In what feels somewhat like a throwback to another era, an old-fashioned bidding war for a spec script has grabbed Hollywood’s attention. No stars are attached at this stage.
At the center of it all is Megan Park, the well-regarded Canadian filmmaker behind the equally well-regarded coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass.
Warner Bros., Sony, Universal as well as Apple, Amazon and Netflix are said to be among the bidders for Die Alive, which Park wrote and is attached to direct. LuckyChap, the company run by Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, and Josey McNamara, is attached to produce.
Described as having tones of Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy and Julia Roberts’ Step Mom, the story centers on a woman finding out that her much older boyfriend has a wife and kids when they unexpectedly show up on her doorstep. Despite a situation that puts the two women at odds with each other, the protagonist finds herself thrust into a role of taking care of the sassy kids.
Buyer sources have praised the script for being “legit funny.”
It is unclear if any frontrunners have emerged in the race for the script. But on one level, that could be a secondary situation. In an unusual move, the project is coming with financing already in the bank. The project has already been independently greenlit by FilmNation Entertainment, with a planned summer or fall 2026 shoot. So Die Alive is getting made whether a studio or streamer is involved or not.
Most spec script sales in Hollywood modern age, think the last 15 years or so, have come as a result of package sales, meaning the script comes wrapped with a name director and/or name actors and a producer. That’s a shift from the 1990s and the early 2000s, when scripts regularly sold on their own merit or just had producers attached to select studios. Sometimes, a script by a filmmaker such as M. Night Shyamalan, in his post-The Sixth Sense era, took the proceedings to even higher levels of secrecy and excitement.
With only two indie movies under her belt, Park is a relative filmmaking novice, although she is a film and TV veteran. She worked as an actress in her teens and twenties, was one of the stars of The Secret Life of an American Teenager, the ABC Family drama that ran from 2008 to 2013, and appeared in Hallmark Christmas movies.
She quietly transitioned to writing, then made her feature directorial bow with The Fallout, a school shooting drama that starred Jenna Ortega. It was an auspicious debut, with the film premiering at the 2021 edition of SXSW, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. Fallout then aired on HBO in 2022.
Park followed that up with My Old Ass, a coming-of-age comedy featuring a mushroom-inspired journey of meeting one’s older self that starred Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella. The movie, which premiered at Sundance in 2024, too, set off a round of accolades, among them earning Park a DGA award nomination for outstanding directorial achievement in first-time theatrical feature film, and a WGA Award and an Indie Spirit Award nomination for best screenplay.
Thusly, it’s Park’s talent and promise that is the draw in this bidding war. The script was sent into the movie companies using Embershot links. Embershot, a secure content-sharing app, was famously used in the bidding war for Zach Cregger’s Weapons.
Die Alive is Park’s third collaboration with LuckyChap, following My Old Ass and the Amazon series Sterling Point, which she created and directed and is currently in post-production.
Park, who will also exec produce Die Alive, is repped by CAA, TFC Management, and Johnson, Shapiro
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