This year’s Black List of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood is out, and only one of them is science fiction. Should we be worried?
https://gizmodo.com/read-2008s-greatest-unproduced-screenplays-for-free-5378684
Entertainment Weekly has the rundown of the ten – well, this year, eleven – best unmade movie scripts from this year, as voted for by over 300 movie insiders and, although we’re not going to pretend that we wouldn’t be rushing out to see a Jim Henson biopic or Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook movie, we’re depressed by the lack of sci-fi or fantasy as the top (especially considering how generic some of the thrillers that made it there sound). The only SF script to make it into the top ten was in last place, as well – Ronin and Sgt. Rock adapter Chad St. John’s The Days Before:
What’s it about: A man from the future keeps hopping one successive day into the past desperate to stop a vicious race of time-traveling aliens from wiping out humanity.
What’s it’s like: This lightning-paced, time-travel adventure is Back to the Future meets Independence Day meets Demolition Man accompanied with a gargantuan production budget.
(Somewhere, Mark Waid’s probably kicking himself that he used the “travel back in time a day at a time to try and change history again” gambit in DC’s The Kingdom ten years ago, instead of turning it into a hot Hollywood script.)
We’re wondering whether the genre’s relative absence from the list means that the SF scripts out there didn’t measure up – Not too surprising, if that’s the case, considering that movies like Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen and GI Joe have shown that audiences are still happy for movies to have ropey scripts if the special effects are amazing – or whether there are less SF scripts out there these days. Has geek chic fallen out of favor, finally? Only time – and the aftermath of Avatar, undoubtedly – will tell.
