IP Picks🔎: A Sriracha Feud Gets Spicy
âž• A haunting quartet of horror short stories
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
We have a full boat this week, including a bunch of horror shorts, so let’s get right into it…
But before we do, there’s one thing we need to address: the apocalyptic journalism blood bath of the past few weeks. The news is grim everywhere you turn — the shuttering of The Messenger, big layoffs at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, and the utter collapse of Sports Illustrated to name just a few. Of course as a former journalist and as someone who’s been reading a daily paper since he was seven — shout out to the great Boston Globe, where the comics were my gateway drug, quickly followed by the sports section and eventually actual news — I’m upset about this for a lot of reasons.
The one that should concern you the most, though, is the downstream effect these sad developments will have on available IP and how it will be felt in Hollywood. It bears keeping a close eye on. After all, fewer journalists and fewer resources mean fewer potential true-life stories to option. Long-form journalism has already taken a big hit — just look at the GQs and Esquires of the world, which used to publish great, meaty features. Yes, newspapers have picked up some of the slack, but as their budgetary belts have gotten tighter and tighter, they’ve been cutting back on that stuff too. When the funnel narrows at the top like this, the number of option possibilities for Hollywood shrinks. A handful of newer long-form digital outlets like Truly Adventurous and Epic have filled some of the gap, but not enough. Few podcasts devote the same resources to investigating original stories like magazines and newspapers do. Well, did. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see that a lot of podcasts leverage what print journalists have done. What’s to be done about this? That’s a tough one. There’s not a lot that people in Hollywood can do — it feels a bit like climate change in the sense that the small things you could do like driving less seem like a drop in the bucket of the larger problem — but the creative community should be concerned and speaking out in defense of journalism every chance it gets.
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On to this week’s picks, which includes a quartet of horror shorts from a new anthology:
A horror tale about the Faustian bargain that gives a demon the rights to a family’s daughters when they turn 19.
A zombie story centered on a high school party in a cemetery.
A Get Out-like adventure about a hiking group with awful consequences.
A 1970s-set chiller about Black citizens taking the law into their own hands.
A murder thriller set at a swank wellness retreat.
A magical realist drama about a woman who must keep moving from place to place…or else she’ll die from a mysterious disease.
A true-life drama about the red-hot feud between two business titans.
