10 Best Films Made From Black List Screenplays

Quentin Tarantino’s highest-grossing film to date, Django Unchained, first popped up on the 2011 Black List and went on to score the writer-director a hattrick when it scooped Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards, BAFTAs and the Golden Globes in 2013.

The seeds of the movie were planted in Tarantino’s head while he was writing a book about Italian director of uber-violent Westerns Sergio Corbucci and envisioned a Spaghetti Western set in pre-Civil War Deep South that dealt with America’s violent history of slavery – what he’s termed a ‘Southern’ rather than a Western.

The movie takes much inspiration from Corbucci’s 1966 Western Django, a similar tale of revenge and racism whose star Franco Nero makes a cameo in Django Unchained as slave owner Amerigo Vessepi. Other script influences include Richard Fleischer’s 1975 blaxploitation flick Mandingo and another Corbucci movie called The Great Silence – a ‘snow Western’ that Tarantino paid homage to in both Django Unchained and his later film The Hateful Eight.