What is the trend today in Hollywood?
I'm standing smack-dab in the middle of the town and I haven't a clue. As in algebra, however, let's say that there is a trend and let's call that trend "X."
It's too late to get in on that trend for the simple reason that it is the trend. If it's the trend today, it had to be in the works at least a year ago, and much more likely two or three or more years ago. To cash in on that trend by writing a script geared to it is to guarantee that, by the time you go to market with the script, it's already old news, stale and pale and so last year.
During a strike years ago, since no one could market to the studios, a huge pile of spec scripts were written by writers, some of them very well established, with the idea of selling them after the strike. When the strike finally was settled, there was a flood of cop-buddy action-melodramas, which happened to appear to be the trend at the time the strike started. Two writers well known to me and to the community, however, a husand-wife writing team, wrote a spec script representing the kind of movie nobody was making at the time: a rich period piece, a historical costume drama. It stood out above the rash of police thrillers. It caught the imagination and attention of studios and producers largely because it was not merely another cop action-melodrama. It promptly sold for a substantial price. In the meantime, dozens, indeed scores, perhaps hundreds of cop thrillers went into the shredder.
Perhaps 20 years ago, I advised my screenwriting seminar commandos at UCLA not to outsmart themselves by trying to figure out the latest trend. I suggested they write the dumbest script they could think of. At that time nobody was buying or making Westerns, and so I advised them to write a Western. When it was ready, it would be the only such item and, therefore, attract attention.
One of the students took me up on this and wrote a hilarious comedy set in the American West after the Civil War. Not a gunslinger but a painter is making his way west, hauling a wagon of artist's supplies: canvases, tubes of pigment, linseed oil and turpentine, brushes, a pallet and the like. Towns are springing up along the landscape and each town has a brand-new saloon under construction, and every saloon needs a naked lady painted above the bar. Our protagonist visits town after town, paints a naked lady to be hung above the bar and in exchange receives room and board from the owner, in addition to receiving provisions so that he can continue his journey west.
At one town the mayor is a Victorian-style prude, who doesn't think there should be pictures of naked ladies in the saloon or anywhere else. He is especially disturbed by the particular portrait of a naked lady above the bar, as she looks terribly similar to his own wife, right down to a wart in a particularly intimate place; one would have to know her very well indeed to know about that particular aspect of her body.
