More good news in Hollywood!
In the most recent Screenwriting Master Class monthly newsletter, we led with this:
Thus far 2011 has been pretty much a tale of two cities for Hollywood. The worst of times? Box office for the year is off 30% from 2010. The best of times?
- The resurrection of the adult drama genre with the box office success of The King’s Speech ($277M), Black Swan ($229M), True Grit ($228M), The Social Network ($221M), and The Fighter ($108M) [all figures are worldwide totals from BoxOfficeMojo].
- Two new film distributors just announced: Tribeca Films, associated with the film festival, and Open Road Films, a joint venture from AMC and Regal, the nation’s two largest theater operators.
- Relativity Media, which has a hit on its hands with The Fighter, just closed another $200M in financing and is slated to expand their release slate from 5 to 12 movies per year.
But most important to screenwriters is this: As we noted in this blog post here, sales of spec scripts are up from 2010 with 10 sold compared to 8 at this time last year.
Well, business is buzzing in Hollywood because there’s more good news since we sent out the newsletter only a few days ago:
* Summit Entertainment (the Twilight series) just closed on a $750M recapitalization deal. When buyers get money, they spend money, always a good thing for writers to hear.
* But even more exciting, as noted here, here, and here, three spec scripts sold this week.
But wait, there’s more! One more spec sold yesterday and rumor has it another has as well bringing the total this year to 15. The 15th spec script didn’t sell last year until April 14th. So clearly the spec script market is on an upward trend.
Last year 55 spec scripts sold, part of a continuing downward slide since 2088 when 88 specs sold. On 2/21/11, I predicted here the spec market would rebound in 2011: my guess was 64 deals. Too early to tell if that will pan out, but given the activity in the first quarter of this year, it certainly looks promising. As we said in the March SMC newsletter:
One theory for the uptick in spec sales: Precisely because current box office is so bad. For two years, the studios have cut costs in part by working their way through preexisting projects on their development slates. With the success last year of original movies like Inception, Despicable Me, The King’s Speech, Black Swan, The Fighter and others, we are hearing that agents and managers have gotten the word from the studios: Bring us original material! So it’s a good time to be pounding out that spec script of yours.
By the way, if you’re interested in getting on the Screenwriting Master Class mailing list so you can receive the free monthly SMC newsletter, you can go here.
Check back here on GITS later today where I’ll have a post on the most recent spec script sale.