‘The thrill of discovery was gone.’ After strikes, will movies get creative?

Have Hollywood movies run out of original ideas? Not if Nathan Graham Davis can help it. As an alternative to the endless sequels, remakes, and familiar name brands, the screenwriter recently polished up a script titled, “Congratulations, It’s an Alien.”

The action-comedy is about a woman who gets pregnant during a one-night stand only to discover that the father is an alien in human form. She tries to find her lover. But an unstoppable killer is on her trail. In short, it’s “The Terminator” meets “Knocked Up.” Budget: $100 million.

The Massachusetts-based writer knows he’s unlikely to find a studio willing to midwife such an unconventional screenplay. But amid the writers strike – during which Mr. Davis completed two other unsolicited screenplays – he posted it online.  

“There’s a lot of buzz that original scripts might have a little bit of a boom and be coming back,” says Mr. Davis, whose action movie screenplay “Aftermath” was filmed last year. “We’ll see if that happens.”

Hollywood is gearing up to make the greatest comeback since Norma Desmond. This week, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists resumed its negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Screenwriters are back at work following a successful contract resolution. On the production side, idea pitches and script sales are back on. So are power lunches at Soho House in Los Angeles. 

However, it isn’t business as usual. Hollywood is struggling to tamp down runaway production costs and also trying to figure out how to make streaming profitable. At a time of contraction, many believe Hollywood will be tempted to get back on track with familiar formulas.

Courtesy of Jeff Vintar

Jeff Vintar, a screenwriter for the 2004 film "I, Robot," on the picket line for the Writers Guild of America in June 2023. Mr. Vintar says Hollywood studios are less interested in original stories than they once were.

On the surface, conditions may not seem ideal for original storytelling. But the convection currents of creativity deep in the mantle of Hollywood continually create tectonic shifts. Sometimes it’s a gradual movement of the plates. Other times it’s an earthquake that reshapes the landscape. 

“Twenty years ago it was a lot of the same lamentation and rending of garments about, you know, ‘There’s nothing original and everything is sequels; it’s all presold, and there’s nothing new under the sun,’” says Dade Hayes, the business editor at Deadline, a Hollywood trade publication. “Hollywood just is continually wrestling with that question.” 

Studios have long banked on movies based on recognizable characters such as Tarzan, Robin Hood, and, well, Moses. During the 1930s and ’40s, they invested in franchises such as “The Thin Man” and “Lassie.” At the same time, American cinema developed into a vitally creative art form for original stories, often influenced by European film. The 1970s brought what some call a golden era for highbrow masterpieces by auteurs such as Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, as well as inventive popular blockbusters by the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The two strands, sometimes intertwined, lasted through the 1990s.

“I broke into this business in 1995 by selling three original spec feature film scripts within the span of six months,” says Jeff Vintar, a screenwriter for the 2004 Will Smith blockbuster “I, Robot,” in an email. “Now if that sounds like a whole different world, it really and truly was. ... Original work, challenging screenplays, great motion pictures are simply not a goal of the major studios the vast majority of the time.”

The tension between conservatism and risk played out at the U.S. box office this past weekend. The top earners were the latest entries in the kid-friendly “Paw Patrol” franchise and the definitely not kid-friendly “Saw” franchise. By contrast, the sci-fi film “The Creator” fell short. So did “Dumb Money,” a true story about an upstart investor who beat Wall Street at its own game.

But the macro picture of the 2023 box office presents a more complicated picture. Many recognizable properties – “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” and “Fast & Furious” – performed well. But audiences were less enthused by the latest from the “Indiana Jones,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “The Flash” franchises. Instead, they flocked to Barbenheimer – with original stories about a doll (“Barbie”) and a nuclear scientist (“Oppenheimer”) scoring more than $1 billion and $800 million worldwide respectively. The most improbable box office hit of the summer: “Sound of Freedom,” a biopic about combating human trafficking.

“Audiences are really signaling that they want more original content, but they do like tried-and-true as well,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. 

Some producers work within those commercial parameters to develop inventive blockbusters. “Barbie,” which is campaigning for best original screenplay at the Academy Awards, is one example. “Joker,” a psychological portrait of a villain in the Batman universe, is another. 

Junior executives and talent agents are constantly on the hunt for original scripts, sometimes on behalf of actors seeking challenging material.

Courtesy of Dean Bakopoulos

Writer Dean Bakopolous (HBO’s “Made For Love”) penned two scripts during the work stoppage.

“What was missing during the writers strike is that the thrill of discovery was gone from the business,” says writer Dean Bakopolous (HBO’s “Made For Love”), who penned two scripts during the work stoppage. “For the producers and creative executives, discovering a new writer, discovering a new project, or finding a writer you’ve worked with who’s done something that’s mind-blowing – that’s what everyone wants.”

There’s an online venue for remarkable screenplays that haven’t found a home. It’s called The Black List. Hollywood insiders nominate and vote on overlooked scripts in an annual survey. In 2019, Harvard Business School associate professor Hong Luo studied the box office performance of Black List scripts that ended up getting made. She found they tended to generate 90% more revenue than other movies with a comparative budget.

“Less-experienced [writers] are actually much more likely to be on the list than experienced people, which is not entirely surprising, partly because experienced people are less likely to write spec scripts to start with,” says Professor Luo in a video call. 

Some predict that Hollywood will be awash with original features and pilots created during the nearly five-month writers strike (which is allowed by the Writers Guild of America). But when strike captain Jessica Sharzer chatted with her agents at United Talent Agency last week, they told her that perhaps only 10% of their clients wrote scripts during the work stoppage. Most were too exhausted by daily marches on picket lines. For their part, studios and streaming companies may be cutting back on expenditures. To the extent that they are spending on acquisitions to make up for lost production time, it’s on independently produced movies that were hits at festivals such as in Venice and Toronto.

Indie films, often made for less than the tire budget of a “Fast & Furious” movie, remain a vital outlet for truly original stories. For example, “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “CODA,” and “Nomadland” all won best picture at the Academy Awards. A24 Films is a big player in this space. So are streaming companies. The likes of Amazon and Apple TV+ have helped audiences who don’t venture to art-house cinemas develop a taste for more adventurous fare. Case in point: Netflix will release “May December,” directed by Todd Haynes and starring Oscar winners Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

“They shot it in 26 days,” says Mr. Hayes, the Deadline editor, whose most recent book is “Binge Times: Inside Hollywood’s Furious Billion-Dollar Battle To Take Down Netflix.” “It was very much an indie production. Of course, it ended up getting acquired for $20 million and made a big noise at the festivals.”

Mr. Davis, a former bank employee, spent years submitting scripts to social media before he scored a breakthrough. “Aftermath,” about terrorists who commandeer Boston’s Tobin Bridge, was made for $10 million and is now seeking distribution.

“That $5 [million] to $15 million spot is a range where movies get made and they’re still profitable,” says Mr. Davis, who posted “Congratulations, It’s an Alien” on his website as a writing sample. “They can pay a writer well enough that they might actually have a chance at making something approaching a living.”