How Long Should a Screenplay Be? (page counts, and the one-page-one-minute myth)

A feature screenplay should be between 90 and 120 pages, and if you have no specific reason to be elsewhere, aim for 100 to 110. A short should be under 20 pages and is usually better under 10. Television varies entirely by format, so find the specific show length you are writing for.

The number behind all of this is the one-page-one-minute convention: a page of correctly formatted screenplay runs about a minute of screen time. It is roughly true, it is useful, and it fails in predictable ways that are worth understanding.

Why a page equals a minute at all

Only because screenplay formatting is fixed.

Courier 12 point, one inch margins, dialogue indented to specific measurements, roughly 55 lines to a page. Those constraints, covered in the format post, are not aesthetic conservatism. They exist so that a page is a standard unit of measurement, and a stack of pages is a reliable estimate of running time and therefore of shooting days and therefore of money.

Change the font and you have not made your script shorter. You have made it unmeasurable, which is worse, and everyone can tell instantly.

Where the rule breaks

The convention was calibrated on dialogue-driven drama, and that is where it holds well.

Dialogue runs slower than a page a minute. A page of two people talking, with the white space that dialogue formatting creates, often plays at 45 seconds. Rapid overlapping comedy can be faster still.

Action runs much slower than the page suggests. This is the big one. "The car chase continues through the market" is nine words and could be four minutes of screen time. A page of dense action description might play as three minutes or as twenty seconds, and there is no way to tell from the page.

Silence is invisible on the page. A scene of someone sitting alone, written in two lines, might run ninety seconds in the cut. Slow, contemplative cinema is systematically under-counted by page count, sometimes by a factor of two.

So: for a talky drama, page count is a decent predictor. For an action film, a horror film, or anything with sustained wordless sequences, it is a rough proxy at best. Experienced first ADs know this, which is why they time scenes themselves rather than trusting the page count, and it is why estimating how long a scene takes to shoot is a separate skill from counting pages.

The real numbers

Features. 90 to 120 is the accepted range.

• Under 90 reads as thin and, at the very low end, invites the question of whether this is really a feature.
• 100 to 110 is the comfortable center and where most contemporary spec scripts sit.
• Over 120 needs a reason. Epics, period pieces and ensemble dramas get more latitude. A first-time writer's 140-page script is usually read as a writer who cannot cut, whether or not that is fair.
• Comedy trends shorter, around 90 to 100. Drama sits in the middle. Studio action often runs longer because of the action-page problem above.

Shorts. Under 20 pages, and pay attention to festivals here. Many have hard caps at 15 or 20 minutes, and a large number of programmers will tell you privately that a strong 8-minute film is dramatically easier to program than a strong 18-minute one, because it fits into more blocks. If your short is 22 pages, the honest question is whether it is a short at all.

Television. Ignore general advice entirely and match the format:

• Half-hour comedy: roughly 22 to 35 pages depending on whether it is multi-camera or single-camera.
• Hour drama: roughly 45 to 65 pages.
• Streaming has loosened both considerably, which means the only reliable method is to read three recent scripts from the show or the slot you are aiming at.

What to do when it is too long

Almost always the answer is not to trim lines evenly across the script.

Cut scenes, not sentences. Find scenes whose only function is to convey one piece of information, and move that information into a scene that is doing something else. Two half-scenes rarely beat one whole one.

Look at your locations. A scene set somewhere that appears nowhere else costs a company move for a single page. Combining it into an existing location saves both pages and days.

Enter later, leave earlier. Covered in the dialogue post, and it typically recovers five to ten pages across a feature with no loss.

Find the subplot you would defend least. Every long script has one. Removing it entirely is usually cleaner than shrinking it, because a compressed subplot reads as unfinished.

Check your action blocks. Six-line paragraphs can often become three without losing anything but adjectives.

What to do when it is too short

A short feature is a rarer problem and usually means something structural rather than a shortage of words.

Do not pad. Adding description or extending conversations produces a slack version of the same film. Look instead for whether a character has no life outside the plot, whether the antagonist is present enough to be a real force, or whether an entire sequence has been summarized where it should have been dramatized.

If you genuinely have an 80-page story, consider whether it is a very good 80-page film. Some are, particularly in horror and comedy. Consider also whether it is a short that has been inflated.

Measure honestly

Two habits worth having:

Read the whole script aloud at performance pace and time it. Boring, unavoidable, and the only accurate measure you will get before a table read. Compare the result to your page count and you will learn your own ratio, which is more useful than the general rule.

Time your action sequences specifically. Act them out or storyboard them roughly. This is where the page count lies to you most.

Once you know that your own scripts run at, say, 55 seconds a page, you can plan with a real number instead of a folk one.

Next

You know how long it should be and roughly what is in it. Next: the first time other people say it out loud, and how to run that day so you learn something from it.