

You read through a few, but none really impress you. Now imagine you’re an agent or a producer and you’re inundated with millions of screenplays. That can result in a flood of not-so-great screenplays. Since it’s so easy to write them, anyone might think they can. You can get by without a word-processing program as well, as you can use tools like Google Docs or even your phone’s notes section to begin jotting down ideas as they come.Īs we said before, you have to expect that millions upon millions of people submit a screenplay every year. Heck, you don’t even need a computer nowadays, just a smartphone or tablet will do. The Sheer Number of Screenplays SubmittedĪll it takes to write a screenplay is a computer and an idea. What is it that makes it so hard to break into the world of screenwriting? There are several factors at play here, and each are significant. Once you crunch all those numbers, we’d say yes, it’s quite difficult to be one of the chosen few who gets a screenplay sold.
Horror screenplays wanted 2012 movie#
That’s roughly 48 percent of the 10,000 screenwriters, leaving 52 percent that are not yet involved with film or movie production. Some of these writers already have roles in Hollywood, about 4,760 of them, states the article. Thus, they have a better chance of acceptance. The article says that perhaps only 10,000 writers actually produce screenplays that are considered good, even great. Script Magazine dives deeper into how many people might get their screenplay sold by rating the quality of writing. That number has surely only gone up since then. This article in The Atlantic notes that the Writer’s Guild of America receives 50,000 registered screenplays annually, but the article is also from 2011. How many people actually do send in screenplays? That’s a little tougher to say. You have to assume that way more than a million people might submit a screenplay, meaning far more would be rejected. If you had a million screenwriters and took 20 percent of them, that’s only 200,000 writer’s screenplays that would be accepted. That rate is, just to reiterate, between five and 20 percent. The writer knows managers, screenwriters, and agents, so they didn’t pull the acceptance rate out of nowhere. The Script Magazine article we linked you to in the intro is from 2017, so it’s pretty current. Īdmittedly, those acceptance rates are pretty low, but that doesn’t mean you should give up! In this article, we’ll talk more about why screenplays get denied and what you can do to increase the chances of yours being sold.

Will your screenplay get sold? How hard is it to sell a screenplay, anyway?Īccording to writers, managers, and agents involved in greenlighting screenplays, there’s a five to 20 percent chance of a screenplay being accepted and sold, says Script Magazine. You’ve just completed your own screenplay and these stories are swirling in your head, making you nervous. Everyone in screenwriting has a horror story or two about their screenplay getting rejected for seemingly no reason.
