There are stories that never get told – lost forever in the minds of their putative authors. Then there are stories that make it to the page, but no further. The best of these end up on The Black List, a compilation of not the best, but the “most liked” unproduced screenplays.

As their website says, The Black List was compiled from the suggestions of more than 375 film executives, each of whom contributed the names of up to ten favorite feature film screenplays that were
written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2023 and will not have begun principal
photography during this calendar year.” Scripts had to receive at least seven mentions to make it to the list.

This is an honor given to screenwriters, which is sorely welcome in a year when so many writers had to lay down their pens (euphemistically speaking) for the duration of the WGA strike.

“This year, the industry was defined by a debate about the value of writers within it, and I think it’s inevitable that this year’s Black List means more than it has in the past,” said its founder Franklin Leonard in a statement. “I’ve been saying that writing is the lifeblood of the industry for almost twenty years now, and I’ll continue saying it until the industry actually starts acting like it. Now that the strikes are over, I look forward to these and other great scripts getting made so I can watch them as an audience member myself.”

Top honors went to Travis Braun, whose  screenplay Bad Boy follows a rescue dog who suspects that his loving new owner is a serial killer, and second place honors went to  Justin Piasecki’s Stakehorse which follows a racetrack veterinarian who runs an off-the-books ER for criminals, and finds his practice and life in jeopardy when he’s recruited for his patient’s heist.

While these screenplays are still sitting in a drawer in some producer’s office somewhere, that doesn’t mean they will never be filmed; many of the scripts that were Black Listed were produced, included several that won Academy Awards. The list includes notable films like Slumdog Millionaire, Argo, The King’s Speech, Spotlight, Free Guy, Queen & Slim, I, Tonya, All the Money in the World, Bird Box, The Post and Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Still, some ideas are better – or at least bolder – than others. This year’s list yielded some incredible ideas that really should have been filmed already. Who wouldn’t want to go to see Hunter Toro’s Boy Falls from Sky, the gripping story of “an anxious playwright [who] finds himself tangled in a web of deceit, injury, and intellectual property as he adapts his first Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Inspired by a true story.” The “true story” was so cringey, so unbeliveable, that it would be hard for any “making of” film to capture its awfulness on film. But wouldn’t you like to see someone try?

Then there’s Dickens vs Anderson by Henry Oscar Thaler, which is about “Clumsy, awkward Hans Christian Andersen invites himself over to the country home of his idol, Charles Dickens… and overstays his welcome.” Come on, a grudge match between the guy who wrote The Little Mermaid and the guy who wrote A Christmas Carol would be incredible, especially if made in a ‘sea witches vs. ghosts’ kind of way.

What about The Straford Wife by Sarah E. Sinclair, in which “Anne Hathaway, a rebellious woman who has a way with words, weds William Shakespeare, an aspiring actor ten years her junior. They form a plan to sell her plays anonymously. But when William travels to London, Anne is stunned to learn he takes all the credit for himself, leaving her to forever live in the shadow of the greatest playwright to ever live.” The best outcome for this script would be to have Anne Hathaway portray Anne Hathaway. Can she play herself* convincingly enough to rack up another Oscar nom? Let’s find out. (*Of course they aren’t the same person, unless time travel is real.)

A lot of the scripts offer only a tantalizing premise, like Maximiliano Hernandez’s Beyond the Grave, in which “a woman, suffocated by motherhood, has an affair with a man she hasn’t seen since high school… only to discover he has been dead for years.” Did they meet on an app called Plenty of Dead Fish? Ghostface Book? Some clever writer than I could come up with better puns, surely.

Or the soon-to-be holiday classic Fistmas, by Jack Waz, wherein a lovestruck guy who wants to propose to the girl of his dreams “must first survive her hometown’s annual Christmas fighting tournament.” If any movie will serve as an antidote to all those schmaltzy Hallmark holiday romances, its this film.

If I Had Your Face by Ran Ran Wang challenges you to make sense of this premise: “When Jo’s best friend, Rina starts dating a white man, she begins transforming into something different: a white woman.  Through it all, Jo can’t seem to convince anyone that there is cause for concern.  But when three unidentifiable white women turn up dead, Jo realizes that they had all been Asian women who dated the same man, and now that he has Rina in his sights, it’s up to Jo to save her before she becomes his next victim.” Lol, what?

How’s this for high concept? In Roses by Evan Twohy, “a married man takes his girlfriend on a romantic getaway to a villa. There is a swimming pool.” A villa with a swimming pool? What far-flung futuristic world does this take place in?

Andrew Nunnelly’s Toxoplasmosis offers the well-worn story where “boy meets girl, boy loses girl… boy forms unexpected bromance with girl’s cat, who may actually be an intergalactic emissary sent to save humanity from itself.” It’s possible – nay, probable – that we’ve never seen an intergalatic interspecies bromance before, but now that we know there could be a movie about such a thing, that begs the question: where is the gofundme for this production?

Furries especially will want to see The Wolf in Chiefs’ Clothing by Adam Christopher Brest, which finds “lovable loser from a family of criminals becomes the Kansas City Chiefs’ most famous superfan. His newfound status is expensive, so he teams up with his imaginary friend – an anthropomorphic version of the team’s wolf mascot – and goes on a bank-robbing spree.” There has to be a role for Taylor Swift in this one, which will catapult it to the number one movie of the year.

Katie Found’s Down Came the Rain, if produced, could singlehandedly reduce the birth rates with the premise “When a woman gives birth to a spider, she begins to question her unraveling reality and the psychological and arachnid horrors of postpartum motherhood.” Plan B for everyone!

You never know which seemingly unremarkable organizations are really a front for a nefarious cabal of evildoers who want to take over the world, do you? At least, not until it’s too late. That’s probably the genesis of the story told by Zach Strauss in Palette, in which “a woman who discovers she is suffering from severe synesthesia gets recruited into the secretive, cult-like industry of color design by a mysterious corporation but then uncovers the bloody, dark, and twisted reality of what it really takes to make the world’s next great hues.” The hues? Not the hues! Somebody raid the Pantone headquarters, stat!

These few examples only skim the list of well-regarded scripts, not even mentioning the one where Tome Hanks gets rescued from kidnappers by his doppelganger, or the one where an essay contest winner’s White House ceremony gets derailed by a violent insurrection (again?) and she must work with some nepo babies to save the world. Or something. The complete list can be found here.

If nothing else, the list is an inspiration to any would-be screenwriter. You may think your idea is out there, and maybe it is, but write it down anyway. That idea could be next year’s most awesome (unproduced) movie.