The logline is the hardest-working sentence in screenwriting. It's one or two sentences that must convey your entire movie — and it's the first thing every agent, manager, producer, and contest judge reads. Most loglines fail for the same handful of fixable reasons. Here's the formula, 20 examples, and how to sharpen yours.

The formula

Every working logline has four elements:

  1. Protagonist — who are we following? Give us something specific, not "a man."
  2. Goal — what do they want? The engine of the story.
  3. Stakes — what happens if they fail? Why should we care?
  4. The twist — what's different about this version? The irony, the complication, the hook.

Template: When [inciting incident], a [specific protagonist] must [goal] before [stakes] — but [twist/complication].

You won't always use every element explicitly, and you won't always use this exact syntax. But if a reader can't find all four in your logline, it's not done.

20 examples (annotated by genre)

Thriller / Horror

  1. A night-shift 911 operator takes a call from a girl who claims she's been kidnapped — then realizes the caller is describing her own house. (Protagonist: specific job. Twist: the caller's house is hers. Stakes: implied and immediate.)
  2. A blind veteran, living alone in a fortified cabin, realizes the home invaders outside can see — and he's the only one who knows the terrain in the dark. (Twist inverts the expected power dynamic.)
  3. During a city-wide blackout, an elevator repairman discovers one car that still has power — and the passenger inside who doesn't want to be found. (Contained, high-concept, producible.)

Drama

  1. After her estranged father's fishing boat sinks with him on it, a marine biologist returns to her coastal hometown and discovers the catch logs proving he wasn't the failure the town believed. (External mystery + internal grief; the logs are a great concrete engine.)
  2. A retired concert pianist with early dementia takes a job tuning pianos in strangers' homes, stealing one memory from each house before his own fade. (Specific, melancholic, deeply castable.)
  3. Two estranged brothers inherit their father's failing roadside motel and have one summer to turn a profit — or lose the last thing connecting them. (Clear goal, deadline, emotional stakes.)

Comedy

  1. A wedding planner who doesn't believe in marriage has to save her sister's big day while falling for the best man — a divorce lawyer. (Irony stacked on irony; the concept does the work.)
  2. A substitute teacher decides to teach his class how to survive middle school by faking his own death — but the kids take it as a challenge. (Escalation is built into the premise.)

Sci-Fi / Fantasy

  1. A memory-editing therapist discovers a client's erased memory contains proof of a crime — her own. (High concept in one sentence; the twist reframes everything.)
  2. On a generation ship where no one has seen Earth, a teenage archivist finds footage proving the ship never left orbit. (The reveal is the movie.)
  3. A woman who can taste emotions in food opens a restaurant where customers pay to feel something — until a health inspector arrives who tastes nothing at all. (Original, specific, full of story.)

Crime / Action

  1. A getaway driver with perfect memory takes one last job to pay for his sister's surgery — but the crew's plan requires him to forget the route. (The complication attacks the protagonist's defining trait.)
  2. A retired jewel thief comes back for one score: stealing back the evidence locker that holds 30 years of her crew's crimes. (Clean, castable, immediately visual.)

Romance

  1. A translator at the UN falls for a delegate whose language no one has been able to translate — including her. (The job IS the romantic obstacle. Elegant.)

Mystery

  1. A true-crime podcaster investigating a 20-year-old disappearance realizes her star witness has been describing her own childhood. (The investigator becomes the subject — classic engine.)
  2. A hotel night auditor notices the same guest checking in every night for a month — under a different name each time. (Contained, creepy, cheap to shoot.)

Adventure / Family

  1. A 12-year-old mapmaker discovers her town's official maps are wrong on purpose — and the real map shows a road nobody will talk about. (Kid protagonist, mystery engine, franchise-able.)

Western / Period

  1. A former hangman becomes the town's only doctor, and his first patient is the man he was hired to execute. (The premise is the conflict. Nothing wasted.)

Dramedy

  1. A grief counselor who hasn't processed her own husband's death gets assigned his doppelgänger as a client. (The complication is emotional, not mechanical — harder to write, richer when it works.)

Contained / Micro-budget

  1. A job interview conducted over video call turns into a hostage negotiation when the candidate realizes the interviewer is reading from a script — someone else's. (One location (a screen), maximum tension, nearly free to shoot.)

Study what the good ones share: a specific protagonist, a clear goal, real stakes, and a twist that makes this story different from every similar one.

The five logline killers

  1. Vagueness. "A man must confront his past" could describe 10,000 films. Which man, what past, what happens if he doesn't?
  2. No stakes. If nothing bad happens when the protagonist fails, there's no story — just a situation.
  3. Too much plot. A logline is not a synopsis. One twist, not three. Save the rest for the script.
  4. Theme instead of story. "A story about family and redemption" is what it's about, not what happens. Loglines need events.
  5. Rhetorical questions. "Will she survive?" Never end on a question — it reads as uncertainty, not intrigue. State the stakes.

How to sharpen yours: the tests

  • The stranger test. Say it to someone once. Can they repeat the movie back? If not, it's not sharp enough.
  • The "so what?" test. After every clause, ask "so what?" until you hit something that makes a stranger lean in.
  • The comp test. Can you name two films it's "like"? If you can't, the concept may be too diffuse — or genuinely original, which is rarer than writers think.
  • The poster test. Can you see the one-sheet? If the logline doesn't suggest an image, it may lack visual identity.

Where the logline goes

Everywhere, in order of importance: your query letter (it's the first line), contest submission forms, pitch meetings (it's your opening), the Black List hosting profile, and your own one-pager. One strong logline does more career work than any other single sentence you'll write.

More on putting it to use: how to write a screenplay query letter.

The bottom line

A logline is protagonist + goal + stakes + twist, in one or two sentences a stranger can repeat back. It's the smallest unit of your movie and the first thing anyone judges. Write twenty versions, test them on strangers, and don't stop until the sentence itself makes someone want to read the script.