Netflix snaps up Amazon-set creature thriller Canopy

Netflix has pre-emptively bought Canopy, a horror-thriller creature-feature spec script by Brandon Feldman, in a six-figure deal reported by Deadline on 16 October.

A spec is a script written without a buyer attached and then taken out to market. Pre-emptive means the buyer moves early to close the sale before a full auction runs its course.

Verve organised the auction process. The agency also represents Feldman. The early bid ended the sale process in Netflix's favour.

The story centres on a botanist searching the uncharted Amazon canopy for a rare medical cure. After being offered as a sacrifice by a local village, the botanist must survive an undiscovered apex predator. The canopy is the forest roof, the dense world of branches and leaves high above the ground.

The sellers compared the script to Apex, Predator and The Shallows, according to Deadline. All three are survival stories built around a human hunted in an isolated place. That tells a new reader what kind of threat to expect.

Adam Goodman and Matt Skiena will produce through their company Dichotomy. They came aboard after Canopy began to generate buzz on The Black List website. The site allows unproduced screenplays to circulate among industry readers, and attention there often brings producers calling.

Goodman and Skiena picked up the project off that heat. No director or cast is attached. The sale covers the script alone.

Feldman co-wrote the romantic comedy Marriage Material with Ben Agron. That film, starring Emma Roberts and Matt Rife, is set up at BuzzFeed Studios and Capstone Pictures, which means those companies are developing it for production.

Feldman is represented by Verve, John Dunne at Independent Artists Media and Mitchel Ostrove at Yorn, Levine, Barnes, as noted by Deadline.

For viewers, this is the earliest stage. A script sale starts development. Production dates, casting and a release plan follow much later.