Big Spec Script Sales Are Back, Baby!
It's not quite a Shane Black-1990s frenzy, but the industry is growing allergic to big packages — and writers (seriously!) are cashing in
This Ankler feature is a 16-minute read.
Chris Slager vividly remembers the Wednesday morning in November when he received a 6 a.m. text saying he had to read a script — now. Startled awake, he did, sitting in bed in such a way so as not to wake his wife.
“I was one page in and then I couldn’t stop reading,” says the head of film at Fifth Season, the independent production, financing and distribution company (formerly Endeavor Content). “That’s unusual. I mean, there’s great writing and I feel that way when I read a lot of material. But not in conjunction with that feeling in your bones of, I’m watching a movie.”
Slager wasn’t the only one excited by the script, titled Alignment, and written on spec, about a tech company whose AI model goes rogue, manipulating foreign governments and provoking international conflict. A board member and a fledgling software engineer have just 36 hours to convince the company to shut it down before things get worse.
The script inspired comparisons to Margin Call and Contagion, setting off a frenzy of interest — and a fair share of raised eyebrows, given that the writer, Natan Dotan, was a complete unknown. For a “nobody,” though, he’d already met with 20 producers and director Damien Chazelle, and Matt Damon was rumored to want in. (Dotan, in fact, is the son of Israeli filmmakers, with the very un-Hollywood training of a sociology PhD from Columbia University.)
But Slager was motivated by more than just a great script. A month earlier, Fifth Season had extended its deal with Makeready, Brad Weston and Collin Creighton’s production company, with an eye toward moving beyond smaller, prestige films such as the Sundance Grand Prize winner A Thousand and One and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Oscar-nominated drama The Lost Daughter. Alignment felt like just what they were looking for: a smart but commercial project that would serve as bait for A-list directors. (They were already moving in this direction with Animals, the thriller that Ben Affleck is directing for Netflix that was announced last January.)
So they decided to go big and make the kind of statement that would make the town — and directors — pay attention. After tracking down Fifth Season’s co-CEO Graham Taylor, who was in Tokyo at a board meeting, Slager got the okay and Fifth Season went ahead with its mic-drop move: It preemptively offered Dotan $1.25 million upfront against $3 million if Alignment gets made, with Makeready producing.
For a young-ish, independent studio that doesn’t have Netflix’s billion-dollar content coffers, the offer turned heads. To up the ante even further, Fifth Season threw in a clever plot twist worthy of Dotan’s script: The writer and his representatives had a three-hour window to take the pre-emptive deal.
That evening, with the clock ticking, Slager attended The Hollywood Reporter’s NextGen party at Holloway House in West Hollywood. Between glad-handling and nibbling on hors d’ouevres, he kept stepping outside with his phone to check in on the negotiations. (“At one point I was hiding behind the DJ booth trying to take a call,” he says.) He couldn’t help but notice that Faisal Kanaan, a manager at Untitled Entertainment, which had signed Dotan following a Zoom meeting, was also walking in and out, phone to ear.
At 11:16 p.m., the deal closed. Kanaan and his team accepted Fifth Season and Makeready’s offer.
The next morning Makeready’s Weston called up Slager early.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Why?” Slager replied, shaking off sleep.
“I mean, that was kind of crazy,” Weston said.
Last night’s drama was coming back into view.
“I feel good.”
“Good,” Weston said, “you should.”
There’s been a lot of good crazy in the spec market lately, a market defined by original scripts penned by writers (aspiring and credentialed) on their own steam (and dime), then shopped. A slew of headline-grabbing deals have been made over the past several months, enough that many in Hollywood feel like we’re experiencing a throwback to the spec-mania days of the 1990s and early aughts. “Our business needs specs again,” says career producer Chris Bender, who got his start developing and selling specs like American Pie with Warren Zide in the late 1990s. “We need writers writing original spec scripts again so we can start making original movies in lots of genres and have a bit of a return to the variety that used to be in theaters.
“I feel strongly that we need screenwriters to save theatrical. It all starts with them.”
While Alignment-style frenzies are still the exception, there’s enough happening to give writers, producers and studio execs hope as we head into 2025. (Current spec poster boy? Challengers’ writer Justin Kuritzkes.) I spoke with more than a dozen agents, managers, producers, executives and screenwriters. In this story, you’ll learn:
The major spec sales of the last few months — and what price they fetched for their writers
What’s selling right now and how it differs from the spec market’s heyday
How the scripts being gobbled up harken back to the run of a certain legendary studio chief
How the buying strategy of Netflix’s Dan Lin is influencing the change
The way writers are larding their scripts with “actor bait”
Why studios and streamers are cooling on A-list packages — and want “naked” scripts without talent attached
How spec sales are changing the dynamic between studios and agencies
What the bomb of Wolfs has to do with the shift