Disney still owns it.ĬLICK HERE to Doug Richardson's own post about the experience of getting the million-dollar call. It was later mired in studio notes, which shifted the focus of the story.

Then Disney studio head, Jeffrey Katzenberg, wasn't a fan of the script, despite the head of Disney's Hollywood Pictures loving it. The script was written by Rick Jaffa ( Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Jurassic World) and Doug Richardson ( Die Hard 2, Bad Boys). WWII GI soldiers attack a Nazi train, thought to be holding stolen Italy treasures, only for them to find Jewish children on their way to a concentration camp.Īnother $1 million sale picked up by Disney. Read Scriptshadow's review of the spec HERE. Eventually, the momentum the script had faded into oblivion and was never produced. There were rewrites for different stars then the stars wouldn't commit. The marketing of this script was famous because agents literally sent out ticking clocks to executives before the script went out wide.Īfter being sold, it got caught in development hell after Willis left.

Bruce Willis was close to starring but chose to make The Last Boy Scout instead - a script that Shane Black sold for $1.75 million. Confidential, Mystic River) and Manny Coto ( Dexter, 24). It was sold for $1 million and written by a much younger Brian Helgeland ( L.A. This spec script is remembered as one of the pinnacle spec sales from that time period. The Ticking ManĪ bomb expert must prevent the human nuclear bomb he created from getting into and destroying Moscow. Spec scripts like Milk Money ($1 million), Radio Flyer ($1.25 million), Medicine Man ($3 million), Basic Instinct ($3 million), The Long Kiss Goodnight ($4 million), and many others were purchased and eventually produced - to varying degrees of success.īut what about the dozens upon dozens of others that sold for millions but were never produced? Here we look back to some of those big sales that lead to nowhere and learn a little bit more about them. In 1990 alone, 14 scripts were sold for $1 million or more. The result led to a competitive streak among the studios, leading to a ridiculous amount of big sales that we haven't seen since. At that time, the industry was coming off of the 1988 WGA Strike, and there was a high demand for content, resulting in a plethora of original screenplays - spec scripts - that were sold for millions.Īlan Gasmer, a William Morris agent during that time, started the trend of putting such scripts on the market for only a limited amount of time with the auction block opening on Monday and closing at the end of that Friday. The script market has drastically changed since the screenwriting boom of the 1990s.

What were some of the biggest spec script deals that never led to any produced feature?

Blank check screenplay pdf