There's a lot of thoughts in my head about what the future of entertainment will be, I dont know if I can even put them together here, but I'll try:

1. Technology changes everything. This is something we discussed with producer Richard Berger on the radio last sunday. The means of production of which Karl Marx once wrote about, are becoming socialized, not through politics like he meant them to, but through technology getting both more powerful and cheaper. It used to be that the dividing line between major productions and indie flicks was the size of the budget. Technology is turning the boardgame upside down: suddenly every John Doe with a desktop can make increasingly nicer-looking films with increasingly cheaper budgets. Soon, the dividing line will be about story. This is a good thing. But like every paradigm shift, it will reset all players to near zero. Bad storytellers who used to bank on the size of their budgets, will fall off the board, while good storytellers who used to dream about having big budgets, will suddenly dream no more. It'll be a slow-mo revolution. The studios are reacting to it by playing it safe: increasing the number of movies based on proven Intellectual Properties (be it other movies, comics, videogames, etc). This will not suffice in the long term. When technology allows people to have a digital Angelina in their desktop, acting at their beck and call like S1M0N3, things will get scary. Then again.. a virtual Angelina in my monitor? I may suddenly become too busy to make movies anymore.
2. Mixed platforms. This is something else Richard mentioned. The studios are cutting the number of new films per year, and focusing only on huge mega-big-deal projects, but less of them. And these behemot franchises always come with the whole shebang: videogames, comics, toys, lunch boxes, collectibles, etc. Its never just a film anymore. Now its about brands, which come in many platforms, films being just the flagship. Again, the response to the democratizing effect of technology on the unwashed masses, is to go bigger, bigger, bigger to The Fiddler's Green where they may not reach us. Yet :)

Strategy: To make it in this new world that's coming, you need to be a generalist. You need to know about Videogames and Comics too, not just films. You need to be able to think in terms of marketing and branding, not just story.

Concrete steps: Something I'm making right now, and I think it'll prove to be a good move, is this: I'm writing a comic book of my screenplay first, before the screenplay. This is interesting on several fronts:

1. It forces me to address my biggest weakness as a screenwriter, which is: I write too fucking much. In comic book form, there's only so many letters you can fit in a speech balloon. This is good. This teaches me discipline, forces me to keep a tight pace, and its an amazing filter for things that look good only to me, but the audience would yawn at.
2. It produces something -visual- you can pitch at studio execs. They can -see- it, before they invest money in it. This counts for something. (See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar... [1]) And later on, if you get green-light, its like a quasi storyboard the whole production team can follow. Here, proof, see the way the director and comic writer understood each other via the pages of the comic. The first 40 minutes of the movie, scene by scene is the same as the comic, panel by panel. Captions, voiceovers, everything:
3. It helps me get a job later on as a comic book writer. This is the biggest "LP-gets-scratched" moment for some, because the question jumps: "why would an aspiring screenwriter want to write comics!?" Answer: cuz they pay bi-monthly man. A paycheck counts when you have a family, and comics have a bit more stability than movies. Plus, you'd be surprised how related the two skillsets are. Now if I end up making millions someday (heh!) then I'd readjust my priorities, but for now, I need paychecks. Plus, I love comics.

So there, my plan. I'm writing a comic first, then a screenplay, for a movie, which is just the flagship, of a brand that will hopefully include other platforms and other stories, maybe even my wet dream, videogames, and goes who knows where. Everything in my project is designed to accomodate growth, rather than a single story, its a whole rich world where hundreds of stories could be told under the same umbrella. I made a website for it which will be the brand central, and studio people have said it looks good. And in the meanwhile all this happens, I will try to get regular paychecks writing comics.

I've given away my secret plan! Its cuz I wuv you guys. And I'll even share the product of many hours of research, benchmarking and comparison, the easiest product for writers who want to dabble into comics: http://plasq.com/comiclife-win [2]

There!

Lets see what happens people. I just felt like sharing this :)

Marco