Hey PhotoCine News readers, your friendly neighborhood Hollywood correspondent here. Every Friday morning I’ll be posting a shortlist of the major stories in feature films for the past week. Million-dollar script sales, big moves on upcoming blockbusters, industry gossip and lots more — all presented to you in handy bite-sized pieces. Eat up, it’s good for you. … Continue Reading
It’s long been spoken around Hollywood that the spec script market is dying. But a recent bidding war over Shawn Christensen’s script “Abduction,” followed by a hot, million-dollar sale to Lionsgate, has suggested that maybe things are ready to perk up again.
A script written “on spec” means that the writer has written it with no promise of compensation, as opposed to it being written on assignment (a company is paying the writer to write a specific idea or story). An agent, manager or other representative of the script will circulate it to buyers (in industry parlance is this known as “going out with the script”) in hopes of making a sale. The attachment of a high-wattage star, or an A-list director, will often sweeten the deal.
This year’s Sundance Film Festival saw more dealmaking than it has in years. All in all, nine domestic deals were struck — a result of festival directors steering the focus towards towards high quality, noncommercial product and away from the sort of highly commercial pictures that either fail to find deals, or are bought for way too much and wind up grossing too little. A good article summing up the festival can be found here.
Movies like Buried (featuring Ryan Reynolds trapped inside a coffin for two hours), The Company Men (TV writer John Wells’ big screen debut) and The Runaways (Kristen Stewart making her break from the Twilight Franchise) were getting big buzz before the festival began. And now that distribution deals have been struck, you’ll be hearing about them soon, too. Come next winter, these are the pictures that are going to be collecting Oscar nominations right and left.
