Black List 2022: Films About Britney Spears, Michael Phelps and Harry Houdini Among Favorite Unproduced Scripts

The 2022 edition of the Black List, the annual collection of Hollywood insiders’ favorite unproduced screenplays, this year features films about a low-level worker saving his workplace crush while on a spaceship run by a dark god, an interracial couple dealing with an apparent encounter with UFOs and a day-in-the-life dramedy about the employees of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping on Nov. 7, 2020.

The Black List, now in its 18th annual edition, is a list of Hollywood’s “most liked” unproduced scripts. It’s not a list of the “best” screenplays floating around town but the ones that were most “liked” or recommended by executives across film financiers and production companies.

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The Black List was compiled from the suggestions of more than 300 film executives, each of whom contributed the names of up to 10 favorite feature film screenplays that were written in or are somehow uniquely associated with 2022. To make the list, they cannot have begun principal photography during this calendar year.

Scripts had to receive at least six mentions to be included on the Black List. Sevnety-four screenplays total made the cut, including projects centered on figures as wide-ranging as Harry Houdini, Britney Spears and Michael Phelps.

This year’s top screenplay, with 25 mentions, was Catherine Schetina’s “Pure.” It concerns a woman obsessed with food purity who descends into madness after contracting a foodborne illness while at her sister’s destination wedding.

“Court 17,” penned by Edlad Ziv, is a tennis-skewed time-loop saga about an over-the-hill tennis pro forced to replay the first round of the U.S. Open (against a top-ranked competitor) over and over again. Haley Bartel’s “Pumping Black” concerns a cyclist and his charismatic new team doctor going to dangerous extremes to win the Tour de France. Both scripts received 22 mentions.

And “Court 17” is just one of at least two time-loop entries alongside Colin Bannon’s “Let’s Go Again,” which features an actress struggling to maintain her sanity as a director has her shoot the same scene 148 times.

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Among the real-life figures featured, either in a biographical or fictionalized narratives, are Lee Atwater, Phelps, Sheriff Le Baca, Spears and Houdini. A running theme this year was, generally speaking, regular people coping with extraordinary historical and/or fantastical circumstances. Among the as-it-happened historical screenplays is a film, “It’s A Wonderful Story,” about how Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart made “It’s a Wonderful Life” and worked their way through their World War II traumas. Another is a dark comedy about the Hindenburg disaster, described in the logline as “one of the biggest f—ups in history.”

While some of the screenplays dealt with real people and real-life situations, the majority of the winners/mentioned scripts were high-concept pitches. In a world less dominated by IP, marquee characters and nostalgia for glories of generations past, the hooks, elevator pitches and “Hey, that’s a new idea for a movie” loglines were arguably the bread-and-butter of a stereotypical studio slate.

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In its 18 years, screenplays that have appeared on the Black List have gone on to gross a combined $30 billion in worldwide box office and have produced several Best Picture winners, including “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Argo” and “Spotlight.” “Jojo Rabbit” by Taika Waititi was once featured on the 2012 list as well, and half of the Oscar winners for screenwriting over the last 12 years (including Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” which won Best Original Screenplay in 2020) have also landed on the Black List in years past.

You can view the full Black List for 2022 via their website.