The Black List · Survey since 2005 · Platform since 2012
Great writing exists everywhere. Hollywood had no efficient instrument for finding it at scale. We built one.
It started as a survey. I asked seventy-five development executives to name their favorite unproduced screenplays. I published their answers in an anonymous email. That email went viral. It is now a platform where writers anywhere in the world can have their work read and evaluated by professionals, and where the people whose job it is to find material come to find it.
The annual list, since 2005
What happened to those scripts
Since 2005, more than 500 scripts on the annual Black List have been produced as feature films, grossing over $30 billion at the worldwide box office and winning 60 Academy Awards from 284 nominations — including four Best Picture Oscars since 2007 and 13 of the last 38 Best Screenplay Oscars. Those are the annual list’s numbers, not the platform’s. The list is free, it always has been, and it is a separate thing from the platform below.
The list never predicted anything, nor did it get movies made. It simply collected what hundreds of professionals already believed and shared their opinions widely.
The scripts that got made got made because the scripts were exceptional, because actors, directors, producers, and executives fought for them, and financiers paid for them. All the list did was make them pay attention.
It is published every December.
The platform, since 2012
How it works
Writers host their English language screenplays, pilots, plays, and novels on the Black List website, and can pay professional readers to evaluate them. Development executives, agents, managers, producers, and editors search our database of material, read what they find, and sometimes get involved in the material they find that excites them.
Every reader has spent at least a year at a real company working in the format they read, at assistant level or above. (Time as an intern does not count toward that threshold.) We review their previous feedback work before hiring them, and we continue to monitor their work for as long as they read for us.
What we publish
We ask our readers one primary question: how likely would you be to recommend this to a peer or superior in your industry? They answer that question from one to ten. We’ve published a number of data studies about score distributions, what factors drive scores, and how reliable our readers are. Black List readers land within a point of each other about three times in four, and large disagreements happen at half the rate that chance would suggest.
Read the data studiesFiction, theater, and television
Since 2012, the platform has expanded to accept television pilots, stage plays, and unpublished and self-published novels. The process works the same way.
Independent evidence
From Harvard and the Academy
Harvard Business School
As Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge summarized the study: “Black-Listed scripts were twice as likely to be made into films, with 30 percent of them produced, compared to 15 percent of non-listed scripts. What’s more, they also did better at theaters, with movies of the same budget generating 90 percent more revenue at the box office. These large differences remain after controlling for a large number of observable factors, including the experience of the writer, the agent, and the identity of the studio.”
HBS Working Knowledge (September 2019), summarizing Luo, Macher & Wahlen, Judgment Aggregation in Creative Production: Evidence from the Movie Industry. This studied the annual list.
The Academy Nicholl Fellowship
In our first year as a submission partner to the Academy Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, the Black List recommended 25 scripts out of roughly 2,500 public submissions — less than a quarter of the 101 the Academy considered. Five of the ten finalists came from those 25. One of the five Fellows was among them.
A script the Black List recommended was three times as likely to reach the final ten as one it did not — five of our twenty-five, against five of the other seventy-six the Academy considered. Academy members chose them, reading blind.
Academy Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, 2025 cycle.
Limits
What it doesn’t do
The Black List is a partial solution. Our educational resources and creating a writer profile are free. We do charge writers to host their material and have it evaluated, because discovery at a professional standard costs money: staff, infrastructure, and experienced human readers, paid appropriately for their time, at volume.
We charge $30 per month to host material, $100 for screenplays, pilots, and plays to be evaluated, and $150 for the first 100 pages of a manuscript. Including bonuses, readers receive two-thirds of evaluation fees on average. High-scoring material receives free hosting and additional evaluations, and fee waivers are available for writers who find our paid services to be a substantial burden.
We are a for-profit company, because discovery infrastructure needs to be permanent and cannot exist at the whims of individual and corporate philanthropy.
What the Black List does is find great material and share it with professionals who can do something with it. We cannot force them to option, acquire, or make it (though often we wish that we could). Making great work visible can do a lot, but it can’t do everything.
I’d welcome any system that identified talent at scale for less, or that moved the cost onto the people who profit from delivering the work to audiences rather than onto the people who can least afford to be found. We’ve built the site to keep the cost low for all writers, and zero for those who can’t afford that low cost.
I’m still trying to work out how to build the better version.