Scott at 2011-06-30 20:36:24:

Not really. I predicted spec sales in the mid-60s this year, up about 20% over last year. Good chance they'll top that.

Many contributing factors. The biggest one I think is two years back, some of the studios made a conscious choice to work through projects in their development slates as a cost-cutting effort in an attempt to see how little money they could spend in terms of acquisitions and still make enough product to sustain their distribution network and fixed overhead costs. You also see this reflected in the reduction of movies they actually produced during the last year or so.

But they ran through their development slates. And found the bottom in terms of releases (January of this year was particularly bad). So it only made sense they would start buying specs again in more numbers.

Then, too, these things just run in cycles. That's been true for the entire quarter-century I've been following the spec and acquisition market.

What's that mean? Now is a good time to be writing a spec script. Not just in terms of trying to sell it, but also in getting representation, going up for open writing assignments, and so forth.