Every year, the “most liked” unproduced screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays in Hollywood are collected for The Black List, which, rather than a glimpse into Hollywood’s future, offers a look at a cooler alternate universe version of Hollywood where people make movies about a rescue dog thinking its new owner is a serial killer rather than the same tired crap the studios always toss out. (That being said, a lot of Black List screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays do get made, including Argo, Slumdog Millionaire, The Revenant, and The King’s Speech.) This year’s Black List includes a bunch of cool stuff, plus some stuff that is just inexplicably unhinged in a very fun way, starting with the aforementioned story about a dog and his serial killer owner—Bad Boy by Travis Braun—which received the most likes from the studio executives who voted on The Black List this year.

The other two top screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays are Justin Piasecki’s Stakehorse and Jordan Rosenbloom’s Spoiler, with the former being about a racehorse veterinarian who secretly treats criminals and then gets recruited into a heist (fun!) and the latter is about a foolish studio executive who passes on a screenplay and then gets sucked into the movie (meta!). And if that’s not enough of a high-concept for you, there’s a script literally called High Concept by Alex Kavutskiy and Ryan Perez about two friends in the year 2000—“an uptight lawyer” and “a stoner slacker”—who swap bodies and get stuck in a time loop and must face other “high-concept comedy premises.”

Crazy shit like that is what The Black List does best, and this year does not disappoint on that front. Take Connor McKnight’s 10/24/02, which only has this tantalizingly twisty description: “On one rainy night in October, a man checks into the Mooncrest Motel. He never leaves. A real time, single-location thriller in the aftermath of a heist at Area 51.” Wow! Or how about Jack Waz’s Fistmas, where a guy must win his beloved’s heart by winning her hometown’s annual “Christmas fighting tournament”? Or Andrew Nunnelly’s Toxoplasmosis, where a guy makes a connection with his girlfriend’s cat and then realizes the cat is actually “an intergalactic emissary sent to save humanity from itself”?

And it just keeps going: Will Youmans’ Our House is about a kid winning an essay competition and getting invited to visit Congress… on the same day as “a violent insurrection.” Kirill Baru and Eric Zimmerman’s The Great Pretender is about Tom Hanks and a guy who looks like Tom Hanks getting kidnapped together and having to work together to escape. Ben Ketai’s Undying is about a mother having an affair with her old high school boyfriend, only to realize he’s been dead for years.

As a side-effect of condensing these screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays into a couple of sentences, a lot of them seem like one idea stapled to another idea, and the greatest of those this year is Adam Christopher Best’s The Wolf In Chiefs Clothing, which has no fewer than four ideas. It’s about a “lovable loser” from a crime family who loves the Kansas City Chiefs and becomes their most famous superfan, but after realizing he can’t afford to keep up with his newfound stardom, he teams up with an imaginary version of the team’s mascot (which is thankfully a wolf and not something racist), and starts robbing banks. Imagine if that movie got made! It would solve all of our problems!

The other thing The Black List is historically good at it is fascinating true stories, like Argo or the famous Jim Henson biopic that never got made, and this year contains an all-time great pitch in Hunter Toro’s Boy Falls From Sky. It’s about an “anxious playwright” who gets “tangled in a web of deceit, injury, and intellectual property” as he writes his first Broadway musical… Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Now that movie would solve all of our problems.

Screenplay News
Author: