There has been a seismic shift in the screenwriting community this month.
Screenwriters who have been using sites like ScreenCraft, The ScriptLab, and WeScreenplay for paid coverage services will have to look elsewhere.
These websites announced this past week that they were shutting down, with all of them being gone by March.
CREDIT: ScreenCraft
CREDIT: WeScreenplay
CREDIT: The Script Lab
These companies are part of Industry Arts, which owns Coverfly, Final Draft, Tracking Board, and Launch Pad.
It seems like BackStage, another huge company, bought Industry Arts and Film Freeway, and then was acquired by Cast & Crew.
Are you keeping up with all this?
Now, Cast & Crew owns all the companies above, and it seems like they're shutting down redundancies.
I would assume Final Draft is safe because it's a very popular software. But the other sites are all screenplay sites with contests and paid coverage services.
You could infer that they'll send everything through FilmFreeway and possibly make that their coverage service hub, or maybe they'll create one new website for that.
The general story I could find online was that most people thought all these sites Cast & Crew acquired were in competition with themselves, and it didn't make sense to pay for staffers and sites that all competed with one another.
It's hard to say the ramifications of this consolidation, aside from taking away a lot of sites that were used regularly by aspiring screenwriters.
No matter what springs up to take their place, you should be wary of any sites that want cash for industry connections. These places will always have money as their main goal. But some of them also can be worth the cash.
We'll keep you updated as more information is leaked.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
