The next Oscar winning film is out there, somewhere—and it may be on this year’s Black List. The 2023 Black List—a compilation of the best-liked screenplays bouncing around Hollywood that have yet to be produced—has arrived, and it’s full of stories about everything from Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX to the making of the Broadway flop Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark to a studio executive who gets trapped in a screenplay that he passed on.
Founded by Vanity Fair contributor Franklin Leonard, the Black List has been shedding light on the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood since 2005. Previous iterations have included screenplays like The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, Argo, and Spotlight before they went on to best picture Oscar wins. “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,” says Leonard. “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.”
This year’s Black List contains a plethora of gritty stories based on real events, as well as fanciful fare from the deepest recesses of their writers’ imaginations. The script that received the most votes is Bad Boy by Travis Braun, which follows a rescue dog who suspects his owner may be a serial killer. Next on the list is Stake Horse by Justin Piasecki, about a racetrack veterinarian who runs an off-the-books ER for criminals finds and finds himself in hot water after being recruited for his patient’s heist. The third is the very meta SPOILER by Jordan Rosenbloom, which finds a studio executive trapped as the protagonist inside a film he passed on.
Elsewhere on the list are non-traditional adaptations of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare. There are a scripts based on true stories, like The Adults in the Room by Jake Disch ,about crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried and the rise and fall of FTX; Kazan by Chris Parizo, about the feud between titans Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan; and PATSY by Filipe Coutinho, about the life and times of country songbird Patsy Cline. And then there’s Boy Falls From Sky by Hunter Toro, about the anxious playwright tasked with bringing the notorious musical flop Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark to the stage.
While some of the movies are higher-concept than others, the Black List stamp of approval is nothing to sniff at. Since its inception, 440 scripts that made the Black List have been produced, grossing over $30 billion in box office worldwide. Black List movies have won 54 Academy Awards out of 273 nominations, with a whopping eleven best screenplay Oscar wins since 2007. Most recently, Black List scripts JoJo Rabbit by Taika Waititi and Promising Young Woman by Emerald Fennell won the best screenplay Oscar among a dozen more Screenplay Oscar winners. And this year’s may add another Oscar winner to the list, as Samy Burch‘s Golden Globe nominated May December was on the 2020 Black List.
Here is the full list for 2023 Black List.
