Writers haven’t been speccing that kind of material for years because it hasn’t been selling.”
“There is definitely a lack of that type of material at the studios, especially that’s not IP-based. “It’s kind of like a new take on ‘Back to the Future’ with parallel universes as opposed to time travel,” Perry said. “And believe it or not, there’s a healthy spec market for - I’ve seen a bunch of musicals and live-action family in development.”Įarlier this year, APA agent Adam Perry sold Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman’s family-adventure script “Harry’s Hamburgers” to Warner Bros. “A lot of places are buying straight-up action,” Rincon said. Yet the studios are developing all kinds of films - and specs in other genres will often get a look. But the only genre a writer could really write on spec is horror and, traditionally, horror specs don’t go for a lot of money - horror budgets are typically not that high, $5 million or so.” In other words, smaller payday, less incentive for reps to hustle. Manager Jake Wagner from Good Fear elaborates: “The three genres that seem to be working at the box office are superhero, horror and animated family movies.
“The marketplace isn’t open to certain genres,” said Boxerbaum, who last month sold Cory Goodman’s horror thriller “The Oberlin Incident” to Paramount after a competitive auction.
Great, so time to dust off that Peloponnesian war drama on your shelf? Not so fast. “The new buyers like Amazon, Netflix, as well as the studios, their appetite for content is at an all-time high right now.”Īlso Read: Disney, Pixar Sued - Again - Over 'Inside Out' “It’s a really great time to have an original piece of material that can be sold in the marketplace,” he said. Verve partner David Boxerbaum is positively upbeat. Spec sales are again making headlines - witness the recent sale of not one but two specs by Emilia Serrano to Sony. “In the last 18 months, they have perhaps looked at their development slates and realized there was not as much original development as they had hoped and got slightly more aggressive.” Ouch! But do those numbers tell the whole story? “There was a long period when financiers weren’t buying as much,” UTA agent Alex Rincon said. According to, there were 173 spec sales in 1995… and 62 in 2017. If you could write a halfway decent actioner or rom/com, you had a shot in Hollywood. The spec screenplay replaced the Great American Novel as the pastime everyone and his uncle was working on. Headlines of huge spec sales and bidding wars filled the trades.
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