Film Script Trends – Are You Missing The Painfully Obvious?

Film script trends do exist. When you’re looking at original screenplays, what’s clear is that the trends go towards comedies, dramas, horror films, and family comedies or animated films. That may sound big and kind of generic to you, those big arenas – comedies, dramas, horror films, and family animated movies. But the truth is it’s leaving out the largest money makers in Hollywood.

The largest money makers in Hollywood, the most reliable sources for material in Hollywood are comic book franchises, cartoon franchises, adaptation of best sellers, adaptations of classics, and adaptations of classic mythology. So, those are the lion’s share of what’s being made in Hollywood these days and a huge film script trend.

So if you’re writing an original screenplay, it’s best to focus on a comedy, an action drama, a horror film, or a family movie. And we’re going to focus on those kinds of movies whenever we talk about original screenplays.

In some of the courses I teach, I deal with adaptations, deal with specific genres like comic book adaptations in particular or graphic novel adaptation. But this post is about original ideas and original movies, because I know all of you out there really have the most affordable accesses to your own brain, your own concepts, and I honestly believe that all of us have at least one great movie idea in us.

I don’t think that you need to belong to some elite club to be a part of Hollywood. In fact, when you look around at the success stories in Hollywood, it often comes from the most unlikely sources. Whether it’s Diablo Cody, whose Academy Award winning film script “Juno” is a success and she was a former stripper.

Or it might actually come from a taxicab driver, who drove the streets of Las Vegas and came up with “Crime Scene Investigations,” or “CSI,” which is the most successful drama franchise in the past 30 years.

So, you never know where the sources come from, but I really believe everyone has a big movie in them or a TV show for that matter. But this post is going to be about original screenplays instead of all of the other kinds of film script trends such as remakes of classic films.

To get back to the point of this particular post, the very first step that you need to take when deciding what film script you’re going to write is crafting a logline, the infamous logline.

Why do people call it a logline? It goes way back to the early days of when publicists were just logging in a description for their magazine editors. It had to be short and to the point, describing the movies that were going to be reviewed in that day’s paper.

Back in the early days of newspapers, that log or that logline would be printed every day, because movies were coming out every day in the ’30s and ’40s. They were making hundreds if not thousands more movies in the studio system back then than they are now.

Young copy editors had to be able to boil a movie down to its essence, which meant one or two sentences to describe the basic elements of the movie that was playing at the cinema that week.

So, what writers are asked to do now is really focus their energy and focus their attention to those one or two sentences to help really hone what the concept of their movie is. A mistake a lot of writers make that I’ve come across over the years is mistaking a genre for an idea for a film script.