Topic

arc

A collection of 8 issues

Deconstructing Project Hail Mary: Were the Comps Right?

When Ryan Gosling was attached to Project Hail Mary, the development conversation around the film kept returning to the same reference points. Interstellar. The Martian. Arrival. Gravity. These were the comps being used to describe what the film was and who it was for. We have the structural data for

Deconstructing Project Hail Mary: What the Data Shows

Andy Weir published Project Hail Mary in May 2021. By 2022 Drew Goddard had a draft. When directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller first screened their assembly cut, it ran 3 hours and 45 minutes. They described it as embarrassing. They cut 135 minutes. The film that released in 2026

Deconstructing Sinners: Best Original Screenplay

After Sinners took home Best Original Screenplay, we mapped it through Quanten Arc. What the map shows is a script operating on its own internal logic, one that does not conform to the template most development tools are calibrated against. For starters, Sinners is not three acts. It is five.

Create Accidentals with Intention

There is a hesitation when a story is measured. Because storytelling is treated as art. And structure is treated as constraint. They don't exist on opposite ends. Music shows this: every composition exists within a system, but within that framework, musicians interpret.

Why Some Trilogies Work and Others Don't

We've always wondered why some trilogies work (Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings) and others fall apart after a strong first film. So We mapped the Dark Knight trilogy in Quanten Arc to see the pattern.

Coverage Is Opinion. Structure Is Signal: A Producer’s Guide to Narrative Data

Producers don’t have a script problem. They have a decision problem. Every slate meeting asks the same hard questions: •⁠ ⁠Which project gets the next rewrite budget? •⁠ ⁠Which script is ready to package? •⁠ ⁠Which one is promising, but structurally not there yet? Most teams answer with some mix of instinct,

The Three Things That Define Great Storytelling

There are three things that define the strength of a narrative, and only one of them is the story itself. The story is contextual. Only a human being can decide whether it is worth telling. But once you have that validation, the question becomes whether the structure and arc actually

Lessons from a Koi Farm

Whenever the world feels chaotic, I look for patterns in analogs and parallels that might give a sense of direction. There's so much talk about abundance and disruption in the content world these days that sometimes it's hard to make sense of it all. I recently