DEVELOPMENT EXERCISE / ORIGINAL COMMERCIAL FEATURES
BIG MOVIE PREMISE LAB
STATUS: TESTING / TIGHTENING
Can you still invent a movie people understand from one sentence?
I wanted to stop beginning with lore, IP, casting, or a three-page explanation of the world and go back to the old summer-movie trick: invent a situation.
So I reduced more than a hundred big movies to their dramatic DNA, built banks of opposing forces, actions, arenas and rules, then started colliding them.
The target was never “a good plot.” The target was a one-sentence situation that starts generating scenes immediately. Every survivor then had to answer the question that kills a lot of movie premises: Why wouldn’t competent people just solve this?
WHITEOUT
Escaped prisoners move car-to-car through a hundred-vehicle interstate pileup during a blizzard. Visibility is twenty feet. Nobody can drive away.
- ARENA
- frozen interstate pileup
- RULE
- every stranded vehicle is a new room; outside access is worse than staying put.
STRIPFALL
A chain of sinkholes begins swallowing the Las Vegas Strip during a packed holiday weekend, forcing casino workers and tourists through linked service tunnels as resorts collapse one by one.
- ARENA
- Las Vegas Strip
- RULE
- every safe route can become the next collapse zone.
FAULT JOB
A bank robbery is interrupted by a major earthquake, forcing robbers and hostages through a collapsing financial district while the stolen money itself becomes part of the survival problem.
- ARENA
- financial district
- RULE
- the loot slows survival and keeps changing the alliances.
ZERO HOUR
Gravity disappears across Manhattan for sixty seconds every hour. Society adapts. Thieves build an impossible robbery around the schedule — then the intervals stop arriving on time.
- ARENA
- Manhattan
- RULE
- the trusted safety system is the thing that fails.
STATIC PREY
During a citywide blackout, an organism that hunts electrical fields moves toward the last powered trauma hospital in the city.
- ARENA
- blackout city / hospital
- RULE
- turning off the power would kill the people the characters are trying to save.
THE LAST TUG
A storm turns a container ship into a city-block-sized runaway object headed for a packed waterfront, leaving tug crews and harbor professionals with one hour to keep it from arriving.
- ARENA
- industrial harbor
- RULE
- the heroes are the professionals everyone would rationally call for help.
UNDER TERMINAL
A sinkhole swallows part of an international airport, trapping passengers in old service tunnels while thieves discover the collapse opened a one-time route into the customs vault.
- ARENA
- airport underground
- RULE
- the heist route and escape route are the same route, and both keep collapsing.
THE STANDING
America funds government and selects federal leadership through a mass-elimination civic spectacle in Washington. When contestants realize corporate owners control the outcome, they stop fighting one another and turn on the system itself.
- ARENA
- Washington, D.C. during hurricane season
- RULE
- the dangerous system is the legitimate institution; the broadcast has to continue.
METEOR RUSH
A meteor shower scatters fragments containing a never-before-seen mineral across Nevada, sending scientists, criminals, locals and authorities through the still-active impact zone before quarantine closes.
- ARENA
- Nevada impact field
- RULE
- impacts are still coming and the containment perimeter closes at dawn.
BLACK SKY
A lightning superstorm traps tens of thousands at a music festival while stages, towers, fencing and nearly every structure designed to serve the crowd becomes a strike risk.
- ARENA
- music-festival campground
- RULE
- shelter is scarce and the tallest “safe” structures are dangerous.