Across June, July and August, ScreamWire tracked 341 deal stories. Of the 213 that say where the material came from, 208 were adaptations, remakes or revivals. August’s marquee buys were a Possession remake, a Leprechaun reboot, a Stephen King short story and a creepypasta.
A tracked deal story is one deal, counted once, on first sighting across 500+ trade and genre sources. 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.
June through August: 213 tracked deal stories declare a source. The top five rows count deal stories, and a story carrying two tags counts in both, so the column sums above the base. The specs row counts distinct projects — five stories, three films.
Three projects, one quarter. Every other tracked deal that declared an origin was built on something that already had an audience — a novel, a franchise, a short story, a podcast, or a piece of internet folklore nobody owns.
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.
August tracked deal stories naming that buyer, corporate aliases merged. The July figures behind these deltas differ from the ones printed in Nº 001, for the reason given in the correction above.