A short his­to­ry of Hollywood’s (ill-fat­ed) attempts to adapt the internet

For broth­ers Matt and Har­ri­son Query, a night­mare turned into a dream come true this past week­end. Not so long ago, Matt was killing time as many online denizens do, by post­ing on Red­dit; he had tak­en to r/​nosleep, where users share orig­i­nal short hor­ror sto­ries, to get some feed­back on a new com­po­si­tion with the head­er ​‘My wife and I bought a ranch in the moun­tains last year, and my neigh­bor had some inter­est­ing sug­ges­tions on how to man­age our new land.’

The chill­ing tale sends a for­mer Marine reac­cli­ma­tiz­ing to civil­ian soci­ety and his wife out to a tract of land in Ida­ho, only to dis­cov­er that a ​“malev­o­lent spir­it” appears at the begin­ning of each sea­son, and that they must per­form bizarre rit­u­als in order to keep it at bay. Of course, this dredges up some trau­ma for the vet­er­an, and in hor­ror movie tra­di­tion, the exor­cisms of his per­son­al demons form a par­al­lel with the lit­er­al ones.

It sounds like a ready-to-go Blum­house project, and Hol­ly­wood exec­u­tives must have thought so as well, because Dead­line reports that the pitch was the object of a hot­ly con­test­ed bid­ding war on Fri­day after­noon that end­ed with a low-sev­en-fig­ure deal from Net­flix. Matt will cash a fat check, and his broth­er Har­ri­son (a some­what more expe­ri­enced screen­writer, though he’s nev­er had a script pro­duced) will adapt the sto­ry for the screen. Suc­cess! Right?

This item echoes a hand­ful of the film industry’s past attempts to trans­late the viral hap­pen­ings of the inter­net into box-office dol­lar signs, and fore­tells a dif­fi­cult road ahead to full real­iza­tion. The high­er-ups of Tin­sel­town have long since wok­en up to the fact that there’s gold in them thar e‑hills, but they’ve still had plen­ty of trou­ble extract­ing it.

The ur-exam­ple of the hard­ships inher­ent in mak­ing the jump from Red­dit to cin­e­mas would have to be Rome, Sweet Rome. Post­ed by mil­i­tary his­to­ri­an James Erwin under the user­name Prufrock451, the mul­ti­ple-install­ment action-epic worked through the thought exper­i­ment of whether a sin­gle bat­tal­ion of sol­diers from the present day could use their supe­ri­or knowl­edge and tech­nol­o­gy to best the entire Roman empire.

This being the year 2011, a time when Amer­i­ca still had some lin­ger­ing pos­i­tive feel­ings about swords-and-san­dals pic­tures from the suc­cess of 300, Warn­er Bros. snapped up the rights for a prince­ly sum and hired Erwin to draw up a treatment.

Erwin pur­chased some of the clas­sic screen­writ­ing man­u­als from McK­ee as well as the Lennon/​Garant brain trust, and got to work. By 2013, Warn­er Bros. brought in Bri­an Miller (then known as the pen behind the space-set found-footage hor­ror­show Apol­lo 18) to fix what the stu­dio deemed an unus­able script. Miller junked every­thing Erwin came up with aside from the basic premise, but even so, the script nev­er got off the ground. The last update came in 2018, and that update was ​“nev­er going to happen.”

Anoth­er case study pre­sent­ed itself in 2017, when a pho­to of Rihan­na and Lupi­ta Nyong’o sit­ting next to one anoth­er at a fash­ion show three years ear­li­er set Twit­ter ablaze. The image of the two stars inspired user @GRAVEYARDHOTTIE to post, ​“Rihan­na looks like she scams rich white men and lupi­ta is the com­put­er smart best friend that helps plan the scans [sic],” and so the wheels were set in motion.

Ava DuVer­nay agreed to direct and Net­flix seemed inter­est­ed, but the past three years have gen­er­at­ed no updates what­so­ev­er on the project. DuVer­nay has got a lot of irons in the fire, yet she nev­er seems to men­tion this par­tic­u­lar iron, leav­ing lit­tle cause for optimism.

It sounds an awful lot like ​“The Patient Who Drove Me Out of Med­i­cine,” anoth­er selec­tion from r/​nosleep. The stu­dio for­mer­ly known as Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry Fox had laid claim to the con­cept in 2018, with Ryan Reynolds attached to pro­duce, but not a peep has been heard since. Nei­ther advanced through cast­ing announce­ment nor per­ma­nent­ly shelved as a no-go, it now lan­guish­es in ​“devel­op­ment hell,” await­ing some pos­si­ble salvation.

That doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly spell the end, how­ev­er. The bar­ri­er-break­er would appear to be Zola, the upcom­ing (though in these uncer­tain times, who knows when) Sun­dance sen­sa­tion based on the spell­bind­ing yarn woven by Twit­ter user @ZolarMoon. When the lengthy thread appeared on the plat­form in 2015, the pub­lic imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized the nar­ra­tive poten­tial in the wild tale of sex and crime, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t obstacles.

James Fran­co first called dibs on the director’s chair in 2016, but the accu­sa­tions of sex­u­al mis­con­duct lev­eled against the actor-film­mak­er com­pelled him to vacate his role. It wasn’t until 2018 that Jan­icza Bra­vo took over, and though the fes­ti­val pre­mière was a smash­ing suc­cess back in Jan­u­ary, the film still awaits the pub­lic eye.

Any­one who’s got­ten a movie made will be quick to tell you what an ardu­ous uphill bat­tle it can be, but when work­ing with par­tial­ly-formed ideas and writ­ers who have no pro­fes­sion­al résumé, the odds get even slim­mer. It looks like the future of film may not rest with the vir­tu­al ama­teurs, but the ques­tion of whether they’ll have a place of their own in that future still has yet to be decid­ed. Our nation turns its lone­ly eyes to you, Zola.