Rogue One’s Gary Whitta Is Trying to Crack the Code of Original IP
By Germain Lussier
This fall, from the writer of Rogue One, The Book of Eli, and After Earth, a brand new sci-fi adventure is on the way. Set in a future where Earth has been conquered by giant alien mechs, a young woman finds a map that might hold the key to saving humanity. Sounds cool, right? Well, it’s called Gundog but you can’t see it in theaters. In fact, you can’t “see” it, period, which is very much by design.
“At the beginning of my career, like almost 20 years ago, I would have written Gundog as a spec screenplay,” writer Gary Whitta told io9 over video chat. “In the naïve sense, I didn’t really understand at that point that big expensive original science fiction from not particularly well-established writers [are] a nonstarter…Even as established as I am in my career now, and I’ve got Star Wars on my resume and all this cool stuff, if I wrote that as a spec screenplay, I know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s going to go to every studio, maybe 15 or 20 different people are going to read it across the studios. They’re all going to pass. ‘Too expensive. It’s original.’ And six months of my life basically is wasted so 20 people can read a script and put it on a shelf. It’s heartbreaking. If I’m going to that amount of work into something. I want to know that it’s going to find an audience.”
