The Current State of the Spec Script Market

Scott Myers
Go Into The Story
Published in
4 min readDec 10, 2016

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Alive or dead? Viable or not? WOOT or WTF?

Here’s something you may not know: The Hollywood project acquisition and development community is actually quite small, no more than several hundred people in terms of the buyers: major studios, mini-majors, production companies, and financiers. So when something interesting happens, everybody from Culver City to Burbank knows about it pretty much as it goes down

During the last 48 hours, something interesting has gone down: The announcement of 4 spec script deals.

The Englishman

Highway One

The Aeronauts

The State

And not just option deals, but outright sales to some heavy hitter companies: 20th Century Fox, Amazon Studios, DreamWorks,

Four spec deals in 2 days? That hearkens back to the good ol’ days, the Golden Era of Spec Scripts during the 80s and 90s.

Joe Eszterhas: Patron Saint of the Golden Age of Spec Scripts

I know it first-hand because I was there. I sold a spec script to break into the in 1987. Since then I’ve pretty much continuously tracked the market and in the process sold two other spec scripts and optioned several others.

So four spec script deals announced in two days. In December no less which — as conventional wisdom goes — the town shuts down and nothing gets done. If only there were some way to do an historical analysis of spec script deals in December, say, stretching back to 2008? Wouldn’t it be grand if there were a free online site with a comprehensive listing of spec script deals from the last 25 years or so?

Oh, wait, there is. In the amazing archives of Go Into The Story!

The Definitive Spec Script Deals List [1991–2015]

Going back to 2008 when I launched the blog, here are the numbers of spec script deals announced in December:

2008: 1
2009: 6
2010: 3
2011: 9
2012: 5
2013: 3
2014: 2
2015: 1
2016: 4

A lot more activity some years than one would think for a supposedly slow business month in Hollywood.

Then I wondered if there might be some correlation between the number of deals announced in December and the overall activity in that particular year. So I went back into the archives to see what annual numbers were:

2008: 87
2009: 67
2010: 55
2011: 110
2012: 99
2013: 100
2014: 62
2015: 55
2016: 73

The number of December deals in 2011 (9) is the highest on the list as is the total for that year (110), but not much else to glean from these numbers with the possible exception of this:

2014: 62 / 2
2015: 55 / 1
2016: 73 / 4

The December numbers generally align with the trajectory of annual sales for each year. 2015 went down. 2016 has gone up and is higher than 2014.

What are we to make of all these numbers? A few things strike me:

  • Announced spec script deals are up 25% this year compared to 2015. That number may go up as there are a few specs still in play this month.
  • That said 73 is below the average number spec deals per year. Starting in 1993, there have been 2,214 announced spec script deals which means the average number of deals per year is 92. So while the number is up in 2016 compared to 2015, it’s still below average.
  • Deals this year were actually lower through February (10) compared to 2015 (13) which means that the numbers were up for the last ten months of this year compared to last, probably in the order of 35%. Will that increase in deals continue into 2017 bringing us back to the strong market a la 2011–2013?

One thing is for certain: I’ll be doing my annual spec script deal year-in-review in January breaking down the 2016 numbers by Genre, Buyers, Agents & Managers, Top Sales, and First Timers. But a couple of reminders in the interim.

First, you will see other spec tracking outfits whose numbers are higher, sometimes substantially more so than mine. I err on the conservative side, reporting only deals I can confirm through news sources, social media, and email. I have no financial interest or benefit in doing this, my concern is grounded in me wanting to know trends for my writing career and those who read the blog. Other folks do have an incentive to inflate numbers to feed the Hope Machine. For example, some include writers signing with managers as a ‘deal’. While that’s certainly a plus for the writer, it’s not a spec script deal as no money exchanges hands. My advice: Be careful who you read and what you choose to believe.

Second, even if a spec script doesn’t sell, it can still be a valuable asset. It can get you representation, be used as a writing sample, enable you to land meetings with studio execs and producers, and there’s always a chance down the road it can move forward as a proejct. So even if only about 2 specs land a deal on average per week, don’t be discouraged. A spec script can serve many functions beyond a sale or option.

Yet we can’t ignore the fact: It’s hard to sell a script. That’s why bottom line you should write because you love it. Writing is its own reward. Hopefully you make some money from it. Even if you don’t, if you’re following your bliss and giving expression to your creative voice, that’s a win for you.

Onward!

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