When your project doesn’t sell, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was not good enough. It could mean that it wasn’t the right time, it was before it’s time… or way past it. Or your material wasn’t put in front of the appropriate buyers or partners. Sometimes the mayor of Hollywood was out for an extended overpriced lunch and justice was not served on this one.
When that happens you could rewrite it, slap a new title on it, and try again. Or you could take the slightly used/exposed idea and adapt it into another medium. Before you dust it off and revive it, let’s take a moment to evaluate and humbly suggest where one of your favorite projects could go next…
LIMITED SERIES
When you were initially plotting your project, did you leave out a lot of critical information or find an abundance of story after you concluded writing? Maybe what you envisioned as 90 minutes should be much longer. That’s right! Now you don’t have to think of multiple seasons of your shows. Now more than ever, one of the most popular vehicles out there is the 6 or 8-hour movie, more commonly called the Limited Series.
ANIMATION
Does your “old” project have fantastical elements? Inanimate objects coming to life? Lots of VFX? Could the tone and subject matter be refitted to be animated? Consider the live-action to animated plunge if there’s a comedy, if the situations are improbable, if one of the cast may not be human or if there’s a visual style or palette that would specifically enhance the storytelling that would be prohibitive to be done in-camera or in post.
SCRIPTED PODCAST
Are the scenes in this project on the longer side, mostly consisting of two or three characters talking in a conversational manner? Then adapting it into a narrative scripted podcast might translate really well and (bonus!) it could open up a new lane in your career. Be prepared to rethink the plot to be more episodic and adjust certain aspects that would play better for the eyes, so that they land for the ears.
GRAPHIC NOVEL
Is your project heavy on visuals, light on dialogue, and in a sci-fi, fantasy, horror, superhero, or crime genre? Then maybe it’s ripe to be illustrated and presented as a graphic novel or ongoing comic book series. A lot of today’s IP gold rush is focused in this area, so it could even be a nifty way to reverse engineer a story of yours that you have a burning desire to tell, get it bought by Hollywood, and then put it right back into the form you originally intended!
THEATER
For your most dialogue-heavy vaulted piece, consider revisiting it for the stage. Is there a role in there that would be an acting showcase if done live? Is the story pretty self-contained, with minimal locations? Maybe this old screenplay of yours could be a play.
Whatever you decide to do with it, remember that it’s not one size fits all and that adapting a project into something else is going to take just as much work as when you got your thoughts out the first time, if not more. Also, keep in mind that you could repurpose your screenplay into something beyond the options above. How about a novel, short story, video game? Virtual reality, or an app? What did you do? And more importantly, what are you going to do next?
--
Note From Tongal: "Repurposing Your Old Screenplays" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
