How Much Money Hollywood Pays for Scripts and Screenplays

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck received 

Good Will Hunting was made for $10 million, but the movie grossed

If you’re in the Writer’s Guild (WGA), I believe the union minimum right now for a feature script is in the neighborhood of 76K. Of course, the WGA does understand that small movies can’t take that hit, and they’ve got low-budget agreements for those kinds of productions.

One rule of thumb says the script should account for about 3% of the budget… so if your script is a little indie film that’s being shot on weekends for 50K, figure $1500. A $2 million movie? Shoot for a $60,000 purchase price. Find a balance, and don’t cripple the production with an unreasonable percentage. Be a partner, and an asset, not a financial liability. Instead, negotiate those alternative compensations. Wouldn’t you like to have owned a little backend piece of Paranormal Activity?

The producer may ask you to option your script to them for very little or no money, and while many writers may disagree with me, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. There are good reasons to take low dollar or free options, especially when you’re early in your career — so long as you’re confident that the producer has a reasonably good chance of reaching production, or you’re otherwise going to get some good value and experience from the option. There’s value in getting the opportunity to work with certain people, for instance, or in being allowed to participate and gain experience in a production role.

via: 10 things to think about when you option your screenplay

Based on the above rule of thumb, a $100 million movie might have a $2-3 million payment for the script.


A Knight's Tale
Screenwriter(s): Brian Helgeland
Fee: $2.5 million

Deja Vu (starring Denzel Washington)
Fee: $5 million ($2 million guarantee and $5 million production bonus)
Bill Marsilii moved from Delaware to New York to study drama and pursue a career as an actor. Marsilii formed a theatre group with friends he made in the Big Apple. They discovered that paying royalties to use existing plays was an expensive business and quickly turned to writing their own material. Marsilii went on to get a few TV writing gigs on such high profile projects as Courage the Cowardly Dog and The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss before hooking up with high profile Hollywood screenwriter Terry Rossio for Déjà Vu.


Talladega Nights
Screenwriter(s): Will Ferrell and Adam McKay
Fee: $4 million

Mozart and the Whale
Screenwriter(s): Ron Bass
Fee: $2.75 million ($2 million guarantee and $750,000 production bonus)
Production Budget: $12 million
U.S. Box Office: $36,000

Ronald Bass was the scribe behind Rain Man, so when he penned a new script about a man and a woman with autism, it’s easy to see why studios were prepared to splash out on it. Mozart and the Whale is by far the biggest commercial disaster on this list. A troubled production is largely to blame, with many of the cast refusing to promote the movie due to unhappiness with the final cut. This lack of guaranteed promotion put off distributors, and the film was barely exhibited outside of Spokane, Washington (the area in which it was set) before it limped onto DVD. It seems unlikely Bass will be getting close to $3 million up front for his next effort.

Basic Instinct
Screenwriter(s): Joe Eszterhas
Fee: $3 million

Basic Instinct became the world’s most expensive spec script in 1992, but it wasn’t the first time Joe Eszterhas had held the record. He’d first nabbed it in 1980, getting paid $500,000 for City Hall. A few years later he smashed his own record and collected $1.25 million for Big Shots. Then Lethal Weapon’s Shane Black sold The Last Boy Scout for $1.75 million and stole Eszterhas’ record. Eszterhas responded by penning the most commercial script he could think of. He finished it in ten days and sold it for almost double what Black had gotten. The film took over $500 million globally and a French newspaper named its release the most important global event of the year. Not bad for ten days work.

EuroTrip
Screenwriter(s): Alec Berc, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer
Fee: $4 million
Adam Herz’ spec script for American Pie was sent to studios as ‘Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy Which Can Be Made for Under $10 Million Which Studio Readers Will Hate But We Think You Will Love’. Herz netted $750,000 for his efforts, which helped push production costs up to $11 million. American Pie went on to take over $100 million at the U.S. box office. Studios saw potential in the revitalized gross out comedy genre and a string of similar films hit cinema screens in the years that followed.

via:

10 things to think about when you option your screenplay

Screenwriter's salary - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Terminology in the screenwriting business, a breakdown of the pay for the writing process, and more.

Article – Top 10 Specs-Turned-Movies of 2012 (and what it means for your next script!)
Safe House, Flight, Trouble With the Curve, 


Top 10 Highest Paid Spec Scriptwriters - Listverse

How much money can I expect to earn by selling a script to Hollywood? - Quora


The Definitive List of Spec Script Sales: 1991-2012 [Every Link] | Go Into The Story


Script trivia:

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck found a clever way to choose the right studio for their script: the story goes that on page 60 of the script, they wrote a completely out-of-nowhere sex scene between Will and Chuckie. They took it to every major studio, and nobody even mentioned the scene. When they met with Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, he said, "I only have one really big note on the script. About page 60, the two leads, both straight men, have a sex scene. What the hell is that?" - Damon and Affleck explained that they put that scene specifically in there to show them who actually read the script and who didn't. As Weinstein was the only person who brought it up, Miramax was the studio chosen to produce the film.

At a WGA seminar in 2003, William Goldman denied the persistent rumor that he was the actual writer of Good Will Hunting: "I would love to say that I wrote it. Here is the truth. In my obit it will say that I wrote it. People don't want to think those two cute guys wrote it. What happened was, they had the script. It was their script. They gave it to Rob [Reiner] to read, and there was a great deal of stuff in the script dealing with the F.B.I. trying to use Matt Damon for spy work because he was so brilliant in math. Rob said, "Get rid of it." They then sent them in to see me for a day - I met with them in New York - and all I said to them was, "Rob's right. Get rid of the F.B.I. stuff. Go with the family, go with Boston, go with all that wonderful stuff." And they did. I think people refuse to admit it because their careers have been so far from writing, and I think it's too bad. I'll tell you who wrote a marvelous script once, Sylvester Stallone. Rocky's a marvelous script. God, read it, it's wonderful. It's just got marvelous stuff. And then he stopped suddenly because it's easier being a movie star and making all that money than going in your pit and writing a script. But I did not write [Good Will Hunting], alas. I would not have written the "It's not your fault" scene. I'm going to assume that 148 percent of the people in this room have seen a therapist. I certainly have, for a long time. Hollywood always has this idea that it's this shrink with only one patient. I mean, that scene with Robin Williams gushing and Matt Damon and they're hugging, "It's not your fault, it's not your fault." I thought, Oh God, Freud is so agonized over this scene. But Hollywood tends to do that with therapists."

The very first day of the shooting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck started crying out of happiness, because it was a scene between Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgård, accomplished actors, doing Damon's and Affleck's scene verbatim and they had waited so long (four years) for this to happen. 

When Matt Damon was in his fifth year at Harvard, there was this playwriting class and the culmination of it was to write a one-act play, and he just started writing a movie which with the help of Ben Affleck became this movie.

Coupled with Matt Damon being cast as the lead in The Rainmaker (1997), Robin Williams signing onto the film, had lead to it getting fast tracked for production.

via: Good Will Hunting (1997) - Trivia - IMDb