208 of 213 horror deal stories that named a source this quarter were about existing material.
Across June, July and August, ScreamWire tracked 341 deal stories; 213 said where the material came from. The other five covered three original projects — two spec scripts and a pitch. August’s marquee set-ups were a Leprechaun reboot at Lionsgate, a Stephen King short story at Prime Video and the creepypasta Jeff the Killer.
Corrected October 15, 2026. Published September 7, 2026. The headline originally set three original projects against 208 deal stories, which are different units; it now counts stories on both sides. Supporting details were corrected too: the Sweet Spot spec is by Nic Curcio and Kirby Gladstein, not Kirby Kelly; Curry Barker’s project was sold as a pitch, not a script; a Possession remake listed among August’s buys was a release-date report; Netflix tied Amazon MGM in July rather than leading it; nineteen stories were tagged as series orders, not nineteen orders; and the buyer table no longer shows month-over-month changes, consistent with the correction below.
101tracked deal stories in August
A tracked deal story is a story ScreamWire’s classifier flagged as deal activity, counted once on first sighting across 500+ trade and genre sources. Several stories can cover one project, and some cover a project already in motion (a casting, a trailer) rather than a sale. It measures reported activity, not money. ScreamWire publishes no dollar figure unless a source states it verbatim — and, as of this issue, no month-over-month volume change either. The note below explains why.
Where the IP came from
Ninety-eight stories about novels. Eighty-nine about revivals. Five about original scripts and a pitch.
Where it came from
Stories
Who bought it
Novels and books
98
Amazon MGM, Netflix, Warner Bros. and 13 others
Existing horror titles
89
Paramount, Netflix, Blumhouse and 6 others
Short stories
15
Amazon MGM, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros.
Public domain
10
Level 33, Viva Pictures, Sony Pictures
Podcast IP
6
SkyShowtime — the only named buyer
Original specs and pitches
5
Sweet Spot →Paramount Primal
Crush →20th Century
Untitled Curry Barker film →Blumhouse / Universal
June through August: 213 tracked deal stories declare a source. Every row counts stories, and a story carrying two tags counts in both, so the column sums above the base. The last row’s five stories cover three projects: two spec scripts and one pitch.
Three projects, one quarter: two spec scripts and one pitch. Every other tracked deal story that declared a source concerned material that already had an audience — a novel, a franchise, a short story, a podcast, or a piece of internet folklore nobody owns.
Sweet Spot · high-concept thriller spec by Nic Curcio and Kirby Gladstein · Paramount Primal · Aug 1
Crush · python survival thriller spec by John Fisher, reportedly based on a true story; Julius Avery directing · 20th Century · Jul 17
Untitled Curry Barker film · the director’s third, sold as an original pitch · Blumhouse Atomic Monster / Universal · Jun 19
Correction
Nº 001’s volume figure was wrong. We are retiring the metric, not restating it.
That issue led on deal volume falling 13% from June. Two things were wrong with the number. It shipped on July 30 and counted 29 days of July against a complete June. And the archive it counted has since been rebuilt to match the editions that actually published, which moved every historical month by a different amount — June by 26%, July by 23%, August by 42%.
There is a third problem, and it is the one that matters. The pipeline’s weekend runs sweep several days of backlog into a single pass, so how many of those land in a month moves the month’s total more than the market does. August had 16 such days. July had 7. Measured on the archive as it stood in July, August dealmaking rose 21%. Measured on the archive as it stands today, it fell 20%. Same months, opposite signs.
So Deal Flow Monthly no longer reports month-over-month volume. It reports what was bought, by whom, and where the material came from — the figures that hold whichever way the pipeline breathes.
The buyers
Netflix led August, as it did June. In July it tied with Amazon MGM.
August tracked deal stories naming that buyer, corporate aliases merged. Month-over-month changes are not shown, for the reason given in the correction above.
The structures
Nineteen stories were tagged series orders. Their headlines show at least six series ordered, greenlit or renewed.
The pipeline
Four of 81 staged deal stories were about a project actually rolling: one in twenty.
Click a bar to see those deals in the ledger below.