Best Black List movies?

This made the rounds at the end of last week from the Playlist (Indiewire): 20 Best & Worst Films Made From Black List Scripts:

Tomorrow sees the release of Ivan Reitman’s “Draft Day,” a sports drama starring Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner. There aren’t many reasons that it’s particularly notable, other than being a late-period Ivan Reitman movie that doesn’t have terrible reviews (merely middling ones). However, its claim to fame is that it’s one of only a handful of produced movies to have topped the famous Black List when it was in screenplay form.

Founded in 2005 by Franklin Leonard, then an executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company, the Black List set out to showcase the best unmade scripts in Hollywood, surveying development executives (now up to a pool of 500) on the best thing they’d read in the previous year. The organization has grown (now providing a script-reading service rated as one of the best and fairest in the business), and the December release of the list remains an event in the Hollywood calendar, and can make a career overnight.

The list has showcased Oscar-winners and blockbuster hits, but of the nine scripts that have actually topped the list, four remain unproduced: Western “The Brigands Of Rattleborge” which Park Chan-Wook is attached to; Jim Henson biopic “The Muppet Man”; GOP higher education comedy/drama “College Republicans,” which the “Kill Your Darlings” team are making; and last year’s winner “Holland/Michigan,” which Errol Morris will shoot later in the year), while Benedict Cumberbatch starrer “The Imitation Game” is due for release later this year. Of the four that have been made, they haven’t led to immediate success — HBO drama “Recount” was widely praised, but Susanne Bier’s “Things We Lost In The Fire” was underseen and Jodie Foster’s “The Beaver” was marred by the bad press surrounding Mel Gibson.

We’ll see how “Draft Day” goes down in the coming days, but we thought we’d use its release to examine the track record of the Black List, by picking out the ten best and ten worst movies based on scripts that have been featured on the esteemed list. From the results, it seems clearer than ever that William Goldman’s maxim of “nobody knows anything” still applies: scripts near the top have been made into terrible movies, and those in the lower reaches have proven to be among the best (it should also be pointed out that a good script is only the start: as we’ll see, the blueprints can be departed from in ways that prove ultimately disastrous).

Per the article, the 10 best Black List movies:

10. “Take This Waltz” by Sarah Polley (2012)
Black List: 2009

9. “Toy’s House” by Chris Galletta (released as “The Kings Of Summer” (2013)
Black List: 2009

8. “Margin Call” by J.C. Chandor (2011)
Black List: 2010

7. “In Bruges” (2008)
Black List: 2006

6. “Juno” (2007)
Black List Appearance: 2005

5. “The Wolf Of Wall Street” by Terence Winter (2013)
Black List Appearance: 2007

4. “Never Let Me Go” by Alex Garland (2010)
Black List Appearance: 2007

3. “Looper” by Rian Johnson (2012)
Black List Appearance: 2010

2. “The Social Network” by Aaron Sorkin (2010)
Black List Appearance: 2009

1. “The Wrestler” by Robert Siegel (2008)
Black List Appearance: 2007

The 10 worst Black List movies per the article:

10. “This Side Of The Truth” by Matt Robinson (2009) (released as “The Invention Of Lying”)
Black List Appearance: 2007

9. “A.C.O.D.” by Ben Karlin and Stu Zicherman (2013)
Black List Appearance: 2008

8. “London Boulevard” by William Monahan (2010)
Black List Appearance: 2008

7. “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Rawson Marshall Thurber (2008)
Black List Appearance: 2005

6. “Red Riding Hood” by David Leslie Johnson (2011)
Black List Appearance: 2009

5. “Seven Pounds” by Grant Nieporte (2008)
Black List Appearance: 2006

4. “A Couple Of Dicks” by Mark and Robb Cullen (2010) (released as “Cop Out”)
Black List Appearance: 2008

3. “Lions For Lambs” by Matthew Michael Carnahan (2007)
Black List Appearance: 2006

2. “ATM” by Chris Sparling (2012)
Black List Appearance: 2010

1. “Abduction” by Shawn Christensen (2011)
Black List Appearance: 2010

Whether you agree or disagree with the assessment of any of these movies on either list, the article spotlights a truism that has been around Hollywood since God knows when: You can make a bad movie out of a good script. But you can’t make a good movie with a bad script.

How about you? What do you think are the best movies based on Black List scripts?

For the rest of the Playlist article, which goes into detail on each of the 20 movies featured on the two lists, go here.

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