I have been talking to a lot of development executives and producers lately about how they make greenlight decisions. The honest answer I keep hearing is: coverage, gut, and comps. Usually in that order.
Coverage is useful but expensive and subjective. Two readers can recommend opposite decisions on the same script. Gut is irreplaceable but hard to defend in a room. Comps are mostly marketing, not structural. Saying your script is Parasite meets The Martian tells you nothing about whether the script actually behaves the way those films do.
Curious how others in this community are approaching this. What does your evaluation process actually look like before you commit to a project?
Vijay Anand I actually just wrote a blog on this exact topic from the development exec POV, what it really means to “train your reading brain” to assess material beyond personal taste and into viability, audience alignment, and market positioning:
https://www.stage32.com/blog/the-skill-that-will-change-your-career-trai...
One of the biggest shifts is moving from “Do I like this?” to “What is this trying to do, and does it succeed for its intended audience, and can it realistically exist in the current market?”
"Parasite meets The Martian tells you nothing about whether the script actually behaves the way those films do." Then why use them as comps.
E Langley It looks like the industry has conflated two different questions - one is who is the audience for the film, which is a marketing question. The other is does this script actually behave the way those films do structurally, which is a development question. I am seeing a lot of people using comps to answer the marketing question - much less about the structural question.
I noticed a lot of people compare Project Hail Mary to the Martian - even heard Ryan Gosling talk about it in an interview and most of the times, the idea is, if you watched the Martian and liked it, you might like this movie too, and commercially that was a success, so this one might too. But I also know people who went into Project Hail Mary with the expectations of the Martian and were disappointed cause it feels different. Same author, same writer but structurally two different things.
Funnily, Interstellar is structurally more close to Project Hail Mary. And some aspects of Arrival. Ive been working on how to visualize these structural aspects of comps, so that we can tell stories better - and do the marketing bit next.
Ashley Renée Smith Thanks for sharing that article. "But development isn’t about your taste. And that realization takes a minute to fully land." - that resonates.
There is a layer underneath this that I have been thinking about a lot. Even a well trained reading brain is working against a biological constraint. Working memory holds roughly 4 to 7 items at once. Which means even the most experienced reader is evaluating fragments, never the whole arc simultaneously. What lingers after a read is heavily shaped by the peaks and the ending, not necessarily by what the script is doing structurally across its full runtime.
I wrote about this recently here: http://blog.quanten.co/why-your-brain-cannot-evaluate-a-script-and-what-...
The argument is not that trained judgment should be replaced. It is that visualization of the full structural arc gives that trained judgment something it cannot generate from a linear read alone. A complete picture alongside the instinct.
Curious whether that framing resonates with your experience in development.
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Great question. From a writer’s POV, the scripts that get my team excited always have 3 things: clear audience, contained costs, and a hook you can pitch in one sentence.
I’m developing BEYOND THE GATES — a Nollywood thriller with low locations and high stakes. Curious what budget range makes you greenlight fastest?
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Ezeonu Juliet Question : Are audiences ever clear? A lot of executives assume that if there was a teen vampire drama that has an audience, once the show ends, that audience might be up for grabs. But isnt that an assumption in a lot of ways? The science of fandom says that audiences don't transfer that easily. There are also the variables of - what is the social context like (for Eg. a movie about a middle east war would be a terrible film to come out right now, even if the storyline was awesome. And there are also variables about what else releases around that time, that is impossible to control.
When things are still a script, all you can really prove is whether the structure of the story you are trying to tell can hold audiences - the hook helps to get the attention, absolutely.
Wishing you the very best with your project.
vVijay AnandThis is real, Vijay. Audiences don’t transfer — they choose.
As a screenwriter, I’ve learned you can’t borrow yesterday’s fandom. You build today’s obsession with structure + stakes + timing. The hook buys you 30 seconds. The structure earns you 90 minutes.
I’m developing BEYOND THE GATES, a contained Nollywood thriller. Wrote it knowing I can’t prove audience, but I can prove the engine: 3 locations, 1 moral choice, and a hook you can say in 5 words — “What if loyalty kills you?”
Social context matters too. A story about truth in corrupt systems hits different in 2026 Nigeria than anywhere else. That’s not transferable. That’s specific.
Curious — when you greenlight, do you weigh “script engine” heavier than “comp title audience” for first-time writers?
Ezeonu Juliet Just to be mindful of your time - I am not a development executive so I cannot answer the greenlight question from experience. I wish you the best with your project.
viVijay Anand Appreciate the clarity, Vijay. Thanks for taking time to respond. Wishing you well too.
The part that never gets talked about is that most evaluation systems are designed to reduce risk for the person making the decision not to find the best material. Coverage exists so someone can point to a document when a project fails. Comps exist so someone can explain their bet in language a room full of executives already understands. The actual quality of the writing becomes almost secondary at that point. The scripts that break through usually do it because someone with enough authority decided to trust their own read over the process. That is the gap no evaluation system has figured out how to close.
Eric Charran Bingo.
The gap you are describing is not between good material and bad evaluation. It is between the person who can see what a script is doing and the room that needs a shared language to discuss it.
Structural data does not replace the read. It gives the person who trusts their read something to point to that the room can engage with without it being purely subjective.
That does not solve the political problem you are describing. But it changes what the conversation in the room looks like. Here's hoping fingers crossed
TL:DR
E Langley TLDR Version : Folks try to pitch "success" before getting the structure of the story right.
Vijay Anand At DSP we greenlight scripts that first are original and effective, with a strong voice. And does it align with our own brand and artistic objectives? We don't ever look at coverage - we believe coverage is only use by incompetent producers (and I mean that in the nicest way) or for those who literally have thousands of scripts to filter through (and there are not many of those people). Why? Because coverage is traditionally written by someone who has never sold a script, maybe not even written one, and has no experience at all in production, distribution or anywhere else in the film cycle. So by definition those who write coverage are unqualified to make any assessment that they are being relied upon to make, and I question the competence of any producer who relies on it for a 6 or 7 or 8 figure decision. And increasingly, it's being done by AI, which by definition cannot assess anything other than grammar and formatting, neither of which have any actual connection to storytelling. Also, we're making the decisions, we're going to read the script before we do that. Comps are a marketing issue, even before finding investors. It's not a reason to greenlight a script, it's a way to get your head around packaging and marketing it, IMO.
Shadow Dragu-Mihai Thank you for sharing your process. That was insightful. Thank you!