“As a guy who writes constantly, I stopped trying to sell specs to studios after that.” Landis works with studios all the time, when they hire him on their projects. “I realized not to put all your eggs in one basket when the sequel to Chronicle never got made, and there was no good reason for it not to,” he said. First, Landis, who owned the spec and could have sold it anywhere, with any package: A lot of this deal had to do with his dissatisfaction with another of his original IP script creations, Chronicle, where he was cut out of a sequel process for a second film that never happened. Chats I had with Landis and Ayer indicate there was more at play than cash. I’m not sure we will ever see that again, Max Landis notwithstanding.įLEMING: The cynic in me suspects this is all trading theatrical release dreams for a massive payday. Still, it was a great moment to see writers getting rich and signing autographs at the hot restaurants. Those that were made didn’t result in especially interesting films – they were more like Lethal Weapon than Spotlight. It was all very exciting, but there were problems: Some of the hot scripts were never made. The “star” agents of the spec era built a lot of melodrama into the process: They would give a studio executive a three-hour window to read a script, and sometimes they demanded to be present as the script was being read. The “stars” of that era – Joe Eszterhas and Shane Black, for example – became folk heroes in their own right. We’d regularly bust deadlines at Daily Variety as the bidding for scripts took off into the millions toward the midnight hour. Peter, are we going to see a return to the heyday of spec and books, where there was a seven-figure check written at least once a week?īART: I think you’re getting sentimental, Mike, about the glory days of the spec script market – a moment when covering the writing game was a daily action-adventure exercise. If an A+ producer like Stuber or Michael De Luca, or Lorenzo di Bonaventura can guide Netflix when their home studios tie other producers to auctions, this could get really interesting. Studios tried to hold the line on the Grann book to around $1M, but then AG Capital’s Alex Garcia and Laura Walker bid around $2.5M, and Frakes upped the ante to $3M and so did Netflix, bidding with Scott Stuber (he’s Universal-based, but the studio had Jason Blum and Scott Rudin on their bid). Netflix Commits $90M+ For David Ayer-Directed Will Smith-Joel Edgerton Pic 'Bright ' $3M+ For Max Landis ScriptĪt a time when studios strangle every deal - whether they are hiring writers, directors and talent, or buying pitches and spec scripts - this deal and the $5M outright buy Imperative Entertainment made for the David Grann book Killers Of The Flower Moon will loosen up the purse strings. And Netflix is beefing up its Wall Street valuation. Netflix is serving subscribers in 190 countries - just about everywhere but China, Syria and North Korea.
Ted Sarandos is serving a completely different revenue model studios make calculations based on turning a per-picture profit. Both of those were for traditional theatrical releases, but Netflix committed around $45M for the budget and $45M to pay talent and buy out their projected backends. Warner Bros & MGM teamed with an offer in the high-$50M range, and PalmStar Media’s Kevin Frakes (who’s shooting the Smith starrer Collateral Beauty) offered $4M for Landis’ spec and was prepared to fund a $60M budget.
Producers Eric Newman and Bryan Unkeless also got paid.
GAWKER VERDICT MOVIE
In this weekly column, two old friends get together and grind their axes, mostly on the movie business.įLEMING: Hollywood was floored by the news Friday night that Netflix won its first tentpole film by committing $90M+ for a Bright package with a Max Landis script (for which he was paid $3M+), David Ayer directing Will Smith and Joel Edgerton as cops in a procedural surrounded by fantastical elements. worked together for two decades a t Daily Variety.
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