Every year the Black List crowns Hollywood's best unmade screenplays. I traced two decades of scripts and 1,682 writers to see if the list a brilliant talent-spotter, a genuine career-maker, or both.
I’ve grown highly skeptical of the Black List due to what I view as a track record of misleading public statements from Franklin Leonard regarding his operations. Letting the owner essentially plug his unrelated, controversial business right in the article wasn't exactly reassuring.
Doing my best to put that aside, I have some reservations regarding your analysis of the 18% credit differential. While I recognize that you explicitly constructed a control group by matching writers in similar positions to isolate the list's impact, the comparison itself remains fundamentally skewed. Matching writers on observable baseline metrics fails to capture the critical, unobservable variable that actually lands a script on the annual Black List: latent industry momentum.
The annual Black List does select these scripts themselves, it simply polls the industry on scripts executives are already buzzing about. To get onto the list in the first place, a script already needs an immense amount of existing advocacy, representation, and internal momentum. Therefore, your control group doesn't represent identical writers where one randomly received a "Black List bump." Instead, the comparison is inadvertently drawn between writers who already possessed critical mass in development circles and those who, despite looking similar on paper, simply lacked that specific pre-existing institutional heat. The 18% credit delta is almost certainly measuring that initial variance in insider reputation rather than an independent lift generated by the list itself.
I spoke to Franklin after the analysis was finished, and it didn't change any of the numbers (to be clear, neither did he ask me to!). I think it's good to add colour and context to articles like this and bring a human touch when I can. He is clearly the best person to do that, as his words are clearly flagged as quotes, I'm not worried about anyone confusing my data from his commentary. To me, the Black List is not the same as the annual Black List, but I don't think it's unrelated. (Plus I'm trying not to police what guests want to say and the reader is free to listen to his words or not - I'm clearly not endorsing them).
On the 18% point, I think we agree more than it might seem. You're right that matching writers on the things I can see doesn't capture the momentum that gets a script noticed in the first place. That is why I say in the piece that most of the rise is selection and momentum rather than the list, with only a modest lift on top. The matched comparison is a ceiling on the list's effect, not a clean measure of it.
Your POV is that it's almost certainly pre-existing heat rather than the list, which I can totally see. But as you point out, we can't know for sure, and we're all left to decide what we each think it is. As always, I try to make the methods and data clear so that everyone can draw whatever conclusions they think are valid.
"What the Black List does is put a very bright spotlight on that script so that the people who should read it actually do."
What you could argue from the numbers is that the black list puts a very bright spotlight on those who decide what goes on the black list. All the data can work to legitimize that spotlight.
I think that's a fair characterization honestly, but "those who decide what goes on the Black List" are the executives at every studio, streamer, financier, and production company who do business with those studios, streamers, and financiers. By design, they are the folks who decide what gets made.
Listing scripts like Social Network or Django on the Black List makes the whole thing pointless, as there was never a doubt those scripts would be produced. By that logic every script in Hollywood could be on the Black List, as every script at one point is finished, but not yet produced.
Apologies for not addressing the analysis itself, but something more rudimentary occurred to me... If I'm understanding this correctly, "THE" BLACKLIST is a closed network of executives who share screenplays as "The Annual Blacklist", and the other Blacklist (i.e. blcklst.com) is related only by virtue of Franklin Leonard alone..?
If so, what real impact does the website have for unknown writers? Is the above analysis relevant to a writer who solely began with a submission on the website?
My fear is THE "real" BLACKLIST/The Annual Blacklist(?) is as inaccessible for new writers as any other part of the Hollywood construct —whatever that might be.
DISCLAIMER: I've only recently learned about this (possible) bifurcation, so apologies for asking a dumb question (due to it having an evident answer or one that's been answered already) but I'm confused about what's what, and the efficacy of the website for being a launchpad or if it's simply a site for thorough script coverage.
Hey Chaz. This article is about the annual Black List poll and not the blcklst.com website.
You're right that they are linked by the very similar name, Franklin runs them both, and by intent in the industry. I don't have any data on the website, so I can't speak about it.
I’ve grown highly skeptical of the Black List due to what I view as a track record of misleading public statements from Franklin Leonard regarding his operations. Letting the owner essentially plug his unrelated, controversial business right in the article wasn't exactly reassuring.
Doing my best to put that aside, I have some reservations regarding your analysis of the 18% credit differential. While I recognize that you explicitly constructed a control group by matching writers in similar positions to isolate the list's impact, the comparison itself remains fundamentally skewed. Matching writers on observable baseline metrics fails to capture the critical, unobservable variable that actually lands a script on the annual Black List: latent industry momentum.
The annual Black List does select these scripts themselves, it simply polls the industry on scripts executives are already buzzing about. To get onto the list in the first place, a script already needs an immense amount of existing advocacy, representation, and internal momentum. Therefore, your control group doesn't represent identical writers where one randomly received a "Black List bump." Instead, the comparison is inadvertently drawn between writers who already possessed critical mass in development circles and those who, despite looking similar on paper, simply lacked that specific pre-existing institutional heat. The 18% credit delta is almost certainly measuring that initial variance in insider reputation rather than an independent lift generated by the list itself.
Hey Helen, thanks for commenting.
I spoke to Franklin after the analysis was finished, and it didn't change any of the numbers (to be clear, neither did he ask me to!). I think it's good to add colour and context to articles like this and bring a human touch when I can. He is clearly the best person to do that, as his words are clearly flagged as quotes, I'm not worried about anyone confusing my data from his commentary. To me, the Black List is not the same as the annual Black List, but I don't think it's unrelated. (Plus I'm trying not to police what guests want to say and the reader is free to listen to his words or not - I'm clearly not endorsing them).
On the 18% point, I think we agree more than it might seem. You're right that matching writers on the things I can see doesn't capture the momentum that gets a script noticed in the first place. That is why I say in the piece that most of the rise is selection and momentum rather than the list, with only a modest lift on top. The matched comparison is a ceiling on the list's effect, not a clean measure of it.
Your POV is that it's almost certainly pre-existing heat rather than the list, which I can totally see. But as you point out, we can't know for sure, and we're all left to decide what we each think it is. As always, I try to make the methods and data clear so that everyone can draw whatever conclusions they think are valid.
This quote's interesting:
"What the Black List does is put a very bright spotlight on that script so that the people who should read it actually do."
What you could argue from the numbers is that the black list puts a very bright spotlight on those who decide what goes on the black list. All the data can work to legitimize that spotlight.
I think that's a fair characterization honestly, but "those who decide what goes on the Black List" are the executives at every studio, streamer, financier, and production company who do business with those studios, streamers, and financiers. By design, they are the folks who decide what gets made.
Listing scripts like Social Network or Django on the Black List makes the whole thing pointless, as there was never a doubt those scripts would be produced. By that logic every script in Hollywood could be on the Black List, as every script at one point is finished, but not yet produced.
Next up: a comparison between black list script and finished film faithfulness. Does it also correlate with ratings and revenue?
Apologies for not addressing the analysis itself, but something more rudimentary occurred to me... If I'm understanding this correctly, "THE" BLACKLIST is a closed network of executives who share screenplays as "The Annual Blacklist", and the other Blacklist (i.e. blcklst.com) is related only by virtue of Franklin Leonard alone..?
If so, what real impact does the website have for unknown writers? Is the above analysis relevant to a writer who solely began with a submission on the website?
My fear is THE "real" BLACKLIST/The Annual Blacklist(?) is as inaccessible for new writers as any other part of the Hollywood construct —whatever that might be.
DISCLAIMER: I've only recently learned about this (possible) bifurcation, so apologies for asking a dumb question (due to it having an evident answer or one that's been answered already) but I'm confused about what's what, and the efficacy of the website for being a launchpad or if it's simply a site for thorough script coverage.
Hey Chaz. This article is about the annual Black List poll and not the blcklst.com website.
You're right that they are linked by the very similar name, Franklin runs them both, and by intent in the industry. I don't have any data on the website, so I can't speak about it.
Franklin did a four-part data study on the website earlier in the year (which I have only read - I was not involved with) https://blcklst.substack.com/t/data-study