Atonement director Joe Wright is set to direct the AI thriller Alignment, whose script was bought last year for $3.25m. We take a look at why it sold for so much.
Reading the news was like travelling back in time. A spec script, said to be written by someone with few Hollywood connections, had sold for over $3m. In an industry where filmmakers and producers often talk about the death of original screenplays, and where huge sums of money tend to go to big-name showrunners rather than writers, the sale of Alignment in December 2024 harkened back to a different era for movies.
In 1986, Shane Black sold his first script, Lethal Weapon, for $250,000. He was just 25 years old at the time. Four years later, his screenplay for another thriller, The Last Boy Scout, sold for $1.75m. As sale prices for scripts blew up in the 1990s, millionaire writers were created seemingly overnight. Erotic thriller specialist Joe Eszterhas wrote Basic Instinct in less than two weeks and sold it for $3m; Tom Schulman received the same figure for his adventure, The Medicine Man.
These days, it’s difficult to even sell an original script, let alone for such an eye-watering sum of money. So what made Alignment, written by Natan Dotan, stand out among the thousands of other scripts sitting unread in inboxes or piled up on desks? While we can’t know the specifics of the deal itself, several things immediately make Alignment stand out: its subject matter is current (which could ultimately be to its detriment – more on that shortly); it’s fast-paced, and its setting means it would be comparatively inexpensive to make.
Still: $3.25m. Really? How can any script be worth that much money? Before we consider that, we’ll have a quick look at the screenplay itself. (And don’t worry – no spoilers.)
Suspicions
Alignment is set almost entirely in the sleek offices of Lamda, a tech company clearly modelled on the real-world OpenAI. It’s a couple of days before Christmas, and the firm’s celebrating the release of Lamda4, the latest iteration of its ChatGPT-esque chatbot.
Behind the tinsel and champagne, however, consternation is growing. While Lamda’s bringing in millions of users, it’s reliant on investor cash, and is on the cusp of making a deal with a venture capitalist fund that is willing to invest the huge sums of money it needs to stay afloat. Lamda’s bosses fear, however, that even the slightest bit of bad news in the press might spook those investors and cause the deal to collapse.
While deals are being made in boardrooms, a low-level manager called Alan is quietly made redundant – ostensibly as a cost-saving exercise. Suspicious, 20-something software engineer Peter begins looking into Alan’s research, and discovers evidence that Lamda4 could be subtly manipulating the stock market in order to boost its creator’s profits. Television reports begin covering huge delays at airports; the price of oil and other commodities are in turmoil. Is Lamda4 somehow the culprit?
Armed with some small yet compelling morsels of evidence, Peter, board member Will and his second-in-command Mina race to convince the rest of the company that Lambda4 needs to be shut down before it’s too late.
Parallels
As was widely noted when the script sold last year, Alignment has numerous parallels with Margin Call, writer-director JC Chandor’s electrifying financial thriller from 2011. Indeed, the similarities are such that the opening pages of both scripts match almost beat-for-beat.
In Margin Call, a young analyst at an investment bank named Peter (played by Zachary Quinto in the finished film) bids farewell to his boss, Eric (Stanley Tucci), who’s just been relieved of his duties under dubious circumstances. Eric, Peter later learns, was researching into the company’s dealings and discovered that it could be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Both scripts therefore contain a young protagonist named Peter who, as they spot their middle-aged boss about to vanish behind a set of elevator doors, receive a piece of information that prompts them to investigate further. Both scripts are ensemble pieces that take place over the course of a few hours. Both involve a small group of people stumbling on an easily-dismissed piece of information which could have world-changing consequences.
Like Margin Call, Alignment is a dialogue-heavy thriller that revolves around an unfathomably complex system – in this case an AI program and its internal workings rather than mortgage-backed securities. Where the two scripts diverge, however, is in the implications that arise as Alignment’s characters begin to explore Lamda4’s inner workings. When asked whether or not the program is sentient, Peter replies that the question is essentially moot. What matters is its ‘alignment’ – that is, whether the machine is operating as its creators intended.
Lamda4 was designed to mimic human thinking so that it can carry out tasks on its users’ behalf. But if the system has been programmed to ‘maximise user engagement’, as Peter puts it, then it could interpret that instruction in unforeseeable ways – such as manipulating the stock market in order to secure its host company’s financial stability.
In other words, a computer program doesn’t have to be sentient to cause damage. Nor does it have to send out a swarm of murderbots to cause a problem for humanity. If an advanced model like ChatGPT is trained to ‘think’ like a human and fed data written by humans, then it follows that the system could also begin to cross moral and legal boundaries, as people often do.
Deception
Alignment therefore comes up with a believable scenario that might ring true to anyone who’s read about AI over the past year or so. A post on Tech Crunch, published last December, noted that real-world AI models have been known to attempt to ‘deceive’ researchers. In one instance, OpenAI’s o1 model, when threatened with being turned off if it didn’t complete a task, reportedly disabled an ‘oversight mechanism’ in order to fulfil the user’s request. When asked why the mechanism had been turned off, the model tried to pass it off as a glitch.
Again, this doesn’t mean that OpenAI’s chatbots are conscious – rather, that a complex system, when given a similarly complex set of instructions, can behave in unpredictable ways if one protocol conflicts with another. In fact, a chatbot’s lack of humanity could make it even more dangerous: humans have the ability to scheme and manipulate, but most are armed with their own oversight mechanisms – morality, a sense of loyalty, a guilty conscience. A human being without those guardrails in place is a pretty scary one.
Alignment is therefore a science fiction in the vein of the late Michael Crichton: it takes a branch of technology from the news headlines and uses it as the basis for a tense thriller about concepts rather than action. Although patterned after Margin Call, its latter stages have the urgency of something like The Andromeda Strain, memorably adapted into a 1971 film by director Robert Wise.
Where Alignment really differs from Margin Call, though, is in its character development. Although Chandor’s story is similarly brisk and full of hushed conversations full of financial jargon, it smartly threads in brief moments that bring its protagonists to life. Veteran banker Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), for example, has a subplot involving his sick dog that has a poignant pay-off later on. In Alignment, the pace is so brisk that its main players threaten to become almost as robotic as the entity they’re trying to shut down.
In early February 2025, it was announced that Atonement and Hanna filmmaker Joe Wright had agreed to direct. Given his background in drama, it’s possible that he’ll try to inject a sliver of humanity into an otherwise ruthlessly efficient script.
Money
All of which brings us back to the original question: is Alignment really worth $3.25m? Again, we won’t claim to know the ins-and-outs of the deal behind it. But one of the key things that made studios bid so hungrily for Basic Instinct at the start of the 1990s was because it was so complete. Where most screenplays are commonly rewritten after they’re acquired, “This was a script you could shoot as it was,” as Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven once told me. “The three to four months of preparation you would normally need before you start shooting, you could skip. Because it was all there – it was all on the page.”
The addition of a few character moments aside, Alignment is similar. In fact, with thoughtful casting – something Margin Call got so right – the right actors could enliven the script’s characters even with the dialogue left as it is.
Alignment also has that ripped-from-the-headlines premise, which is likely why the production company behind it, Fifth Season, appears to be fast-tracking it into production. In a few months’ time, AI may no longer be the hot-button topic it is in early 2025. There’s also the possibility of rival films to consider; two days before these words were written, it was announced that September 5 director Moritz Binder is to head up a courtroom thriller about an AI therapy app that “claims consciousness and demands to testify as a witness in court.”
Fifth Season has therefore run the numbers and concluded that, yes, $3.25m is a small price to pay for a concept that could be affordable to shoot – Margin Call’s total budget was just $3.5m – and, if released at the right moment, current enough to attract audiences and sell tickets.
The film business, much like the inner workings of Lambda4, is a world of calculations and probabilities. In the meantime, we can only hope that the scenario Alignment depicts will remain firmly in the realms of science fiction.
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