Inside 'Alignment,' the Hot AI-Themed Spec That Just Sold for a Million Bucks

Happy Monday, everyone.

Forgive my absence lately — I spent Thursday traveling and Friday with my family, though I tried to tide you over with a couple of episodes of For Your Consideration — Hollywood’s #1 awards-themed talk show according to Terrence Malick.

Speaking of the awards race, Wicked: Part One got a big boost this weekend with a massive opening weekend of $114 million at the domestic box office, while Gladiator II also fared well with $55 million, though it performed even better overseas — the opposite of Wicked.

Meanwhile, Variety’s Clayton Davis unveiled his latest Oscar predictions, which don’t have Brady Corbet even being nominated for The Brutalist, whereas the Gold Derby gang has Corbet winning the whole thing. Who is right and who is very, very wrong? Find out in a few months…

Either way, I don’t need Clayton —or Matthew Stewart of Screen Time Central — sitting there with a stopwatch during Emilia Perez, clocking whether Zoe Saldana is onscreen longer than Karla Sofia Gascon. Variety is trying to quantify something that cannot be quantified. And if it isn’t, then the trade is giving credence to someone who is by promoting the idea that screen time matters when it shouldn’t and obviously doesn’t. Lead/supporting isn’t and has never been about a stopwatch…

Anyway, last night, I finished watching Ben Stiller’s tremendous limited series Escape at Dannemora, and I say “finished” because I watched the first half of the show when it came out back in 2018, and for some reason… I just didn’t watch the second half. But I visited an old friend and they were watching it on Netflix and it reminded me that I’d never gone back to it, so I did… and it was great.

I mean, obviously Benicio del Toro, Paul Dano, and Patricia Arquette are among our very best actors, but you know who stood out to me while watching the last four episodes — Eric Lange, who plays Arquette’s hapless husband.

Lange has long been one of my favorite character actors — check him out in the “Butt Plug” episode of B.J. Novak’s episode The Premise — but his work in Dannemora is on another level, and I hope he’s on the radar of execs at Marvel/DC/Lucasfilm.

Tonight you’ll read about Alignment, the hot screenplay that had Hollywood frothing at the mouth this past week before it sold for more than a million bucks, and why it’s going to attract top-tier talent both in front of and behind the camera.

There are also items about Charlize Theron joining Christopher Nolan’s new movie, the first new addition to Scream 7, the fate of Henry Cavill’s latest Guy Ritchie movie, and the return of Gerard Butler’s Big Dick Nick in the trailer for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

Paid subscribers can enter the Sneider-Verse to read more…

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.