Tubi and the Black List Want to Read Your Sci-Fi Screenplay

With all the streaming news about price increases and content jumping around, here’s something both cool and unusual: Fox’s ad-supported free SVOD service, Tubi, is teaming up with screenwriting resource the Black List to select five genre scripts for development, production, and distribution.

The partnership is dubbed the “To Be Commissioned” Initiative; according to a Tubi press release, it’s aimed at both emerging and established writers. There are some specifications as to what they’re looking for: the scripts must “speak to young, diverse audiences,” and be categorized as either sci-fi, faith, comedy, or romance, plus a “wild card” that might stray beyond those four genres.

The scripts will be picked by a Tubi committee, and the Black List—famed for championing an annual round-up of Hollywood’s most promising but not-yet-produced scripts—will executive-produce the five films. The hope is that the Tubi Original Movies will start arriving in 2025; that’s huge for whoever gets their script produced because Tubi is the most-watched free streaming service in the U.S.

You can read the fine print on the submission site, but you have to be 18 to enter and your script must be in English; the submission window closes March 15, 2024. There is a financial catch—you have to have a Black List account, which costs writers $30 a month to host their scripts; they can also opt into script evaluations, which cost $70-100—but as part of the To Be Commissioned initiative, “Tubi will also be providing fee waivers for one evaluation and one month of hosting for 200 writers from traditionally underrepresented communities.”

With all the streaming news about price increases and content jumping around, here’s something both cool and unusual: Fox’s ad-supported free SVOD service, Tubi, is teaming up with screenwriting resource the Black List to select five genre scripts for development, production, and distribution.

The partnership is dubbed the “To Be Commissioned” Initiative; according to a Tubi press release, it’s aimed at both emerging and established writers. There are some specifications as to what they’re looking for: the scripts must “speak to young, diverse audiences,” and be categorized as either sci-fi, faith, comedy, or romance, plus a “wild card” that might stray beyond those four genres.

The scripts will be picked by a Tubi committee, and the Black List—famed for championing an annual round-up of Hollywood’s most promising but not-yet-produced scripts—will executive-produce the five films. The hope is that the Tubi Original Movies will start arriving in 2025; that’s huge for whoever gets their script produced because Tubi is the most-watched free streaming service in the U.S.

You can read the fine print on the submission site, but you have to be 18 to enter and your script must be in English; the submission window closes March 15, 2024. There is a financial catch—you have to have a Black List account, which costs writers $30 a month to host their scripts; they can also opt into script evaluations, which cost $70-100—but as part of the To Be Commissioned initiative, “Tubi will also be providing fee waivers for one evaluation and one month of hosting for 200 writers from traditionally underrepresented communities.”