Cinema Cemetery

A story I worked on for 6 years became a Chinese blockbuster

Disclaimer:

The following is my own opinion and not the opinion of any studios I have worked for in the past or will work for in the future. All specific information comes courtesy of publicly accessible articles, please see the bibliography for more information.

I’ve been working on a story since the year 2013. I started the story during a terrible time in my life and continued working on it as things continued to get worse for me. The process was an escape for me, a deeply personal tale of a family struggling to survive on a dying planet. The working title was one of the first phrases I ever spoke as a toddler (or so I’ve been told). Over the years the story only grew more expansive, I had built an entire sandbox to play in. I outlined two sequels and adapted a part of the first film into a script for a proof of concept short film. My goal was to make the short film so I would have some compelling visuals to show off when pitching the features! 

That never happened.

I tried to pitch the short to an animation studio who will go unnamed. They were interested but not interested enough to move beyond meetings. I learned a lot from the experience. I wanted to assemble a team to get it made but I’m terrible at asking for help and had nothing really to offer as an incentive for anyone who would have even wanted to help out. So I sat on the whole thing, improving the story, the characters, the world...bit by bit.

Jump cut to February of 2019, the news of a new Chinese blockbuster called “The Wandering Earth” was shattering local box office records at the time. I looked into it, fascinated. Here’s a portion of the synopsis:

“The Wandering Earth tells the story of a distant future in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and devour the Earth, prompting mankind to make an audacious attempt to save planet. The multi-generational heroes build ten-thousand stellar engines in an effort to propel Planet Earth out the solar system, in the hope of finding a new celestial home.” (1)

Reading this for the first time felt like being punched in the gut. The more I read about the movie, the more similar it sounded to my long running project. Reading the synopsis for The Wandering Earth was the same as reading a synopsis of the story I had been working on for years; I was devastated. Now, to be clear, I don’t think my idea had been stolen. I had been pretty secretive about the story and really don’t think it somehow made its way to China. The studio that I had pitched at had no Chinese ties and I am really doubtful that anything mean-spirited happened in relation to that experience.

It was just one big disappointing coincidence. After some tea, a long walk, and a discussion with my wife, I felt a bit better...but man did I go through a series of strong emotions.

The Wandering Earth is old news by the time this video is coming out, but the shockwave it left in my life is ongoing. I learned 4 big lessons from this experience and I think they’re pretty valuable so I’m going to go through them point by point and then, just for fun, I’ll prove that my situation isn’t completely unique.

Lesson 1:

Don’t hinge stories around settings, build them around characters and relatable emotional journeys. This one is just a fundamental of writing and it’s absolutely saving my script as I retool it. I have a lot of work to do in order to avoid comparisons to The Wandering Earth, but the story isn’t about the planetary attempts at avoiding global destruction by building giant thrusters all over the surface of the celestial sphere... That’s the setting in which my characters found themselves. My story is about the members of the family, how they deal with the threat, their relationship to each other, and how those relationships are tested. Not only is this relatable to the audience (thus grounding whatever situation surrounds them no matter how ridiculous) but it also allows me to alter the details of the situation without crippling the heart of my story.

I know so many people writing novels or movies that are super high concept with zero interesting characters. It’s an easy mistake to make, you get so excited about the world in which your story takes place that you start mistaking that world FOR the story.

Write your characters first, make the audience care, THEN plop those characters into a sandbox of your own making and see what happens!

Lesson 2: 

Take delight in the success of others, don’t become bitter. Bitter people make weak movies.

What The Wandering Earth showed me is that my ideas are good and have the potential to be extremely profitable. If I ever manage to get investors and make my own films, I feel confident that my concepts are interesting enough to draw a crowd.

Lesson 3:

Ask. For. Help. I need to get over my mixture of pride and fear and just ask for help. 

If people don’t want to help a person with no money make a short for no money, then THEY should be allowed to make that choice. I shouldn’t be making that choice for them. If they believe enough in my ideas that they want to help make them better, I should give them that opportunity. I hate asking people for things, I don’t like receiving gifts even from people I love, and I hate the idea that someone would ever think that I was taking advantage of their skills...not giving them what they’re worth. These are things I just need to buckle up and get over. If I have money to pay people then I have money to pay people, if I don’t then I don’t. That has to be good enough for me.

Lesson 4:

Don’t get precious.

Write a screenplay until it’s finished but don’t drag your feet. If you have a good idea, it doesn’t exist in isolation. Several other people on the planet have had the same idea you’ve just had, it’s a race to the finish line once you commit to a project. If it’s taking you far too long to finish something, it might not be because it needs more work. For me, I was using the process of writing to escape the issues I was struggling through. My goal wasn’t primarily to make it into something until I started pitching it...I’ll never make that mistake again.

And now, for your reading pleasure, a list of shockingly similar movies released in shockingly similar time-frame:

  • Armageddon and Deep Impact

  • Babe and Gordy

  • The Prestige and The Illusionist

  • Chasing Liberty and First Daughter

  • Volcano and Dante’s Peak

  • Antz and A Bugs Life

  • Turner & Hooch and K-9

  • Olympus has Fallen and White House Down

  • Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached

  • Shark Tale and Finding Nemo

  • Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman

  • Red Planet and Mission to Mars

  • Top Gun and Iron Eagle

  • Capote and Infamous

  • Stealing Harvard and Orange County

  • Powder and Phenomenon

  • Tombstone and Wyatt Earp

  • The Wild and Madagascar

  • Striptease and Showgirls

  • The Truman Show and EDtv

  • The Cave and The Descent

  • Cop Out and The Other Guys

  • After Earth and Oblivion

  • Marguerite and Florence Foster Jenkins

  • Gone in 60 Seconds and The Fast & Furious

  • Fyre and Fyre Fraud

  • Freddy vs Jason and Alien vs Predator

  • Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War

  • Emperor’s New Groove and The Road to El Dorado

  • The Thomas Crown Affair and Entrapment

  • Megamind and Despicable Me

  • Bicentennial Man and AI:Artificial Intelligence

  • Observe & Report and Paul Blart Mall Cop

  • Scary Movie vs. Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th

This has been Cinema Cemetery, digging six feet deeper into film and culture.

-Josh Evans