The Next Big Thing: The Black List

Movies are one America’s greatest loves. We love to get lost in the story being told on the larger-than-life silver screen. There are tons of moving parts that go into the creation of our favorite cinematic adventures. But none of them can start to move unless there is a script.

It’s no secret that the entertainment industry is hard to break into. Ask any screenwriter and they’ll tell you how long it took them to get to where they are. The traditional ways of breaking into the industry are nepotism, cold asking or wining a screenwriting competition. If the odds are stacked against you, it can be easy to get discouraged. But thanks to technology and the wonders of the Internet, a new fourth channel of entry has come along.

Founded in 2005, The Black List has been serving as a Hollywood internal distribution circle with its annual list of Hollywood’s most-adored unproduced scripts. In total, scripts that were discovered from the blacklist have made over $16 billion worldwide, and have won 25 Academy Awards. Most notably, best picture winners Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech came from The Black List. 

Since its beginning, The Black List has had the philosophy of connecting filmmakers and screenwriters. Though previously limited to those within Hollywood, The Black List aims to expand its circle to a worldwide scale.

For a small fee, screenwriters from around the world are able to upload their scripts and have them read by professionals within the industry with the possibility of getting them made into a feature film. It’s like Reddit, but for screenwriters.  The Black List platform is better for everyone in the long run because it opens up the possibly of a wide range of different and new stories to be told.

But The Black List is not the first to explore this new platform. Amazon Studios ventured into the same realm of open source script discovery when it first launched. The Black List differs in the sense that instead of functioning as a studio (like Amazon), it serves more as a middleman to get it to the right people to help make great movies. 

The success of The Black List’s revamped model is still yet to be seen, but it does have the potential to open up a host of stories yet to be told.

Do you have a company or idea in mind that really Thinks Big? Please contact me via email at Bobby.Miller@thinkbigparners.com.  You could be featured in our blog as The Next Big Thing!