Following up on this post yesterday, I did a little digging and found this on UGO.com. As far as I can tell, this list is from 2004, so there will have been some changes, but their list is as follows:

#11: Gerald Di Pego (Phenomenon, Message in a Bottle)
David Ayer (U-571, Training Day, The Fast and the Furious)
Scott Rosenberg (Con Air, High Fidelity, Kangaroo Jack)

#10: Patrick Sheane Duncan (Courage Under Fire, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Nick of Time)

#9: David Benioff (Troy, The Kite Runner, X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

#8: Randall Wallace (Braveheart, Pearl Harbor)

#7: Dale Launer (My Cousin Vinny, Ruthless People, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels)

#6: William Davies (Ghost in the Machine, Twins)

#5: Ron Bass (Rain Man, Sleeping with the Enemy, The Joy Luck Club, My Best Friend’s Wedding)

#4: Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, The Music Box)

#3: David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spiderman, Panic Room)

#2: Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boyscout, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang)

#1: M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs)

As someone mentioned in a comment, you’d have to include Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio (Aladdin, The Mask of Zorro, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean I, II, and III, National Treasure) on this list.

UPDATE: In comments, Todd notes the deal for “The Zookeeper” which sold recently for $2M against $3M. Actually, there seems to be something of a trend around animal movies. Alcon just picked up “Cryptozoo Crew” for Warner Bros. which follows the sale last year of the comedy spec “Cryptozoologists to New Line. Then there’s “Monster Zoo” which sold to Paramount in March. And “Animal Control”, which originally sold to Fox way back in 2002, is still in active development. I think much of this interest is tied to the incredible success of Night at the Museum (2007) which grossed over $570M worldwide and spawned a sequel Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian.

This is a perfect example of how Hwood operates with the ‘similar but different’ mentality: If a movie concept, like the one in Night at the Museum, proves successful, then look for material that is similar to it, but different enough to justify producing a new movie.