifacts and puts them back in the museums where they belong. He is then hired to find one of the most famous artifacts of all time, the Ark of the Covenant, before the Nazis get it first and use its powers to win the Second World War. Similar idea. But one adds an incredibly high amount of stakes, which improves the concept considerably.
Title: Help
Genre: Thriller
Logline: When a reclusive billionaire dies, the staff of his secluded estate makes an uneasy pact—hide his death and live in opulence, for once. But as greed, suspicion, and uninvited guests close in, their scheme quickly spirals into chaos.
Analysis: I wanted to include this one because I worked on it with the writer. This is a good example of how a logline and a concept must work in tandem. If they’re working against each other, you’ll always feel like something isn’t clicking. My issue here was not with the logline, but with the concept. My argument to the writer was, why would you risk everything to live in opulence for a week tops? Sooner rather than later, people are going to show up asking what happened to the billionaire. They’re then going to learn he’s been dead for a while and that you didn’t report it. You probably won’t get in a lot of trouble. But you’ll get in some. And for what? To waltz around the same grounds you’ve always waltzed around but this time without having to do any work? Where’s the upside? I told the writer we need a different angle for this to work. For example, add a murder-mystery to the plot. That gives the concept a lot more flexibility.
Title: Trust
Genre: Allegorical Thriller / Crime Drama
Logline: A farming couple on the brink of collapse is further divided when one secretly agrees to smuggle cocaine inside pineapples for a deceptive drifter. As tensions rise, a venomous snake slithers through their farmhouse—an ominous force that threatens to destroy them both in this modern allegory of Adam and Eve.
Analysis: You don’t want to send out loglines that put the burden on the reader to figure out the movie. The logline is supposed to do that for them. This idea starts off being about a struggling couple who decides to engage in criminal activity to pay the bills. Okay, it’s a small idea but it hints at a conflict that could drive a narrative. But then, out of nowhere, a snake arrives. Instead of explaining how this snake will engage in the plot, we’re thrown the very vague explanation of “an allegory of Adam and Eve.” Now it’s my job, as the reader, to guess what’s going on. My first thought is, “Well, if there are three people, then it’s not an allegory of Adam and Eve, is it?” This is what happens when you ask the reader to do the work for you. They will come up with things that I guarantee were not part of your plan.
Title: Override
Genre: SciFi/Action
Logline: When a suicidal but indestructible robot hitman botches his latest assassination, he teams up with the young girl he was supposed to kill when she agrees to give him the code that can rewrite his program and allow him to die, but only if he can help her escape to safety. -Leon the Professional, Logan in a cyberpunk world
Analysis: In my experience, when a logline starts to feel like a run-on sentence, it’s failing. NOT EVERY TIME. But, like, 95% of the time. That’s how this feels. Override is actually a pretty good idea when you break it down. I like the team-up between the hitman and the person he was supposed to kill. And their exchange of duties at the end makes sense based on everything that’s been set up. But there’s something about the abundance of wording that makes it hard to comprehend the logline on a single read. Case in point, I didn’t pick up the word “suicidal” until the third time I read it, which is probably because “suicidal but indestructible robot hitman” is a mouthful. Likewise, when you’re trying to work out the exchange of duties at the end, it doesn’t enter the brain smoothly. You really have to focus hard to get what’s happening. Reading a logline should be effortless. As proof, think of all the loglines that have worked for you. You understood and enjoyed everything after one read, right? You didn’t need an abacus.
Title: The Hunt for the White House
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
Logline: A defeated Presidential Nominee must convince and unite his former military associates and incoming legislative friends that the opposition party and its nefarious worldwide allies are collaborating when they commit the most traitorous and audacious act in history – utilize radical technology to teleport the White House to an unknown location and exploit the President for their covert demands.
Analysis: This is an example of a cool idea – the White House gets teleported somewhere. It’s a concept I haven’t come across before that contains several different cool story directions it can go. But then you have to wade through a bunch of word salad to get to that part. When I read a logline like that, I think, “If the writer can’t come up with a cohesive presentation of their idea in the logline, why would I expect them to be able to tell a cohesive story through 110 pages?” Either that or they haven’t thought deeply enough about their idea yet to present it. You see, sometimes we come up with pieces of a cool idea rather than a full idea. It’s your job, then, to mold that crumb into a cake. And don’t show anybody that cake until it’s out of the oven!
Title: Omega Critical
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: When Miranda finally gets the chance to run her dream D&D campaign before graduation, she creates an epic, mind-bending adventure where her friends play as different heroes every session. But as the game nears its final showdown, the game begins to mirror her real-life battle for respect and validation from her long-time crush, the group’s former leader.
Analysis: This is the kind of logline you are forced to write once you’ve written a low-concept script. With any movie concept, you’re looking to generate a “special attractor,” that thing that makes the movie stand out from every other movie. Omega Critical has Dungeons and Dragons, which is slightly original. But it’s not big enough to drive people to the theater. That leaves us with the rest of the logline, which is essentially a woman who has a crush on a guy. That’s certainly not big enough to generate box office since anything that can be a subplot in another movie will struggle to be a main plot in its own movie. I bring this up because a lot of people come to me for logline help with these small ideas and they want me to juice them up, make them sound amazing. I can help make loglines sound as good as they can possibly sound. But I can’t make small ideas sound big. To be clear, I think this could be a good script! I’m not knocking its potential at all. But I’m judging it from the perspective of a producer. They read this and think, “Okay, that sounds like… maybe it could be okay.” The only chance you have of someone requesting this script is if they’re really really really into Dungeons and Dragons.
Title: Seeking Relationship Advice
Genre: Romantic comedy
Logline: A formerly anonymous sex and relationship columnist who based her advice on smutty fanfiction must pretend to be in a relationship with her best friend once her column goes viral and she is forced into the public’s eye.
Analysis: This is a pretty good idea. So, why didn’t I choose it? Because it wasn’t different enough. It feels like a movie seen already. It doesn’t have that unique differentiating factor that makes me want to pull the trigger. Some of you may say, “But Carson, you chose some ideas for the showdown that I felt like *I’d* seen already.” Fair enough. This is the subjective nature of picking ideas and it’s why if you gave 10 people these loglines, they would not all choose the same winners. I will say that with an idea like this, a great way to differentiate it is to modernize it. Can we use apps or programs or web sites or modern pop culture in a way to update the concept? Because a relationship columnist may have been common in the 90s. But not so much in 2025.
Title: Dead Stop
Genre: Horror
Logline: During their morning commute, passengers on a city bus are tested when the bus turns out to be a trap set up by a madman who demands one passenger be chosen to be sacrificed before every stop. (SAW meets SPEED)
Analysis: It’s hard for me to articulate exactly why I’m not a fan of this idea. But it comes down to not being a fan of overly forced concepts. This is what I mean: “A woman has 6 hours to run from the bottom of Manhattan to the top and a series of bombs are positioned across the city that will go off every time her heartbeat goes above 110.” For an idea to work with me, it has to meet a certain organic threshold, where it feels natural and believable (at least by movie-idea standards). I know that’s a vague target. I can’t tell you exactly where the line is. I just know that when I read this logline, it felt forced to me. I could feel the writer’s hand. When that happens, I tend not to connect with the idea.
Title: Hell Hole
Genre: Action/Horror
Logline: When a U.S.-Chinese drilling operation in the Arctic breaches the Gates of Hell, the crew must put aside their differences to seal it before its horrors emerge and destroy the world.
Analysis: This concept finished pretty high up in the contest. Which says a lot. Because, often, when the words “gates of hell” are in a logline, I’m out. Mainly because there’s something generic about it all. I just imagine a bunch of generic demons emerging from the ground and now it’s just a video game. Which is the whole reason I stopped playing video games. Every single game was mutated monsters/demons running at you. It didn’t seem like anyone cared about story anymore. So, I think if I had a better idea of what emerged from these Gates of Hell and what kind of plot resulted from their arrival – that would be the deciding factor of me either going in with this or staying out.
Title: How To Train Your Assassin
Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: When a financial analyst rescues an amnesiac stranger from a crash, he soon discovers she’s a hitman sent to kill him by his corrupt boss. As they grow closer, he must fight to survive, dodging the crypto crime syndicate hunting them while keeping her from remembering why she was sent.
Analysis: I’ll tell you why I wrote off this idea. The word “crypto.” “Crypto” is a word that has become so ubiquitous that it no longer means anything. To me it’s synonymous with “generic.” Therefore, its inclusion had me imagining a generic movie. In retrospect, I wish I wouldn’t have dismissed it so quickly. Cause I do like the idea of someone rescuing an amnesiac who, it turns out, was sent to kill them. And there is some connective tissue with the main character, since he’s a financial analyst. It feels a teensy bit similar to “Unknown.” But if you could create a unique and expansive mythology around this “crypto crime syndicate,” that solves the main problem I had with the idea – that crypto makes it sound generic. It’s not the most original idea but if I did the showdown all over again, I could imagine this logline making the top 10.
Title: Flooded Cage
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Logline: After a tsunami devastates a prison on a remote island, the warden must lead the survivors to higher ground, but when they discover a second, more devastating wave is approaching and rescue becomes increasingly unlikely, order begins to crumble forcing her to face unimaginable decisions.
Analysis: This was definitely one of the top loglines in the competition. I remember earmarking it early on, bringing it into my “maybe” document. But once I had to cut everything down, it was one of the last ideas to go. What’s clever about this idea is the second tsunami. Cause I think most writers wouldn’t have come up with that. And, by doing so, you add this extra element of urgency and tension within a group that historically doesn’t do well with tension. Looking back at this logline with fresh eyes, I’m thinking maybe I should’ve included it.
