It is now 1am Pacific Time. You should have the newsletter by 3am Pacific Time.
Oh man. In the annals of newsletters, this one is up near the top. We’ve got celebrations in this newsletter with writers who are breaking into the business through Scriptshadow. We’ve got a giant new announcement for a screenwriting contest that I know you’re going to love. I review one of the single biggest spec sales of the year. This one had 40 producers chasing it. And I try to figure out how a nobody screenwriter nabbed one of the hottest screenwriting jobs in Hollywood, as well as dissect her movie, Supergirl. Is it as bad as everyone’s saying? James Gunn is Mr. “I Don’t Put Movies Into Production Until The Script is Great.” So… is the script great? If you don’t read the newsletter, you’ll never know. And if you don’t read this particular newsletter, your life in July will literally be 87% worse.
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I’m currently busy putting together a newsletter so posting will be erratic. But I couldn’t help but notice the Supergirl reviews and box office projections since the review embargo lifted this morning. By all accounts, the movie is pretty bad and it looks like it will make something in the 45 million dollar range opening weekend, which is an incredibly low number for A DC movie.
What hit me about this was that you now have three of the top 5 franchises in Hollywood — Marvel, Star Wars, and DC — all with their most recent movies being, if not the lowest grossing ever in the franchise, very close to it.
Star Wars – Mandalorian and Grogu
Marvel – Captain America: Brave New World
DC – Supergirl
To me, there couldn’t be more concrete proof that the 2005 – 2020 model of moviemaking is over. Studios clearly no longer understand what the audience wants anymore. They’re using outdated models. Their live-action franchise behemoths are lost.
And I know this is not an all-encompassing take. The full conversation is messier. Toy Story 5 just did better than any Toy Story movie ever. Marvel will come out with Spider-Man soon and that’s projected to make a ton of money.
But Spider-Man’s success is more about Tom Holland being perfect for the role. That screenplay actually looks like a mess yet it won’t matter. And quality made family-friendly animation is always going to do well because it’s one of the only options out there where adults will gladly take their children to the movies.
But as far as the “cool kids” franchises that I mentioned above, Hollywood has no idea what’s cool anymore. That’s why Obsession shocked them. They didn’t know that was cool!
It was so interesting. I recently stumbled upon this old clip of The Emperor’s first appearance in the Star Wars franchise.
Then, after watching that clip, I noticed Youtube suggesting another Star Wars clip, this one from Dave Filoni’s brainchild, the Ashoka Disney Plus show. Dave Filoni, for those who don’t know, was recently promoted to be the top dog at Lucasfilm. He’s in charge of all Star Wars going forward and really wanted to bring Grand Admiral Thrawn into the franchise.
Thrawn was introduced into the Star Wars universe as the next great villain, the replacement for Darth Vader, after Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi. He first appeared in the Timothy Zahn book trilogy. This was before Lucas had plans of doing any more Star Wars movies. He was going to end it with Jedi. So, as far as the Star Wars fans knew, this was the only Star Wars left.
And Thrawn (pictured to the left on this cover) was a badass. He wasn’t Vader. But he was original. And he was cool. Filoni then decided to bring him into live action and his unofficial plan was to move Thrawn into a larger role, eventually becoming the big baddie of the Star Wars movie universe, like Vader was.
So, here’s that Thrawn introductory scene…
For starters, there’s a clunky mythological element to the proceedings. The stormtroopers are kind of beat up and have their individual signatures in a way that feels cheesy and dumb. The way Thrawn’s entrance is shot is incredibly plain. The actor playing the role looks out of shape and unimposing. You have this embarrassingly on-the-nose score where you actually have the singers belting “Thrawn Thrawn Thrawn” over and over again. I mean, is this Star Wars or the Jennifer Hudson Spirit Tunnel?
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But, worst of all, the second Thrawn speaks and we hear his squeaky high-pitched voice, THAT’S IT. Nothing you do after that matters. We’re not scared of this man. He’s not imposing in any way. My mind was actually wandering 10 seconds after he started speaking. That’s how little he commanded the screen.
Why does this matter? Because Dave Filoni cast this man. And Dave Filoni is now in charge of all of Star Wars. If he’s THAT WRONG about one of the most important characters in the Star Wars universe, how wrong is he going to be about all the other less-important stuff?
I say it from a place of anger but the truth is that I’m sad. I’m sad that my beloved favorite franchise is on life support. It’s gotten bad enough that I’ll watch these AI Star Wars movies on Youtube sometimes.
But regardless, I’m sad that there’s no good Star Wars anymore. I’m sad that there aren’t cool superhero movies anymore. I know some people hated them but my feeling about going to the movies is not that I want to have some big important intense experience that makes me think for days. I JUST WANT TO BE ENTERTAINED. I WANT TO HAVE FUN. And these movies have lost the thread on how to have fun. They’ve been replaced with “HOW TO BE BORING.”
Sometimes they say that you need adults in the room to fix the problem. But I’m starting to think, with the success of these Youtube movies, that we actually need kids in the room. People with fresh ideas. Because while I know that the old guard understands how to tell a story better. They don’t know how to surprise audiences. We need something different and fresh and unexpected. Cause I want to go to the movies and be entertained again.
What about you?
Genre: Family/Animation
Premise: When Bonnie has trouble making friends because kids today only have online friends, her favorite toy, Jessie, attempts to locate the last real-world friend on earth for her.
About: Moviegoing is dead? Pft. Toy Story 5 just had the biggest opening of the entire franchise, taking in 160 million dollars.
Writers: Andrew Stanton & McKenna Harris
Details: 100 minutes
A lot of people are making a fuss over whether there needed to be another Toy Story movie. OF COURSE THERE NEEDED TO BE ANOTHER TOY STORY MOVIE! IT’S THE CROWN JEWEL OF PIXAR!
People. It’s Hollywood. No matter how much we bitch, they’re going to keep making movies in every franchise until people stop showing up to see them. What does it look like when a franchise ends? It looks like The Mandalorian and Grogu.
But Toy Story?? Toy Story does not have Star Wars problems. Toy Story has money printing problems. What are they going to do when the ink at the money printing warehouse dries up? That’s Toy Story’s problem.
The question behind the question here is the only one worth exploring. Because it’s a question you should all be asking yourselves every time you sit down to write a screenplay: “Do you actually have something to say with your movie?”
That’s why I think Toy Story 5 is a relevant entry in the franchise. Because it’s clearly trying to say something. That our children are becoming increasingly dependent on their electronic surroundings and not socializing and building in-life relationships.
Now, an argument can be made that Toy Story was a little late to the party with this take. But give them a break! It takes a long freaking time to make these films!
The plot takes a minute to untangle due to the fact that Toy Story 4’s ending split the toys up. Woody is off with most of the new toys somewhere far away. So the story begins with Jessie and a lot of the original crew losing their shit when they see that Bonnie, their kid, just got a new “lily pad” (an iPad made up to look like a frog).
Her parents got the Lily pad because Bonnie is struggling to make friends and, in the online world, all you have to do to make friends is “add a friend.” And that’s exactly what happens. Lily adds three new friends from Bonnie’s dance class. This is one of the better comedy bits in the screenplay. Lilly adds the friends within seconds. “Problem solved. Three friends added,” she tells Jessie. A confused Jessie starts darting her head around. “Where? Where are they?? There’s nobody here!!”
This friend-adding seems like a good thing at first but then her new online friends start making fun of the fact that she still plays with toys and now all Bonnie wants to do is play on her lily pad. All of a sudden, the toys are feeling the pressure.
Through a confluence of events, Jessie ends up at the old farm house of her original kid where she finds out that there’s an off-the-grid girl living there, Susie, who still plays with toys. This, Jessie decides, is the girl that Bonnie should be friends with. Unfortunately, the only way to connect with Bonnie nowadays is through devices, so she has to recruit several cast-off tech devices (including a tech potty trainer) to get Bonnie over to Susie’s.
The plan is to alert Bonnie’s mom that her daughter’s toys somehow ended up at this old farmhouse so the two will come to get them. Once Bonnie arrives, Jessie’s Operation Join Friends Together initiates. But when Bonnie’s new online friends start bullying her for her continued commitment to real toys, Bonnie decides she doesn’t want the toys anymore, placing the toys in the tragic predicament that this may be the end of the line for them.
There was something huge that stuck out right away about this script. Which is that this is a girl boss story. It’s all about Jessie and Bonnie’s adventure. Woody is barely in it. The other big male character, Buzz, is relegated to comedy sidekick status.
Do you know how dangerous it is to do that in 2026? The way that online campaigns can turn against a choice like this can smother a movie before it can take its first breath. Heck, that very thing happened TO THIS FRANCHISE in 2022, with “Lightyear.”
So, why isn’t anybody talking about this?
I’ll tell you why.
Because it’s clear with Toy Story 5 that they prioritized the story first. How do I know this? There are a lot of tells. But one of the easiest ways to decipher how extensively someone worked on a screenplay is how many setups and payoffs there are. And there are a ton in Toy Story 5. It’s very difficult to write a lot of setups and payoffs in a quickly cobbled together screenplay.
The problem with the diversity craze that took over Hollywood for nearly a decade is that they prioritized the diversity over everything. Every trailer, every article, every press tour was built around, “Look at how diverse this movie is!” And you saw the result of that in the movies themselves. They were never good. And why would they be? They prioritized something else before the actual story.
As I’ve always said, it is soooooooo so so so so so so so so so hard to write a good screenplay. Anything you do handicap that process is only going to put you further behind the 8 ball. Why make an impossible goal even harder? I never understood that.
I’m sure the Toy Story family pitched all sorts of movie ideas for Toy Story 5 with Woody being the priority in a lot of them. But this idea won out because it was the best idea. And that’s the way we should all be conceiving of our screenplays. What idea results in the best story? Whatever the answer is to that question, go with that movie!
Moving on, one of the things that’s always amazed me about this franchise is how many freaking characters it has. As a screenwriter, one of the toughest challenges you’ll have is managing your character count. Every single character you bring into the story is taking time away from bigger more important characters. Which is why, if you are going to bring in other characters, you better have a great reason for doing so. You should literally believe that your movie cannot work without those characters. Cause if it can, then you don’t need them.
There are more characters in the Toy Story franchise than probably any other franchise you can think of. Even Avengers. How many are we talking? I estimate between 50-60.
The lesson here, and it’s one Michael Arndt famously learned from the Toy Story team when he was laboring over Toy Story 2, is that when you have this many characters, you want to start dividing them into groups and treat the groups as one character.
So, with Jessie, her friends are dinosaur, Forky, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, and several others. If you try to individualize all those characters, you’re going to explode your page count. You have to pick and choose which characters you actually want to develop a storyline for and then, for everyone else, they will move with the group as one. They can make a funny one-liner every once in a while. But otherwise, they are limited only to whatever goal their group has.
The last thing I’ll say about the Toy Story franchise – and really, this applies to all Pixar films – is that they’re the kings at making you cry. So how do they do it?? Well, there’s no exact formula, but I can tell you how they did it in this movie.
It is embedded in human nature for us to feel bad for people who really want to be a part of something but aren’t able to be, particularly if they’re being excluded by others.
One of the first things the writers establish here is that Bonnie really wants friends. But the neighbor kids she wants to be friends with think she’s too weird. Now, for the rest of the movie, we’re rooting for Bonnie to make friends. And every time she gets let down again, our heart breaks a little more for her. That constant breaking is what brings us to our emotional floor. And that way, when she finally gets her friend in the end, our heart goes from that bottom floor all the way to the top. That very quick rush of emotion is what triggers the waterworks.
If, however, Bonnie only kinda wanted to make friends. If she had some people in her life who already kinda liked her. Then our heart isn’t on the bottom floor. It’s somewhere on the middle floors. Which means, when she finally gets her friend in the end, our hearts aren’t that broken and they aren’t rising very far, which means the emotional build isn’t extensive enough to make us cry.
Anyway, I found Toy Story 5 to be pretty good. Would I recommend you go out and see it now? If you have younger kids, definitely. I think this movie would be quite eye opening to them. If you don’t have kids, wait until it comes out on Disney Plus. It’s a solid entry into the franchise.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A lot of people think that the Toy Story franchise is so popular because they’re toys and it’s cute to see toys play. But there’s actually a secret ingredient to its success. The main characters – the toys – are the most selfless characters in all of film. All they care about is making somebody else happy (their kids). Caring about others above yourself is one of the single most likable traits you can give a character. Give it to one of yours and see what happens.
There was a brief exchange yesterday in the comments section where Brian took a shot at one of my all-time favorite scripts, Meat. Not long after, Branko came to the script’s defense and said that script was the ultimate “vibe” read. And I agree. That script was not the poster child for GSU but it did an amazing job at BIU (burrowing into you).
But what stuck out to me about that was that I didn’t know Branko liked the script so much. Which made me realize, I don’t know many of the scripts that you guys like. So, I wanted to dedicate a post where you guys get to share the scripts that you’ve loved over the years.
And I admit I have a secondary purpose for this post. I’m hoping that some long since forgotten script gets thrust back into the spotlight and maybe we bring some deserving screenplay back to life. Re-examine it. Ask questions such as, “Could this be made today?” You never know. There are definitely managers and agents and producers reading this site and if you bring a great script to their attention that they’re not aware of, anything could happen.
Now, you are allowed to hype up any script that isn’t your own. But I would advise against hyping a friend’s decent screenplay. Let’s have a genuine discussion here about great script reading experiences. These can be amateur scripts. They can be professional scripts.
One script that I still remember to this day that I can’t, for the life of me, understand why it was never made was Brian K. Vaughn’s Roundtable, about four celebrity knights who are asked to protect England from a modern day evil. That’s a ‘game over’ moneymaker.
I did have an A-list director once e-mail me asking me about the rights to that script, which was pretty funny (how the hell would I know??). But he really wanted to make it. And he looked into it but he came back and told me that the “chain of rights” or something was exceptionally complicated. So, I guess we’ll never see it.
Osculum Infame (real-time witch gets hanged and must figure out how to escape) îs a script read I’ll never forget. The Disciple Program (man must figure out who killed his wife), obviously. There were others (Source Code) but they’ve been made since.
So, I ask you, what are some of your favorite scripts you’ve read over the years here that still stay with you today? Let me know and hype them up in the comments section! Leave a logline if possible (for those who haven’t heard of the script before). It’s a script celebration post!
Genre: Horror/Possession
Premise: When the president’s increasingly erratic behavior brings the United States to the brink of nuclear war, a young White House reporter becomes convinced the most powerful man in the world must be forced into an exorcism.
About: The Blood & Ink Horror Screenplay Contest is a unique screenwriting contest whereby, six months ago, you had to pitch your way into the contest. Scripts either got in with a “yes” by me or they got at least 15 upvotes when pitched in the comments section. The 90+ writers that were chosen then had six months to write their script. I am currently reading all the scripts and will put together an official two weeks of reviews for the Top 10. But, in the meantime, I will occasionally review one of the scripts here. Which is what I’m doing today. Black House was one of only five scripts that got a definitive “yes” to be in the contest. If you want to see the previous Blood & Ink reviews, you can do so here, here, and here.
Writer: Jake Barnes
Details: 98 pages
This is not a high concept. This is a huge concept.
When I came up with the idea for this contest, it was for pitches like this one. Where you immediately say, “That’s a movie.” Cause it really is the whole ballgame – the concept. When you have one that’s awesome, you don’t have to fire on all cylinders. The script can withstand a lot of weaknesses. But that doesn’t mean you can go on autopilot. You still have to write something that’s above average. Let’s see if Jake did that.
Black House follows 26 year old D.C. journalist, Emily Morgan. She works as part of the press corps at the White House, where she pals around with fellow journalists Edmund Douglas-Hamilton and Madison Wells. They make up the young hip journalist crowd who speak to Gen-Z.
There’s a lot going on in the White House these days. The president, 43 year old James Sloan, is dealing with a growing war in the fictional Eastern European countries of Molgova and Krasnia. Everyone wants the USA to stay out of the mess but because rogue nuclear missiles are on the line, the conflict can’t be ignored.
Then, one night, a goat is mysteriously sacrificed on the White House lawn. Afterwards, the president’s wife meets with Emily at a restaurant and confides in her that she doesn’t think the president is her husband anymore. She believes a new man has taken over his body. Emily’s a little weirded out by this but then a car speeds directly into the restaurant, killing the wife instantly.
When Emily next sees the president, she too feels that something is off about him. He acts like an asshole. And he’s starting to seriously consider going to war with the Krasnians. So he mobilizes his military machine, setting up the possibility of initiating World War 3.
By this point, Emily is beyond convinced that the president is possessed by the devil. So she locks in a meeting with the White House priest, and says they have to get it out of him. If they don’t, he for sure is starting World War 3. At first, the priest thinks she’s nuts. But the longer this guy is in office, the more bad stuff seems to happen.
As Emily’s journalist friends find themselves in danger by this evil monster, she realizes that if she doesn’t exorcise the demon from the president before a key date coming up regarding the war, that the president is going to start World Wars 3. So she teams up with the local priest and sets up a plan for the first ever presidential exorcism.
This is going to be a unique breakdown because I’m going to try and figure out my thoughts in real time. So, instead of going back and making all this make sense, I’m going to give you the unique experience of what goes on in my head as I read a screenplay.
Expect the unexpected.
I realized, while reading this, that Jake had a tricky decision to make because it was going to affect the entire reading experience. Should it be obvious that the president is possessed? Or should we not be sure?
Let’s look at both scenarios.
Scenario number 1 is what Jake goes with. We know for sure the president is possessed. The advantage of this scenario is that it invokes dramatic irony. We know something the rest of the world does not — which is that the president is definitely possessed and, because of that, he’s going to destroy the world. This creates a desperate feeling inside of us because we want everyone else to realize what we know before it’s too late.
Scenario number 2 creates a different engine. In this scenario, we would only see the president through Emily’s eyes and he would do nothing to definitively prove that he was possessed. As a result, our focus is more on whether Emily is mentally okay. Is she imagining this? Is she putting together pieces that aren’t there? The story becomes more about her.
There’s definitely a version of the second scenario that works. But I don’t think Emily can be a reporter in that version. She’d have to be a staff member, someone who was around the president a lot. Because it would need to be little things here and there that she picks up on that lead to her theory. And you would need to give your main character constant access to the president to notice those things. As a reporter, you only get to see the president in certain situations.
Which one is better? I honestly don’t know. I was thinking about this throughout the read. I know this: there’s something missing from the current draft. So my solution-oriented brain kept wondering whether the dramatic irony version of the story was the problem. Because I do know this. Something felt too obvious in the script’s execution. It felt like I knew what was going to happen way before it happened. So I thought, maybe that would be cured IF I WASN’T SURE that the president was possessed. But since I *do* know he’s possessed, it’s easy to predict what happens next.
By far, one of the most important decisions you make when you sit down to write a script is what POV you tell the story through. This story can be told through dozens of different points of view. It could be told through the wife’s POV. It could be told through the Department of Defense’s POV. An intern’s POV. The White House janitor’s POV. It could be told through multiple POVs as the demon transfers its way up the hierarchy once it gets inside the White House.
It could be told through the Vice President’s POV. Think about how interesting that one would be. The only person in the world who believes the president is possessed just, coincidentally, happens to be the person who benefits the most from his death.
So, you always want to ask: is this really the best POV to tell the story from? I understand why Jake went with Emily. A reporter is one of the most active jobs there is. Their job is to literally take action at every step. So, we know that she’s going to be on this story like a dog on a bone and, carry the plot with her along the way. Which is good.
But for that to work, another question must be answered: Is your main character compelling? Is Emily compelling? Do we like her? Do we want to follow her? I’ll answer that by saying this: I didn’t *not* want to follow her. But there was nothing about her that made me desperate to hop on her back and root for her either.
The thing I least liked about her was that she was part of this “journalist cool kids club” that were kind of cynical and cutthroat. There wasn’t a whole lot about them to like. So, right away, I wasn’t pulled in by Emily. I’d say when it comes to the most important things about screenwriting, you giving us a reason RIGHT AWAY to root for your hero, is up there near the top. And that didn’t happen with Emily. She kinda came off as a bratty journalist.
“Industry” would be a good comp here. A lot of assholes in that show. But the hero was this tiny new girl who was a super underdog. That’s what made us immediately root for her. She was the ultimate underdog. Maybe creating underdog status for Emily would do wonders for her likability.
Here’s a suggestion I would make to Jake. Every journalist in America in 2026 has become the most cynical person in the world. And they’re all about themselves and their own individual agendas. What about making Emily the last good optimistic journalist in America? She’s the last one who believes in the truth. Make her naive in that sense, sort of like Clarice from Silence of the Lambs. Not only would we like her more but you get a much better ‘good versus evil’ showdown with Emily and the Devil that way.
But I think the biggest problem of all is that not enough happens in the story. Emily comes up with with her theory early on and, from there, it’s a lot running around town, a lot of small victories, until she finally comes up with a plan to confront him and exorcise the demon.
It’s funny because it kind of has that same inherent flaw that moviegoers say Disclosure Day had. They all know the guy is going to disclose the data he took. Here, we all know that Emily is going to help exorcise this demon. And in both cases, we’re just waiting around for that to happen. The movies feel like they’re spinning their wheels in the meantime.
On this next draft, we gotta play around with the plot more. We have to throw some unexpected developments into the story. We have to do something to not make this script feel so… Screenwriting 101’ish.
To me, the moment where I became the most excited in the story, was when the priest said that in order to approve an exorcism of this magnitude, you had to get permission from the Pope himself. I was excited because, for the first time, I felt like there was a system in place. A mythology. And these very specific steps had to be taken before you could do the job.
That’s a good starting point for the next draft. You set up a specific mythology behind high profile possessions (they need to be different than regular possessions) and now Emily has a list of things to do. And these things should be cool, like making your case to the pope.
What we have here is the EXPECTED draft of Black House. For draft number 2, I want Jake to explore his ass off and go in a bunch of different directions. I want the unexpected weird draft. And I guarantee he’s going to find some cool new ideas in that draft. And then we can steer the rig back onto the road for draft 3, where we bring in the best stuff from both worlds. This one still has a lot of potential.
Script link: Black House
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Being correct but still wrong. Screenwriting has a lot of things that you are technically correct to do but could still end up being a net negative for your script. Here, Emily has a former boyfriend who killed himself. And then, later, the demon inside the president uses the dead boyfriend to antagonize her. Both of these creative choices are things that I would support in a vacuum. But, because the dead boyfriend thing feels familiar in a possession movie and because we know the demon is going to use that against her at some point, and because we get the exact scene we’re expecting to get from him, the choice actually ends up hurting the script because it doesn’t add any value other than, “It made sense to do this.” Coming up with these creative choices is no different from coming up with a movie idea. You have to find a fresh way in. You can’t just do the same old song and dance. The second I heard she had a dead boyfriend, I knew the demon was going to bring it up. If I’m that far ahead of you, your script is in trouble. I think one reason why Obsession has taken on a life of its own is that you never know what Nikki is going to do next. One of the standout scenes in the movie is when Nikki starts walking around the bedroom nonsensically with a vase of flowers in front of her face. So I’m not saying to ditch this subplot. But play with it more. Figure out a way to make it more interesting. Maybe her dead boyfriend was keeping secrets and the demon starts revealing them to her. That’s probably not enough but it’s a starting point.
