10 Best Films Made From Black List Screenplays

Nope, not the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s but an entirely different entity that actually helps filmmakers rather than branding them commie sympathisers, the Black List was founded in 2005 by studio executive Franklin Leonard as a way of raising the profile of the film industry’s most-liked but as yet unproduced movie scripts.

Twelve years on from its inception, the Black List is now one of the most anticipated annual events in the Hollywood calendar and can proudly boast that over 300 screenplays previously featured on it have now been made into movies.

Admittedly, not all of those movies have been great and perhaps should’ve stayed purely on paper (we’re talking about you, Dirty Grandpa) but a good few have been excellent. In fact, the list has spawned over 250 Academy Award nominated movies and a further 48 actual winners to boot.

We’ll be covering a few of those Oscar winners here, alongside a few movies that might not be award jury favourites but are still rather brilliant in our humble opinion.

Already hailed as one of the best sci-fi films of the decade, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival hit cinema screens last year to rave reviews. According to the director he had been itching to make a sci-fi movie for quite some time – quite a departure from his usual crime thrillers – and when he was handed Eric Heisserer’s script, which featured on the 2012 Black List, he was smitten.

Adapted from Ted Chiang’s award-winning sci-fi novella Story of Your Life, the screenplay scooped Heisserer an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Unfortunately for Heisserer, he lost out to Moonlight but did beat both Doctor Strange and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to scoop the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation at the annual Nebula Awards.

Interestingly, Heisserer’s original script featured an ending that saw the visiting aliens leave a blueprint for a spaceship capable of interstellar travel but he and Villeneuve decided to change that finale after Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was released in 2014.