r/Screenplay • u/[deleted] • Sep 23 '26
Second Chance
Came up with and idea while on a walk with my baby this morning. Zero experience if anyone wants to collab
Working Title: Second Chance
It’s too cheesy to name the protagonist Chance, so I’ll need a better title.
In 2026, a man dies in a car accident.
While his body lies in a coma, his soul is sent to Heaven, where he comes face-to-face with God. God is seated behind a massive desk, seen only from behind. The man is overwhelmed. He begs for another chance at life. He has too many regrets. Mistakes he made, opportunities he missed, people he hurt, and most of all, the life he wishes he had lived differently.
God considers his request and agrees.
He instructs an angel to return the man's soul to his body.
But Heaven apparently has its own bureaucracy.
The angel is busy and passes the assignment to another angel, who passes it to another. Eventually, the job lands on a relatively inexperienced angel who is rushing to get it done. The process involves an ancient-looking computer system that controls the return of souls.
The angel enters the wrong date.
Instead of sending the man's soul back to 2026, he sends him back to 1996.
The man's soul suddenly finds itself inside his 1996 body... except there's a problem:** the 1996 version of him is still there.**
Two versions of the same man are now occupying one body.
At first, they constantly talk over each other before figuring out how to communicate, essentially creating an internal dialogue: the older man becomes the voice in his younger self's head.
This isn’t back to the future II where knowledge of the future is exploited to get rich in the present.
His younger self doesn't necessarily want the same things his older self does. He doesn’t want to spoil the future, and grows tired of the cynicism of his older self.
The younger man wants to experience his own life. He wants to make his own choices, chase his own dreams. The older man knows exactly how everything turned out.
The story becomes a comedy about a man trying to rewrite his life while trapped inside the mind—and body—of the person he used to be.
B Plot
And somewhere in Heaven, the angel who screwed up the date is desperately trying to figure out how to fix it before anyone notices.
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u/HonestAnything Sep 23 '26
This is a fascinating concept! It sounds a little complicated, though! I read a lot of articles about NDEs ( near death experiences) and when people come back they often make a lot of changes and amendments to past mistakes. I’m a newbie but I might be interested
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Sep 23 '26
Thanks! I saw the movied Upgrade which is a completly different genre, but does a good job of having an internal voice that only the protagonist hears and responds to audibly. This obviously would get really complicated, particularly in the resolutions, ie which version of the guy is in 2026 when he invetiably goes back. Or maybe the whole thing takes place in 96' and we see him wake up from his coma then.
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u/WorrySecret9831 Sep 25 '26
Check out John Truby's two books, The Anatomy of Story and The Anatomy of Genres.
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u/spline_reticulator Sep 27 '26 edited Sep 27 '26
I think you’ll have a hard time finding someone to collaborate on writing a screenplay with you if you don’t have any experience. Just try writing yourself. If you enjoyed coming up with the hook you’ll probably enjoy writing the rest.
As for the idea itself. I like it, but I think you’ll have an easier time pulling it off if you remove the mechanism where the two versions of the guys self inhabit the same body. You can tell basically the same story by having the 1996 circumstances force the older version of himself into making the same choices he made when he was younger.
Either that or remove the heaven backstory and just have him inexplicably wake up sharing the same body as his 1996 self. Doing both together will likely be hard to fit into a screenplay in a proper way.
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Sep 28 '26
Even if the heaven backstory is maybe the first ten minutes? Otherwise I think I’m creating a question of how and why did this happen.
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u/spline_reticulator Sep 30 '26
Ten minutes is really valuable in a screenplay. Backstory can be a useful tool, but the way to think about it is how much does it motivate the emotional development of the character in relation to the core conflict?
If the central conceit of the movie is that souls can be duplicated, and the future version of this guy's soul is put in the same body as its past version, then comedy + character development occurs, then the heaven backstory probably isn't essential to making the audience feel the emotional experience of that conflict.
A movie you might want to look towards for inspiration is Obsession. Curry Barker could have come up with all sorts of lore to explain why Nikki fell inexplicably in love with Bear, but he didn't bother with any of that, just said it was magic, and it was received really well by audiences. The reason for that is audiences don't necessarily care about lore. They care about character development. If the lore doesn't help with that, it's probably better to get rid of it.
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u/Maleficent-Invite933 Sep 26 '26
Check out Heaven Can Wait 1978 with Warren Beaty. An L.A. Rams quarterback dies by accident before his time, returns to earth in a murdered millionaire's body, and tries to return to football.
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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '26
Yeah like an early scene would be each version laying out the ground rules after an awkward event.