Netflix Wants Their Star Wars (or any PG Family Friendly Franchise)

It may not seem like news but it captured headlines all over. Netflix is looking for its Star Wars, something that can capture the hearts and minds of people of all ages, spin-off toys, and gather multiple sequels, building out a huge universe. 

I mean...everyone in town is always looking for this. 

My hope is that Netflix finds its own not from IP but from an original screenplay idea from a talented writer who dreams big and has fun on the page. 

If Netflix pays big bucks to just buy the next buzzy YA novel...I worry that original worldbuilding in spec screenplays might be dead for a while. 

But Vice President of Original Film Tendo Nagenda made the company's intentions pretty clear to The Hollywood Reporter: they're open to original ideas and to building a fantastic world. 

“We’re looking at big, broad-audience, PG-level adventure films as something that we want to get into. Something along the lines of the first Star Wars, or Harry Potter 1 and 2. A lot of family live-action, fantasy, spectacle movies that we think are big and can play great. A Jumanji-type of story. That is the next frontier. Well, we look at it as what aren’t the studios focused on. New ideas. We want to encourage great talent to think that way. George Lucas created Star Wars, it wasn’t based on a book. If you have that kind of imagination, like the Wachowskis with The Matrix, we feel like we’re the place to take the chance on those types of innovative ideas and filmmakers.”

The very idea that they could buy a spec and build a world should excite every writer in town. I know I immediately called my manager and begged him to send over some of my work. They tried to do it with Bright, which was written by a terrible human and directed by David Ayer. That movie did well on the Nextflix platform but its sequel is not coming any time soon.  

Its two biggest hits are Extraction and The Old Guard, both of which had big budgets but were adaptations of graphic novels. 

It has the $200+ million espionage thriller The Gray Man with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in the lead roles and the Russos directing coming down the line as well as Dwayne Johnson’s mega-budget Red Notice arriving sometime next year. 

Netflix knows how to build big movies, but has yet to build a franchise outside of the Kissing Booth series. 

Good luck to every writer out there. 

I truly cannot wait to see how Netflix makes someone's dreams come true and inspires the next generation.