A Short Story Sold for $1 Million: Hollywood's New Gold Rush Unpublished Fiction

Nicholas Binge earned $1 million from Netflix for a short story called "Understudy" that he never submitted to a magazine and may never appear in print. The deal is the sharpest data point yet in a quiet shift: Hollywood studios are paying seven figures for unpublished short fiction while book publishers largely avoid story collections.

Binge is best known as a novelist. Critics praised his thrillers "Ascension" and "Dissolution," and his forthcoming novel "White Smoke," written under a pseudonym, has already drawn Hollywood interest. He had not written short fiction in a long time before "Understudy" — and his reason is blunt.

"Most people are faced with a slew of rejections if they share short stories," Binge said in an interview. "It was only being prompted to specifically write a short story for the film and TV industry that made me come back to it."

What did the studios actually buy?

When Binge finished "Understudy," he did not send it to a literary magazine or a publisher. He shipped it straight to Hollywood. The story follows a struggling actor who unearths an age-old conspiracy after accepting a role in a Korean crime drama. It set off a bidding frenzy, and Netflix won — paying $1 million to develop it into a series.

Binge is not an isolated case.

• In 2024, Universal Studios purchased "Long Lost," a short story by the screenwriter Colin Bannon, and tapped Steven Spielberg to produce it.
• Last year, the screenwriter Harrison Query sold his short story "Code Black" to Amazon MGM Studios.
• Both deals were for seven-figure sums, according to Deadline.
• An unpublished short story by Ursula Wills is now the basis of the film "Wicker," starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard.

What does this change for writers?

The practical question is what the shift means for authors deciding where to send new work. The source points to an uncomfortable asymmetry: publishers generally do not race to acquire story collections these days, but studios appear eager to shell out for unpublished short works. A form once treated as a prestige loss-leader — the literary magazine story that pays little and reaches few — now has a buyer willing to pay seven figures before the public ever reads it.

There is a trade-off, and it sits at the center of the trend. Readers may never see "Understudy" on the page. The money is real; the publication is not guaranteed. Writers who once faced, in Binge's words, "a slew of rejections" from magazines now have an alternative route — one where the work functions as source material rather than as finished public writing.

A caveat belongs beside every promise here. The reported deals involve screenwriters and established novelists — Bannon, Query, Binge — writers already adjacent to the industry. Nothing in the reported deals shows unknown short-story writers commanding similar sums. Seven-figure sales remain exceptions, not a market rate.

Still, the pattern has three named buyers: Netflix, Universal, Amazon MGM. And it has a Spielberg attachment. For a literary form long declared commercially dead, that is a market signal the publishing side has not matched.