Feature film beat sheet · 2005
Save the Cat!
Blake Snyder · Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
Snyder’s beat sheet is not a mythic journey — it is a commercial feature’s skeleton, with page numbers. Opening image, catalyst, break into two, midpoint, all is lost, finale: the language of rooms that greenlight movies. Pair it with Vogler or Harmon when you need both soul and act-structure. Novelists can treat page numbers as proportional (10% = catalyst, 50% = midpoint).
Best for. Feature screenplays, genre novels, and rewriting a draft that “has great scenes” but no spine.
01 · Act I
Opening Image
01 · Act I · pp. 1
Opening Image
A snapshot of the before. Tone, world, and the problem in one image that the final image will answer.
- Purpose
- Set the visual thesis.
- Watch for
- A pretty establishing shot with no thesis.
Ask on the page
If you could show only one frame of the old life, what is it? How will the last frame contradict it?
- The Wizard of Oz. Kansas in grey. The final image will be color, then Kansas seen anew.
- Up. The married life in minutes — a whole ordinary world in the opening.
How to read this map
- Page numbers assume a 110-page feature. For a novel, convert to percentages.
- The “Save the Cat” moment is a beat of likeability, not a stage — place it in the set-up.
- Fun and Games is the trailer: the promise of the premise, not more set-up.