You don't need I.P.
"Intellectual Property" is the past. The Big Idea is always.
A little housekeeping before we begin: I’m deep into rewriting this current script I mentioned last week. I’m about 98 pages into 116, and as I’ve been closing in on the ending I can feel myself picking up steam and moving faster and further each day. Guessing I’ll have it wrapped by the end of the weekend.
Also, if you’re enjoying the newsletter, I would really appreciate you sharing it. Post it on your socials, forward it to a friend, it’s been nice to see this thing grow. I also updated the site by adding some posts I’d previously shared other places on the web, so if you’re new here (or not) check out the rest of the archive, there may be things you haven’t seen yet. I’ll link to a few all the way at the bottom of this email.
Okay, onto this week’s topic: IP vs Ideas!
I went and saw Trap (which Josh Hartnett crushes) and found myself with a big dumb smile on my face for most of the movie, because M. Night Shyamalan is just the king of high concept ideas. A boy who talks to ghosts. A beach that makes you old. A concert that’s actually all a trap. Whether or not you like his style, you have to admit the guy knows how to come up with an extremely hooky premise, and then ratchet that up for ninety minutes.
What’s nice about these sorts of movies is… they have BIG IDEAS. You can tell someone what the movie is in a sentence, and they’ll basically get it. This is the true secret to a big budget, crowd pleasing, four quadrant, movie for all audiences that can hit big:
Can you tell your uncle in a sentence what movie you just saw, and why he’d like it?
Over the last decade (okay eight decades) it feels like Hollywood has somehow confused “Big Idea” with “Intellectual Property” and I’m here to gently remind us all, the two are not the same. As someone who’s pitched on quite a few projects, there are even more that I haven’t pitched on, and usually it’s because they’re based on IP that someone thinks might be valuable that I look at and wonder: okay but what is the movie? Just because something was once a toy, or a TV show, or a board game, or a breakfast product, that does not a movie make.
If you work in Hollywood, you will eventually be offered some “exciting IP we control” and look at it and think “is this exciting?” The answer could be yes! In which case, great! But more often that not, the answer is… No. In the pursuit of a “sure thing,” everyone’s bosses have put the pressure on to find material that people already recognize, because that will boost the audience. Well… sure… it could. If it’s an interesting idea! But, and I ask this with all due respect… what if it isn’t?
Name Recognition ≠ Good Idea
The best thing about a “big idea” is that it doesn’t have to be based on anything. Sure, some are… Jaws, The Godfather, Barbie, but… a big idea is simpler than that. It burrows deeper into the psyche than that.
A boy meets an alien. An archaeologist fights Nazis hunting for buried treasure. A mother and daughter switch bodies. What if there were a Terminator? What if there were a ship called the Titanic? (Okay that one’s real, but it’s actually a sneaky example of IP that is not IP, because it’s just a thing everyone knows about already, James Cameron is the master of this kind of “Not IP IP”).
These are what we call HIGH CONCEPT, and the thing that makes something high concept is not that someone has heard of it before, it’s that it’s BIGGER than our normal world. Which, for an audience (we must always think about the audience), makes it easy to describe.
Yes, Batman is technically a high concept idea. And Batman is also IP. But DO NOT GET IT TWISTED,* the fact that it is IP does not make it a good idea. The fact that it is a good idea made it IP. Usually this is the case. The issue is that after a ten year arms race of studios competing to spew way too much content at the poor unsuspecting American audiences, the treasure trove of good ideas that are pre-existing IP has really been strip mined. Now we are often left with… sure, that’s technically intellectual property. But is it a good idea for a good movie?
[*Twister also counts now as both High Concept & IP]
IP ≠ High Concept.
This may all seem like semantics to you, but it’s important to remember. When you’re trying to get millions of Americans to see a movie, it needs to be something that millions of Americans can explain. And millions of Americans are not the subtlest, most nuanced communicators. Just check the comments section on literally any website in the world.
We need hooky ideas! Ideas that capture our imagination immediately. This is not to say the audience is dumb, it’s to say that to make a big movie — a movie with global box office appeal — you need a big idea. And the best thing about a big idea is… it can come from anywhere! You don’t need an article, or a book, or an agent. You just need… a good idea!
Another way to think about this is: “Can you see the trailer?” If I tell you a movie’s title, and name, and give you the logline, can you see the trailer? If you can’t see the trailer, it’s not high concept. And if it’s not high concept, you probably aren’t getting millions of Americans to get off their asses to see it.
Not that millions of Americans need to see every movie! Some movies are perfectly suited to hundreds of thousands of Americans. But, remember, the big wigs want “sure things,” especially now in a marketplace where everyone everywhere is scared for their jobs. They want every movie to make a billion dollars. So if you want to be playing in the big leagues, it’s helpful to always think about clarity of concept. Always always always. Especially when someone’s asking you whether you want to take on a piece of intellectual property. Remember to ask yourself: Can I see the trailer? If you can’t… whether you’re the writer being tasked with cracking it, or the executive being tasked with whether or not to pursue the material… maybe it’s not a great idea for a movie.
One way to take advantage of this “can I see the trailer?” idea, to ensure that you are in fact writing a hooky movie with a big idea is to: write your movie for the trailer. What are 8-10 things that you know you’d need to have in the trailer for a movie like this? They better be in the movie! If you can crack those kinds of “trailer moments” for your movie, whether it’s an R-Rated serial killer thriller, or a family friendly animated comedy, then you’re already halfway there. The other half of the way is, of course, writing something great.
But a good trailer and a good idea, that’s what gets butts into seats. Not Intellectual Property. Not brand recognition. Not theme. Not even movie stars at this point.
We want BIG IDEAS.
And it is your job to give the people what they want.
An important reminder and caveat to that last statement:
People do not actually know what they want. It is your job as an artist to show them. And it is this fact that really gets to why Hollywood seems IP crazy (still). Nobody knows what anybody wants, and we’re all grasping at straws. But the key is having the clarity of vision to ask early on, at the very beginning: Is this a great idea for a movie? Can I see the trailer? Or is this just an idea that worked once in a different medium?
Now, I’ve gotta go, I have a book of short stories my manager sent me to read to see if any could be made into movies.
What did everyone think of Trap? What do you guys think makes an idea “Big?” What’s the worst piece of IP you’ve had to pitch on? Chime in in the comments section below!
Some New Old Stuff I Added to the Site:
I also wanted to recommend some of my favorite substacks:
Movie Industry Musings with Tepper (super useful practical resources for people breaking in)
The #Content Report with Vince Mancini (love Vince’s writing and reporting and have for years)
Craft Talk (an incredible insight into writing fiction, which sounds even harder than writing movies)
I'm really hopeful that by the end of the decade, we'll have a boom of new big ideas (and in turn, new IP) Sooner or later, we're gonna run out of things to turn into legacy sequels/reboots. I think of all the IPs as being in this giant bucket that we've been taking and taking and taking from without putting anything new in. On a larger scale this has always concerned me because I ask myself "what will 2010s kids have to be nostalgic about?" I'm a 2000s kid and it already feels like most of the things I have nostalgia for are just things my parents liked. That said, I don't necessarily hope for new IP just so it can be ran through the nostalgia machine in 30 years, but that TYPE of new movie that people can fall in love with has been sorely absent. I so badly want for this generation to have their own Indiana Jones or Back to the Future, because like you said, at some point those were just original high concept ideas and that's why they became successful IP. And I really really really hope that once Hollywood is finally done trying to resuscitate the bottom of the barrel table scraps, they'll be forced to embrace all the wacky new big ideas that I know are floating around.
I think you’re totally right about the need for new iconic brands and characters, and I’d hope that what studios come to recognize is that taking a risk on something new is almost always cheaper than taking a swing on some pre-existing material. Maybe a move towards original ideas would allow for some much needed “portfolio diversification” to put it in terms the C-Suite might like. People want new movies!!