Image: From the movie Goodbye
I am a big science fiction fan; I spent hours browsing the library’s science fiction section as a kid. I jump between Foundation on Apple TV+, Star Trek on Paramount+, The Eternaut on Netflix, and Alien: Earth on Disney+. I also read new and old SF.
I am also writing science fiction screenplays. And they are not easy to produce. Maybe that’s why one of the sentences in my The Stellark Black List review (at the beginning of the last year) was: At the moment, there is very little appetite for any special effects-heavy genre series that does not derive from very well-established IP. Which I understand, it’s hard to invest in a new writer’s show as it is a film/tv business after all, but it also signals that new SF worlds are often seen as a luxury for traditional studios, they can’t afford.
The Financing Shift in Science Fiction
With AI, scripts like mine are becoming more viable, and we are already seeing shifts in how projects are financed. Even an established writer like Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary has said that traditional routes were nearly impossible for him, but launching an AI-focused production company suddenly put three features into production. There are already plenty of AI science fiction movies, like deeply personal Goodbye, a story about grief and loss that is also warm with lines like You need to be social at some point. Or amazingly powerful Embryom Chronicles: Roots of the Forgotten, which is too short for the story it tells.
Science fiction as a genre will thrive with AI. We’ll see old worlds reimagined and new worlds that we will fall in love with. Also, a lot of bad movies that rely mostly on spectacle, not the story, because anybody can prompt a giant spaceship with a sign: We break for nobody.
Story Still Decides
While platforms like Escape.ai are the best place to discover the sheer volume of new science fiction being made, Cinema Shift Festival is where we pick the stories that actually stand up as movies. We aren’t just looking for good visuals; we are looking for the human intent that makes a story matter. But will everybody be a filmmaker? No. Just like everybody has a paper, and not everybody is writing a book. People passionate about their stories will make them, just as traditional filmmakers do: they have a story and find a way to tell it.
My passion story is about people stranded in a space hotel during a deadly outbreak on Earth. In 2017, I wrote a book about it, Snow Outbreak, which last year became The Stellark. That space hotel obsession even charmed a Black List evaluator, who wrote: This pilot is an excellent example of great action thriller writing. From the opening flash-forward to the explosive finale, the script has a tight, propulsive quality that drives its story from one complication to the next. It expertly juggles a series of horrific, compounding crises that keep escalating towards an inevitable disaster. And while many of the characters on board the Space Hotel lack clear, distinguishable voices or personalities, there is something charming about the pilot’s laser focus on the procedural dilemmas facing the ship’s survivors.
I know. And I am working on characters like Taylor Sheridan would. In this new era, persistence may be what closes the distance between a great script and the screen.