Final Draft Blog

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How to Sell a Screenplay

March 20, 2025

Selling a screenplay is the ultimate goal for every screenwriter. The general process itself seems simple enough to most at first glance. You write a screenplay. You get that screenplay into the hands of decision-makers in Hollywood. They buy your sc...

Benjamin Kramer: How Big Break Fueled His Success

March 20, 2025

The goal of Final Draft’s Big Break Screenwriting Contest has always been to boost the screenwriting career of winners and finalists. For writer Benjamin Kramer, winning the 2021 Big Break Action/Adventure category was just the push he needed to not ...

Write On: Peter Katz - Manager & Producer, Story Driven

March 19, 2025

“Sameness is terrible. Your goal is to cut through it. If you have a unique perspective, you’re going to take vampires or anything that everybody thinks they know and do it in a way that’s really exciting and gets people really pumped up about it. Th...

The A24 Brand: What ‘Opus’ Teaches Us About Today’s Indie Films

March 19, 2025

About 30 years ago, something changed in Hollywood. Big blockbuster movies by top-notch filmmakers were no longer the clear-cut favorites to win Academy Awards. Small films were breaking through the surface and gaining appeal among a wide audience. S...

Lessons for Screenwriters from SXSW

March 18, 2025

The South by Southwest Conference & Festival, held annually in Austin, TX, crackles with a creative energy no other film festival can match, offering screenwriters lessons from its wildly diverse slate. While studios were certainly present at the...

How ‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Premiere Surprised Fans

March 17, 2025

The premiere episode of the fourth and final season of The Righteous Gemstones has a lot of people talking. The episode, titled simply “Prelude,” doesn’t feature any of the series’ regular cast. It also takes place during the Civil War, and not durin...

‘Mickey 17’ and writing unique Science Fiction

March 14, 2025

In the first few scenes of Mickey 17, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) through voice over explains the wild and strange reality of the world the audience is about to experience for the next 2+ hours. He shares how he became an “Expendable,” someone w...

Embracing Failure Is a Screenwriter’s Greatest Tool

March 13, 2025

One of the most stressful parts of being a creative is dealing with failure. What if the transition between act two and act three doesn’t work? What if your secondary character’s story arc doesn’t make sense? Even worse – what if your protagonist’s s...