100 logline examples from hit movies: can you guess them?
One sentence each, for 100 successful movies. Guess the film, reveal the answer, and notice how little a great logline needs to say.
How many of these 100 movies can you name?
Below are 100 logline examples from successful movies, one sentence each. See how many you can identify, and notice how short they are. Not all of them are perfect. Which ones would you adjust? Send me your versions.
Read the logline, make your guess, then reveal the answer and keep score.
An aging Mafia don has to hand his crime empire to the one son who never wanted it.
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The Godfather (1972)
When a diamond robbery turns into a bloodbath, the surviving thieves hide out in a warehouse and start hunting for the rat among them.
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Reservoir Dogs (1992)
A miserable suburban father blows up his comfortable life after he becomes infatuated with his teenage daughter’s best friend.
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American Beauty (1999)
A lonely, unstable veteran driving a night cab through 1970s New York decides to clean up the city’s filth himself, starting with a 12-year-old runaway’s pimp.
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Taxi Driver (1976)
A freed slave teams up with a German bounty hunter to rescue his wife from a sadistic Mississippi plantation owner.
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Django Unchained (2012)
In Vietnam, an Army captain travels upriver into Cambodia to kill a rogue colonel who rules a jungle tribe like a god.
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Apocalypse Now (1979)
In 1960s Mississippi, a young white writer risks everything to tell the stories of the Black maids who raised the town’s white children.
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The Help (2011)
A banker serving life for a murder he didn’t commit befriends the prison’s fixer and spends two decades quietly working his way out.
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The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
After a Las Vegas bachelor party, three hungover groomsmen wake up with no memory of the night and no groom, and have one day to find him.
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The Hangover (2009)
A hostage negotiator matches wits with a bank robber whose perfect heist seems to be falling apart, until it isn’t.
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Inside Man (2006)
A young FBI trainee needs the help of an imprisoned cannibal psychiatrist to catch a serial killer who skins his victims.
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The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Two hit men, a washed-up boxer, a mob boss’s wife and a pair of diner robbers collide in four interlocking Los Angeles crime stories.
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Pulp Fiction (1994)
A hacker learns that the world he lives in is a computer simulation, and that he may be the one person who can free humanity from the machines that run it.
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The Matrix (1999)
Laid up with a broken leg, a photographer spies on his neighbors through his window and becomes convinced one of them killed his wife.
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Rear Window (1954)
A dysfunctional family crams into a broken-down VW bus to get their young daughter to a children’s beauty pageant across the country.
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Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
After a friend’s suicide, seven college friends from the ’60s reunite for a weekend and confront what they’ve become.
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The Big Chill (1983)
A man who can’t form new memories hunts his wife’s killer using notes, Polaroids and tattoos.
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Memento (2000)
A thief who steals secrets from people’s dreams is hired to do the opposite: plant an idea in a CEO’s mind.
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Inception (2010)
When her 12-year-old daughter is possessed by a demon, a desperate mother turns to two priests to save her.
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The Exorcist (1973)
A lawyer who lies for a living is forced by his son’s birthday wish to tell the truth for 24 hours.
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Liar Liar (1997)
An insomniac office worker and a charismatic soap salesman start an underground fight club that grows into something far more dangerous.
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Fight Club (1999)
A small-town husband plagued by apocalyptic visions can’t tell whether to protect his family from a coming storm or from his own mind.
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Take Shelter (2011)
A nun becomes the spiritual adviser to a killer on death row and finds compassion for both him and his victims’ families.
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Dead Man Walking (1995)
A paralyzed Marine sent to an alien moon in a borrowed body must choose between his orders and the people he has come to love.
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Avatar (2009)
A young aristocrat engaged to a wealthy brute falls for a penniless artist aboard a doomed ocean liner.
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Titanic (1997)
During a preview tour of a theme park full of cloned dinosaurs, a power failure sets the animals loose.
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Jurassic Park (1993)
A lion cub tricked by his uncle into believing he caused his father’s death flees into exile, and must come back as an adult to claim his kingdom.
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The Lion King (1994)
When an 11-year-old girl moves to a new city, the emotions inside her head fight over how to help her cope.
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Inside Out (2015)
In a desert wasteland, a rebel warrior and a drifter help a tyrant’s captive wives escape across hostile territory.
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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
An actor famous for playing a superhero bets everything on a Broadway play to prove he’s a real artist.
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Birdman (2014)
In 1944 Spain, a young girl living with her brutal stepfather escapes into a dark fairy-tale world.
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Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
A teenage girl meets a man online, goes to his house, and turns the tables to expose him as a predator.
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Hard Candy (2005)
After a painful breakup, a man learns his ex had him erased from her memory, and decides to do the same.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
After surviving a freak accident, a troubled teenager is visited by a man in a rabbit suit who tells him the world will end in 28 days.
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Donnie Darko (2001)
A boy who sees dead people finds an ally in a child psychologist haunted by his own failure.
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The Sixth Sense (1999)
A grumpy widower ties thousands of balloons to his house to fly to South America, and finds a boy scout stowed away on his porch.
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Up (2009)
In a city powered by children’s screams, two monster co-workers discover a human girl has slipped into their world.
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Monsters, Inc. (2001)
When a great white shark starts killing swimmers at a summer resort, the police chief, a marine biologist and a grizzled fisherman go to sea to hunt it.
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Jaws (1975)
Centuries after humans abandoned Earth, a lonely trash-compacting robot follows the love of his life into space and ends up deciding humanity’s future.
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WALL-E (2008)
A prince cursed to live as a beast must win a young woman’s love before the last petal falls.
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Beauty and the Beast (1991)
A scrawny young Viking who wants to kill dragons befriends an injured one instead, and learns everything his village believes is wrong.
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How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
After D-Day, a squad of Army Rangers goes behind enemy lines to bring home a private whose three brothers have been killed.
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Saving Private Ryan (1998)
A teenager accidentally sent back to 1955 in a time-traveling car has to get his parents to fall in love, or he’ll never be born.
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Back to the Future (1985)
A cowboy doll is consumed by jealousy when a flashy new space-ranger toy replaces him as a boy’s favorite.
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Toy Story (1995)
With Earth dying, a former pilot leaves his children to lead a mission through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity.
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Interstellar (2014)
A Roman general betrayed by the emperor’s son is sold into slavery and fights his way through the arena to take his revenge.
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Gladiator (2000)
When his wife vanishes on their anniversary, a husband becomes the media’s prime suspect, and the truth is stranger than anyone suspects.
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Gone Girl (2014)
A wisecracking Marine recruit survives a brutal boot camp only to face the moral chaos of the war in Vietnam.
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Full Metal Jacket (1987)
A janitor at M.I.T. with a genius for math needs a therapist to help him stop running from his own life.
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Good Will Hunting (1997)
A death row guard comes to believe one of his prisoners, a gentle giant convicted of killing two girls, has a miraculous gift.
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The Green Mile (1999)
An undercover cop inside the Boston mob and a mobster inside the police department race to unmask each other.
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The Departed (2006)
A murdered man’s ghost, stuck between worlds, enlists a fake psychic to save the woman he loves from his killer.
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Ghost (1990)
In 1954, a U.S. Marshal investigates a patient’s disappearance from an island hospital for the criminally insane.
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Shutter Island (2010)
An insurance salesman discovers his entire life is a TV show broadcast around the clock.
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The Truman Show (1998)
A small-time Philadelphia boxer gets a one-in-a-million shot at the heavyweight title, and just wants to go the distance.
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Rocky (1976)
A con man who fakes insanity to get out of a prison work farm takes on the tyrannical nurse who runs his mental ward.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
A retired gunfighter turned pig farmer takes one last bounty job to support his children.
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Unforgiven (1992)
A waitress in her thirties talks a hard-bitten old trainer into turning her into a boxer.
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Million Dollar Baby (2004)
A rookie detective and a veteran a week from retirement hunt a killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his blueprint.
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Se7en (1995)
A tough Italian-American bouncer takes a job driving a refined Black concert pianist on a tour of the 1960s Deep South.
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Green Book (2018)
A New York cop visiting his estranged wife at her office Christmas party has to save her when terrorists seize the building.
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Die Hard (1988)
A space freighter crew answers a distress signal on a remote moon and brings back an alien that hunts them one by one.
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Alien (1979)
A hunter who finds two million dollars at the site of a drug deal gone wrong is pursued across Texas by a remorseless killer.
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No Country for Old Men (2007)
A cynical TV weatherman is forced to relive the same day in a small Pennsylvania town, over and over.
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Groundhog Day (1993)
A former assassin wakes from a four-year coma and sets out to kill every member of the team that left her for dead.
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Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
A meticulous crew of professional thieves draws the attention of an obsessive LAPD detective after a heist goes bloody.
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Heat (1995)
In 1950s Los Angeles, three very different cops unravel a massacre that leads to corruption inside their own department.
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L.A. Confidential (1997)
Sent to a concentration camp with his young son, a Jewish waiter uses humor and imagination to convince the boy it’s all a game.
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Life Is Beautiful (1997)
After a mysterious black monolith is found on the moon, astronauts and their supercomputer set out on a mission to Jupiter.
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Seven months after her daughter’s murder, a grieving mother rents three billboards to shame the police chief into finding the killer.
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Two rival stage magicians in Victorian London sacrifice everything to outdo each other’s greatest illusion.
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The Prestige (2006)
Four boys in 1959 Oregon hike out of town to find the body of a missing kid.
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Stand by Me (1986)
A struggling writer takes a job as the winter caretaker of an isolated hotel, where something in its past drives him to turn on his family.
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The Shining (1980)
A gambling expert runs a Las Vegas casino for the mob, until his volatile best friend and his hustler wife bring it all down.
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Casino (1995)
A cyborg assassin is sent back in time to kill a waitress whose unborn son will lead humanity against the machines.
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The Terminator (1984)
A secretary steals $40,000 from her boss’s client, goes on the run and checks into a lonely motel run by a young man devoted to his mother.
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Psycho (1960)
A private eye hired to catch a cheating husband stumbles into a conspiracy over who controls Los Angeles’s water.
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Chinatown (1974)
The only survivor of a deadly shootout on a ship tells police how five crooks who met in a lineup ended up working for a criminal no one has ever seen.
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The Usual Suspects (1995)
A woman held captive in a garden shed for seven years escapes with the five-year-old son who has never seen the outside world.
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Room (2015)
A research team in Antarctica is hunted by an alien that can take the shape of anyone it kills.
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The Thing (1982)
A New York ad executive mistaken for a government agent is chased across the country by foreign spies.
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North by Northwest (1959)
An ambitious young jazz drummer is pushed to the edge by a conservatory teacher who believes abuse makes greatness.
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Whiplash (2014)
Allied prisoners of war plan a mass breakout from a high-security German camp.
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The Great Escape (1963)
A reformed neo-Nazi gets out of prison and tries to stop his younger brother from following in his footsteps.
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American History X (1998)
Two strangers meet on a train in Europe and spend one night walking around Vienna, knowing they’ll probably never see each other again.
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Before Sunrise (1995)
A broke screenwriter becomes the kept man of a faded silent-film star who believes she’s about to make her comeback.
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Sunset Boulevard (1950)
On Christmas Eve, an angel shows a desperate small-town businessman what his town would have become if he had never been born.
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It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
A down-and-out detective who hates cartoons has to clear a cartoon rabbit accused of murder.
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Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Two ’90s teenagers are zapped into a black-and-white 1950s sitcom, where their influence starts turning the town to color.
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Pleasantville (1998)
A young programmer is invited to a reclusive tech CEO’s estate to test whether his humanoid robot is truly conscious.
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Ex Machina (2014)
After debris destroys their shuttle, two astronauts are left adrift in orbit with no way home.
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Gravity (2013)
A tax auditor begins hearing a narrator describe his life, and learns he’s a character in a novel whose author is about to kill him.
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Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
The ghosts of a recently deceased couple hire an obnoxious ‘bio-exorcist’ to scare off the family that has moved into their house.
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Beetlejuice (1988)
A young Black man meets his white girlfriend’s seemingly liberal parents for the weekend, and their hospitality turns sinister.
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Get Out (2017)
A young wife who moves into a Manhattan apartment building becomes convinced her strange neighbors want her unborn baby.
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Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
A family survives in silence on a farm overrun by blind creatures that hunt by sound.
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A Quiet Place (2018)
A burned child killer with a bladed glove stalks the teenagers of a small town in their dreams.
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
An eight-year-old accidentally left behind at Christmas defends his family’s house against two bumbling burglars.
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Home Alone (1990)
An uptight ad man trying to get home for Thanksgiving is stuck with a chatty shower-curtain-ring salesman.
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Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
A lonely boy finds a stranded alien in his backyard and helps him get home.
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
What these logline examples have in common
Almost every one fits in a single sentence of about 15 to 30 words, and most never name the main character. They describe who the protagonist is, what they want, and what stands in the way, and that’s enough for you to see the whole movie.
- A character defined by one trait. A lawyer who lies for a living. A cynical weatherman. A man who can’t form new memories.
- A clear goal or problem. Get home for Thanksgiving. Find the groom. Clean up the city.
- Built-in conflict or irony. The liar who can’t lie, the thief hired to plant an idea instead of stealing one, the shark at the summer resort.
- A hint of the genre and tone. You can tell Home Alone is a comedy and The Shining isn’t without being told.
The weaker ones run long, list too many characters, or describe the setup without the conflict. For the full method, read how to write a logline, and if you’re still looking for an idea, start with the 18 types of movie ideas.
Frequently asked questions
What is a logline?
A logline is a one-sentence summary of a movie or series that tells a reader who the protagonist is, what they want and what stands in their way.
How long should a logline be?
One sentence, usually around 25 to 30 words. Most of the logline examples on this page are shorter than that.
What makes a good logline?
A protagonist defined by a clear trait, a specific goal, a strong obstacle and a hint of irony or tone. If a reader can picture the movie from one sentence, it works.
Can you help me with my logline?
Yes. My logline and idea punch-up is $175: send me your logline, and in a 30-minute call I’ll tell you whether it works and how to sharpen it.