Tweet Sets Hollywood Atwitter

Netflix pays big bucks for Twitter-inspired movie project.

What do Grammy winner Rihanna, Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, writer-director Ava DuVernay, and HBO star Issa Rae have in common?

Twitter…
A social media meme…
And a big honking movie deal.

All in about one month’s time.

The whole thing started with this tweet:

Which led to this tweet:

Which led to this tweet:

Which led to this tweet:

Which led to this tweet:

Which led to this:

Which ended up with this:

For background:

Entertainment Weekly

Vulture

Hey, screenwriter. I can pretty much guess what you’re thinking…

Fuck. Here I am slaving away on a spec script for six months, obsessing over my characters and themes and page count and white space and all of that shit. And in a little over a month, a project gets a thumbs-up based on a God damn tweet?

If you can manage to step away from the ledge for a moment and consider this rationally, you have to admit that original inspiration — which actually goes back to this Instagram post two years ago — is actually pretty genius:

They look like they’re in a heist movie with Rihanna as the tough-as-nails leader/master thief and Lupita as the genius computer hacker.

For better or worse, we work in an industry where the combination of high concept and talent are just about the only asset which the studios will even glance at apart from their obsession with pre-branded content and franchises. So we have to give it up for the author of that initial conceit.

As far as the food chain which led from one celebrity Twitter account to another, welcome to the New World. It’s networking of the virtual kind and it’s self-evident given the nature of this deal that it can work.

My takeaway is the same old same old: Story ideas are EVERYWHERE! We just have to keep our eyes open and our ears peeled.

And out tweets atwitter.

Waitaminute! What if in the sequel, Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Olsen, and Elle Fanning are a rival grifter gang hellbent on cutting in on Rhianna and Lupita’s action…

Netflix, you know where to reach me.