Hot and cold genre in current scripts being sold?

Comedy's are very hot. Anytime you have economic hardships you're going to see lighter movies soar. It's too bad I don't write comedy though. People want to laugh, they want to smile, they want to be lifted. Quick paced action movies are probably pretty high up there too, get the blood pumping and people glued to their seats.

They don't want war movies, tragedies, darker themes and such right now so those are a harder sell. Horrors have taken a hit partially because of this from what I've noticed.

Write what you love, first of all.

If you try to write what's currently hot, you'll always be behind what people are actually looking for, which is the 'next' hot thing.

What's hot now, by the time you have worked your script to fit it, done the door-knocking (usually with your head), got the script optioned, the thing goes into development... and the various rewrites have happened. It ain't hot anymore. And the development execs got fired and all their projects got dumped, except the one that had Tom Hanks attached and they took that to their new job at the new studio.

As has been said, just write what you love.

'Cos ultimately, in truth, odds are (if you're lucky) what you write will be a sample that gets you hired to rewrite something someone else did, but during rewrites it got cool. And the development execs who was working it got fired and all their projects got dumped, except the one that had Tom Hanks attached and they took that to their new job at the new studio. And what you suddenly have to work on was one of the dumped projects that someone found after enough time had passed and convinced a studio exec that if they could get this reworked and Tom Hanks on board, this would be a shoo-in.

Write the story that's dying to come out. If it's not 'in' right now... don't worry. Start on the next one.

I got no problems with people being 'genre' writers. Some folks say it's best to stick to what you love, what you 'know' and you are constantly polishing your chops on that genre. Cool - that's one way of doing it. If you're genre's not hot, wait awhile, it'll come around.


For myself, I tell the story that's dying to get out. I've got a rom-com, a sci-fi, action script , a period script, a religious/spiritual thriller, a christmas/family, a western waiting in the wings. Only thing I haven't tackled specifically at this point, is a 'horror' flick.

Comedy is obviously a better bet for a sale. A quick scan of your TV Guide will show that.

Not a matter of temporary "hot", which is, as some noted above, a fool's chase. It's a perennial favorite. The easiest thing to get made is "low budget horror". God knows why.

Write what you do best. The "what you love" thing is kind of pointless when applied to scripts: nobody writes scripts for the love of it. But playing to your strengths is just good sense in any field.

What writeknight says also makes a lot of sense. You don't have to ask other people what's hot: it's the one that's burning a hole in your pocket.

Right now, by the way, there is not such thing as a hot genre or script. The whole world has frozen over until there is money for producers to borrow.

Low budget horror makes money because the genre itself is the star.

I'd like to narrow it down a bit more: high-concept family comedies are HUGE at the moment.

Team 2012 said:

The easiest thing to get made is "low budget horror". God knows why.

Click to expand...

And business people know why too.

Aside from the fact how easy and cheap they are, have you look at the ROI's on low budget horror? Take the Saw franchise for example. Those films have been made on budgets ranging from 1.5-10 million. They consistently take in between 60-80 million. When you look at the percentages, low budget horror dominates the box office. $120M dollar "action epics" would need to gross over a billion to be in the same %'s.

Very true, killbox. The comment was more like "why the hell would anybody want to go see one of these damned things?"

But the do, and they are cheap and lucrative. And, as mentioned, the best bet for breaking in as a screenwriter.

Actually, script a wish, lots of other comedy moves quite well. The whole genre of "cute chick and doofy guy end up hooking up" is all over the place. Look in any DVD rental place, there are racks of them. Then there's a whole "neo-doper comedy" genre. And wedding pictures have become almost a genre unto themselves... and almost all of them comedies.

Bit problem with SF...it tends to be costly to make. (Although apparently any given bunch of geeks can reproduce Star Wars in their garage for a hundred pounds these days)