Hi Script Guy,
I'm afraid you've created lots of obstacles for yourself. The short answer is, you'd be much better served if you rewrote your screenplay to be about your own characters set in your own story world.
Here are the issues I see:
- The copyright for The Usual Suspects was owned by PolyGram, which got bought by Universal Studios (which is being sold as we speak by General Electric to Comcast). In any case, there is only one corporate entity to which you could sell your screenplay. This is like trying to sell a car but only being able to approach one potential buyer. If you changed your screenplay enough to avoid copyright infringement, suddenly the list of potential buyers opens up a lot.
- The Usual Suspects was a huge critical success, but only a modest financial success. Studios rarely make sequels to movies that weren't huge financial successes at the best of times, and that is more true these days than ever.
- A tense crime thriller is usually between 90 and 100 pages. The fact that your screenplay is 130 pages doesn't bode well for a couple of reasons. The first is obvious - it seems to fall outside the typical length for its genre, which indicates that you might not be familiar with the semiotics of the genre and/or you might not have written a "tight" screenplay. The second might be less obvious: a cinema can run a 90-minute movie 8 times in a 12 hour window, but can only run a 130-minute movie 5 times in that same timeframe.
- The first Usual Suspects cost about US$6 million. To pay for a US$100 million dollar sequel, Universal would have to attach so many high-marquee-value names and add so much spectacle to the movie that you wouldn't recognize your script by the time they were done. The first thing they would do, by the way, is fire you from the project.
I'm sorry if this all seems harsh, but I'm just trying to show that you can make things very much easier on yourself if you change your script enough to make it entirely your own creation. Invent your own mysterious mastermind and your own team of criminals to be manipulated by him. If nothing else, you'll be demonstrating that you are able to invent characters and stories that are entirely your own, which would serve you well if you wanted to be hired for other writing assignments.
I hope that helps,
Steve
