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For this post, I’ve gathered 50 movie logline examples and 50 book logline examples.
The examples of movie loglines span decades, while the novel loglines are from the past twenty years or so. That’s because I used IMDB for the former and Publishers Marketplace deal announcements for the latter.
How Long Should a Logline Be?
In general, I would aim for forty words or fewer. Some people will recommend a shorter length than that! However, I’ve included one 49-word logline on this list. Most loglines are one sentence, but not all of them are.
A logline is a short synopsis of a screenplay, movie, or novel that’s used to pitch to agents, producers, editors. In the world of publishing, it may be also used to discuss the book with sales reps, booksellers…and, of course, readers. It only conveys the basic premise of a story. Because of the way it’s used, the whole point of a logline is to be short.
How to Write a Logline
I think looking at examples of loglines is one of the best ways to get an idea of how to write one. But you might think about conveying the protagonist (or protagonists), their situation, and their struggle.
You can try out this
logline formula:
“When (who the main character is) (what happens to the main character), s/he must (what they have to do to solve their dilemma.)”
Using this formula, and adding a little bit to it, the logline for my romcom book Her Knight at the Museum would look like this:
“When a museum employee brings a statue of a medieval knight to life, she must help him navigate modern-day Chicago—and decide whether she can trust her heart again.”
A logline can also just convey a few details and the general vibe of the story. Here’s the logline my publisher, Berkley, came up for my romance novel Her Time Traveling Duke. I thought it was perfect!
“Magic meets science and sunshine meets grumpy when a love spell whisks a Regency-era duke to modern times.”
Okay, let’s get to the lists! I’ve tried to include a variety of genres in these logline examples. Please note that a few of the movies started out as books, and some of the books became movies.
50 Logline Examples from Movies
- To live in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis. Or you’re a Ken.
– Barbie - A novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.
– American Fiction - While trying to secure a $1 million donation for his museum, a befuddled paleontologist is pursued by a flighty and often irritating heiress and her pet leopard, Baby.
– Bringing Up Baby - A writer encounters the owner of an aging high-class hotel, who tells him of his early years serving as a lobby boy in the hotel’s glorious years under an exceptional concierge.
– The Grand Budapest Hotel - The lives of two mob hitmen, a boxer, a gangster’s wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.
– Pulp Fiction - A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist on the maiden voyage of the Titanic and struggle to survive as the doomed ship sinks.
– Titanic - In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a woman rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshipper, and a drifter named Max.
– Mad Max: Fury Road - The plus-size teenage daughter of a former beauty queen signs up for her mom’s beauty pageant as a protest that escalates when other contestants follow her footsteps, revolutionizing the pageant and their small Texas town.
– Dumplin - A young African-American visits his white girlfriend’s parents for the weekend, where his simmering uneasiness about their reception of him eventually reaches a boiling point.
– Get Out - At a top secret research facility in the 1960s, a lonely janitor forms a unique relationship with an amphibious creature that is being held in captivity.
– The Shape of Water - As a young Black man grapples with his identity and sexuality, his journey to manhood is guided by the kindness, support and love of the community that helps raise him
– Moonlight - Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn a complacent society of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.
– Don’t Look Up - The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
– The Godfather - A Christmas Elf goes to New York City in search of his biological father, knowing nothing about life outside of the North Pole.
– Elf - Performer Rudy Ray Moore develops an outrageous character named Dolemite, who becomes an underground sensation and star of a kung-fu, anti-establisment film that could make or break him.
– Dolomite Is My Name - A young man is transported to the past, where he must reunite his parents before he and his future cease to exist.
– Back to the Future - On the eve of their high school graduation, two academic superstars and best friends realize they should have worked less and played more and so attempt to cram four years of fun into one night.
– Booksmart
18. A paraplegic Marine dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.
– Avatar
19. An angel is sent from Heaven to help a desperately frustrated businessman by showing him what life would have been like if he had never existed.
– It’s a Wonderful Life
20. When a bank teller discovers he’s actually a background player in an open-world video game, he decides to become the hero of his own story – one that he can rewrite himself.
– Free Guy
21. A Korean-American family moves to an Arkansas farm in search of its own American dream. Amidst the challenges of new life in the strange and rugged Ozarks, they discover the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
– Minari
22. A student at Oxford University finds himself drawn into the world of a charming and aristocratic classmate, who invites him to his eccentric family’s sprawling estate for a summer never to be forgotten.
– Saltburn
23. A boy’s favorite cowboy doll is threatened when a new action figure supplants him: an astronaut who believes he is real and not a toy.
– Toy Story
24. T’Challa, heir to the hidden but advanced kingdom of Wakanda, must step forward to lead his people into a new future and must confront a challenger from his country’s past.
– Black Panther
25. A couple travels to Northern Europe to visit a rural hometown’s fabled Swedish mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.
– Midsommar
26. A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.
– Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
27 .A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.
– Rear Window
28. A cranky history teacher at a remote prep school is forced to remain on campus over the holidays with a troubled student who has no place to go and a grieving cook.
– The Holdovers
29. Jake Blues rejoins with his brother Elwood after being released from prison, but the duo has just days to reunite their old R&B band and save the Catholic home where the two were raised, outrunning the police as they tear through Chicago.
– The Blues Brothers
30. Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan.
– Parasite
31. A computer hacker is led by a stranger to a forbidding underworld, where he discovers the shocking truth – the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.
– The Matrix
32. In 1936, archaeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones is hired by the U.S. government to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis can obtain its awesome powers.
– Raiders of the Lost Ark
33. A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.
– Casablanca
34. Despite being caught in her imaginative world, Amelie, a young waitress, decides to help people find happiness. Her quest to spread joy leads her on a journey where she finds true love.
– Amélie
35. The history of the United States from the 1950s to the ’70s unfolds from the perspective of an Alabama man with an IQ of 75, who yearns to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart.
– Forrest Gump
36. Nina is a talented but unstable ballerina on the verge of stardom. Pushed to the breaking point by her artistic director and a seductive rival, Nina’s grip on reality slips, plunging her into a waking nightmare.
– Black Swan
37. Roy Neary, an Indiana electric lineman, finds his quiet and ordinary daily life turned upside down after a close encounter with a UFO, spurring him to an obsessed cross-country quest for answers as a momentous event approaches.
– Close Encounters of the Third Kind
38. A town marshal, despite the disagreements of his newlywed bride and the townspeople around him, must face a gang of deadly killers alone at high noon when the gang leader, an outlaw he “sent up” years ago, arrives on the noon train.
– High Noon
39. When a pilot crashes and tells of conflict in the outside world, Diana, an Amazonian warrior in training, leaves home to fight a war, discovering her full powers and true destiny.
– Wonder Woman
40. The world’s greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, is young, out of ideas, and short of cash, but meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays.
– Shakespeare in Love
41. When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one – until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
– Killers of the Flower Moon
42. In May 1940, the fate of World War II hangs on Winston Churchill, who must decide whether to negotiate with Adolf Hitler, or fight on knowing that it could mean the end of the British Empire.
– Darkest Hour
43. A thief who steals corporate secrets through the use of dream-sharing technology is given the inverse task of planting an idea into the mind of a C.E.O., but his tragic past may doom the project and his team to disaster.
– Inception
44. An elderly man reads to a woman with dementia the story of two young lovers whose romance is threatened by the difference in their respective social classes.
– The Notebook
45. During her family’s move to the suburbs, a sullen 10-year-old girl wanders into a world ruled by gods, witches and spirits, a world where humans are changed into beasts.
– Spirited Away
46. An undercover cop and a mole in the police attempt to identify each other while infiltrating an Irish gang in South Boston.
– The Departed
47. A newspaper editor uses every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex-wife from remarrying.
– His Gal Friday
48. On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone’s hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence.
– Do the Right Thing
49. Over the course of several years, two convicts form a friendship, seeking consolation and, eventually, redemption through basic compassion.
– The Shawshank Redemption
50. Luke Skywalker joins forces with a Jedi Knight, a cocky pilot, a Wookie and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire’s world-destroying battle station, while also attempting to rescue Princess Leia from the mysterious Darth Vader.
– Star Wars
Bonus: Breaking Bad logline
I decided not to do a section on TV loglines because this blog post had already gotten very long and time-consuming, but I thought I’d include this one because I think it’s really good…and I didn’t even watch the show!
A chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal lung cancer teams up with his former student to cook and sell crystal meth in order to provide for his family, his wife, disabled son, and newborn.
50 Logline Examples from Books
1. An aged reclusive movie star summons a rookie journalist to tell her never-before-told life story, including her doomed marriages and forbidden love affairs, leading to a shocking and unforgivable confession that changes both women’s lives forever.
– The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid
2. An estranged brother and sister who must set aside their differences to deal with the consequences of their late mother’s long-hidden past, unfolding a tumultuous history of a runaway bride, an unsolved murder, a secret child, a deep-ocean swimmer, and the extraordinary Caribbean cake recipe that connects them all.
– Black Cake, Charmaine Wilkerson
3. A lone astronaut awakens to find himself on a ship deep in space, his crewmates dead, and his memories missing; all he knows is that he alone must now complete a desperate, last-chance mission to save the Earth from disaster.
– Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
4. FBI agent Jane Hawk, devastated by personal loss and driven by rage to avenge her family, finds herself the most wanted fugitive in America as she works to uncover powerful enemies who are protecting a secret so vast and so terrifying that they will exterminate anyone in their way.
– The Silent Corner, Dean Koontz
5. The son of the US President falls in love with the Prince of Wales after an incident of international proportions forces them to pretend to be best friends.
– Red, White, and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston
6. A Chicago man arrives home on his anniversary to find his wife missing and indications of a struggle and he swiftly becomes the prime suspect. The subsequent investigation reveals more than anyone could have imagined about this seemingly-perfect young couple.
– Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
7. A young woman who takes a job in an affluent suburb to care for a five-year-old boy who begins drawing disturbing pictures that point to a gruesome murder on the family’s property.
– Hidden Pictures, Jason Rekulak
8. In the 1960s, a bravehearted and irrepressibly logical scientist and single mother becomes the star of America’s most-loved cooking show Supper at Six, inspiring housewives across America to change their lives.
– Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus
9. A Nuyorican brother and sister from gentrifying Sunset Park, Brooklyn, reckoning with their absent, politically radical mother and their glittering careers among New York City’s elite in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
– Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez
10. In a world where humans struggle to survive amid intricate hierarchies of demons, shifters, angels, and countless other magical creatures, a half-human, half-Sidhe who joins forces with a powerful warrior-angel to hunt down her best friend’s killer.
– House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City Book One), Sarah J. Maas
11. Three teenage boys on the run in the early 1950s make their way from a work farm in the Midwest through the suburbs of Pennsylvania into the gritty heart of New York.
– The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles
12. Two friends who meet as children and reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital storytelling that eludes them in their real lives.
– Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
13. The heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his American-born Chinese girlfriend to meet his family at the Singapore wedding of the summer, amid gossip, backbiting, and scheming among three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families.
– Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan
14. A driven corporate lawyer with a bulletproof five-year plan falls asleep at the end of a momentous day and spends a single, shocking hour exactly five years in the future.
– In Five Years, Rebecca Serle
15. After a brush with death, controlled, careful web designer makes a “get a life” list and recruits her
mysterious, artistic neighbor to help her experience all the things she’s been missing.
– Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
16. In an alternate 1830s Oxford, scholars from colonized nations use silver bars to manifest the meaning “lost” in translation to magical effect, all under the shadow of the British Empire’s ruthless expansionism.
– Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence, R.F. Kuang
17. At the turn of the twentieth century, a botched robbery leaves a young boy dead and sets two men on conflicting journeys across untamed landscape.
All Things Left Wild, James Wade
18. Four sixteen year-old girls in Mainline Philly who are shocked when they start getting secret messages from their best friend, who went missing three years earlier.
Pretty Little Liars, Sara Shepard
19. In a city where magic costs memories, a disgraced nobleman’s son must risk his own memories and deceive all around him to determine if his father is truly guilty of murdering the child prince.
The Kingdom of Liars, Nick Martell
20. A by-the-books case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, who’s sent to investigate the caretaker of six children who are unlike anything the world has ever seen.
– The House In the Cerulean Sea, TJ Kline
21. In a world in which inter-dimensional travel is possible but only for the marginalized, a multiverse traveler who discovers that the parallel worlds of the privileged hold a deadly secret.
– The Space Between Worlds, Micaiah Johnson
22. An erotica writer juggling her career and single motherhood has to wrestle with the return of the love of her life, a prize-winning novelist, twenty years after their initial torrid romance, raising the eyebrows of New York’s Black literati.
– Seven Days In June, Tia Williams
23. A famous painter puts five bullets into the head of a husband that she loves and never speaks again, and a determined psychotherapist is convinced he can get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why.
– The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides
24. A kidnapped group of human women are stranded on a desolate planet where they find a new lease on life and love with the local blue-horned alien inhabitants.
– Ice Planet Barbarians, Ruby Dixon
25. A failed novelist who encounters an arrogant young writer with a brilliant novel idea; when the student dies, the writer steals the plot, but someone feels it wasn’t his story to tell.
– The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz
26. When a notorious child abductor escapes from prison, his daughter must use the wilderness skills her father taught her to hunt him down before he can kidnap her and her two young daughters.
– The Marsh King’s Daughter, Karen Dionne
27. A woman gets the help of her meddlesome mother and aunts to hide the body of her blind date while trying to pull off an opulent wedding for a billionaire client on the same day.
– Dial A for Aunties, Jesse Sutanto
28. A boy is kidnapped as a child and forced to change his appearance to decoy any attackers away from the despicable son of a despicable king.
– The Sword Catcher, Cassandra Clare
29. A group of women play a harmless drinking game that soon escalates into a war of dark pasts.
– Never Have I Ever, Joshilyn Jackson
30. A woman with Asperger’s who hires an Asian-American male escort to help her learn how to be a good girlfriend.
– The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang
31. A xenobiologist working on a uncolonized planet finds an alien relic that thrusts her into the wonders and nightmares of first contact, as epic space battles for the fate of humanity take her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
– To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher Paolini
32. At a brutal and elite war college for dragon riders the only rule is graduate or die.
– Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros
33. Two star-crossed lovers—a wealthy business man and a star chef—meet on Day of Dead and realize that they are the children of bitter rivals when the business man shows up to take over the chef’s award-winning taco shop.
Ramon and Julieta, Alana Viramontes Albertson
34. A loveable oddball whose social misunderstandings, mental health issues and unabashed wit make for an irresistible journey realizes that the only way to survive in the real world is to open her heart to friendship.
– Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
35. A beautiful blue-blooded debutante, a tart-tongued London shop-girl, and a shy crossword-solving spinster join the war against Nazi Germany as codebreakers of Bletchley Park.
– The Rose Code, Kate Quinn
36. A calamitous blind date between two astrologically incompatible women—a free spirited social media meme astrologer and a no-nonsense actuary—turns into love after a little white lie requires them to fake a relationship.
– Written In the Stars, Alexandra Bellefleur
37. A former New York City police detective, now a Brooklyn PI, investigates the conviction of a Black civil rights activist accused of murdering two city policemen, all while he delves back into the conspiracy surrounding his own downfall at the police’s hands.
– Down the River Unto the Sea, Walter Mosley
38. On a dystopian Marsa, a low-caste boy, remade as a spy among the ruling class, must fight a deadly war game against privileged, elite students.
– Red Rising, Pierce Brown
39. In a world inspired by Mughal-Indian history, a nobleman’s illegitimate daughter and a vow-bound mystic both possess the rare ability to compel the dreams of sleeping gods.
– Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri
40. A romance author who no longer believes in love and a literary writer who’s stuck in a rut find themselves living in neighboring lake houses for the summer and engaged in a challenge to swap genres, leading them to realize they may both have been wrong about happily ever afters all along.
– Beach Read, Emily Henry
41. A young black woman just finishing her PhD in astronomy who impulsively gets married in Vegas and decides to leave her perfectly ordered life for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
– Honey Girl, Morgan Rogers
42. An unforgettable young girl grows into a beautiful and strange young woman alone in the lush coastal marshes of North Carolina, which keep violent secrets after two men break her isolation open.
– Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
43. A fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, throwing one woman’s carefully calculated theories on love into chaos.
– The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood
44. A woman whose husband is kidnapped while they are visiting Portugal has no choice but to reach out to the one person from her past she fears most.
– Two Nights in Lisbon, Chris Pavone
45. A nearly magic-less witch reluctantly makes a deal with her childhood nemesis—an alpha wolf shifter—to fake-date their way out of a fake-mating.
– Not the Witch You Wed, April Hunt
46. A California high school dropout with a criminal past is mysteriously offered a second chance as a Yale freshman, where he is charged with monitoring the secret societies, whose occult activities are revealed to be more sinister than any paranoid fantasy.
–Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
47. A magic-wielding African-American couple, both former conductors on the Underground Railroad, solve mysteries the white authorities won’t touch.
– The Conductors, Nicole Glover
48. An ambitious reporter takes photograph that becomes an iconic picture of the Great Depression, catapulting his career to enviable heights—with devastating consequences for everyone involved.
– Sold on a Monday, Kristina McMorris
49. A 25 year-old black woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither, works at a newspaper where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers—and after a messy break up from her white boyfriend, she seeks comfort in all the wrong places.
– Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams
50. In a seemingly perfect dream house in Pittsburgh, a stay-at-home mom is desperate to find help for her mute seven-year old daughter, whose disturbing behavior grows increasingly dangerous.
– Baby Teeth, Zoje Stage
I talk about loglines in my book Blank Page to Final Draft.
Blank Page to Final Draft gives you a step-by-step process for writing a novel that you can fit into your busy life. If you’re interested in writing a novel, or exploring an easier and more organized way to work on one, check it out!
Do you have any thoughts about these story pitch examples?
Do you want to share your own? And do you come up with your logline before or after you write your book or screenplay? (These days, for me, it always comes first.) Let me know in the comments! Thanks so much for reading, and happy writing!
I have always come up with the logline afterwards and had a hard time. Going forward, I’m going to come up with it first. It’s amazing how all of your examples compel a person to want to watch the movie or read the book. Just goes to show how important the logline is.
They really do get your attention, don’t they? I added about a dozen books to my TBR list while putting this post together! When I teach romance writing workshops, I always make people write loglines first. It gives you so much focus.
So glad that there was only “world turned upside-down” example. I see that often on Netflix and backcover blurbs and reminds me how important it is not to use cliches.
I know I told you this elsewhere, but this is so true! I hadn’t noticed it until you said it!
Great examples.
🙂 Thank you, Denise!
Thanks a bunch
You’re so welcome! Thanks for stopping by!
This absolutely makes sense trying to explain a plot.
In every logline of movies 2 things presents and clearly visible
1. Who the main character and about it in few words
2. In which situation the main character is in or what happening to main character.
But no sign of “how the main character deal with the happening or situation”
Instead of it the things indicated by log line is
“where this happening or situation takes the main character.”
Crazy how one good logline can make your heart race. I’ve always written them last — no wonder I felt lost. From now on, I’m starting there. It’s the soul of the story.