The Black List is out! This is an annual list of the year’s best unproduced screenplays — it once included Inglorious Basterds and The King’s Speech. This year’s list is positively stuffed with time traveling plots, alien encounters and survivalist films. We would like to call out Hibernation as a particular favorite. This is a movie that could either be the next Memento or the next Demolition Man (we’re OK with either).
The list was created in 2005 by Franklin Leonard. What began as a small survey of 100 film industry development executives has grown into a black list that includes entries from 500 different development execs. The idea is to drum up attention for screenplays that didn’t get off the ground this year. Let’s hope 2013 is the year of time travel hijinks!
Here are our top picks.
Hibernation
By Will Frank, Geneva Robertson-Dworet
A wrongly convicted inmate volunteers for a hibernation experiment in exchange for one day of parole every five years, which he uses to prove his innocence and search for his missing daughter across an increasingly futuristic landscape.
Story of Your Life
By Eric Heisserer, based on the short story by Ted Chiang
When alien crafts land around the world, a linguistics expert is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.
Americatown
By Ben Poole
In a China-dominated near future, a former LAPD officer attempts to save his family from destitution in Los Angeles by working for a crime lord in the American ghetto within a thriving Hong Kong.
Man of Tomorrow
By Jeremy Slater
In an alternate 1940s reality, the US Government makes a deal with an indestructible gangster to kill Hilter in exchange for the city of Chicago, which he will build into his own utopia. Unfortunately his model city never comes to fruition and both he and his Bureau liaison get much of the slack for destroying one of America’s greatest cities and now the government wants him dead.
The Final Broadcast
By Chris Hutton, Eddie O’Keefe
A man takes a job as a radio broadcaster in a small town, only to discover that it is embedded with a radical group planning mass destruction in conjunction with an upcoming lunar eclipse.
The Survivalist
By Stephen Fingleton
Years after lack of resources result in much of the world’s population dying off, a survivalist is living on a farm alone until a woman and her seventeen year old daughter show up looking for cover.
Our Name is Adam
By T.S. Nowlin
An astronaut travels back in time to enlist the help of his younger self.
The Portland Condition
By Dan Cohn, Jeremy Miller
Set against the backdrop of rainy Portland, Oregon, a young man finds himself falling in love for the first time – only to receive a letter from his future self, warning him of impending heartbreak.
Somacell
By Ashleigh Powell
A female prison guard in the future, where prisoners are rehabilitated with virtual reality, discovers a conspiracy that puts her loyalty into question.
Ground Control to Major Tom
By Jason Micallef
After nine years, a NASA communications expert reconnects with the astronaut she believed to be dead and helps rescue him from space.
Transcendence
By Jack Paglen
An epic love story set in a time where a dying scientist is able to upload his consciousness into the internet and fight the forces who are actively working against the existence of a singularity.
Almanac
By Jason Pagan, Andrew Stark
A group of high school kids discover how to time travel, but fail to recognize the potential consequences.
Peste
By Barbara Marshall
Following the outbreak of a virus that wipes out the majority of the human population, a teen documents her family’s new life in quarantine and tries to protect her infected sister.
Read the full list at the official Black List website.
