Hi, can someone help me. On my script in progress, if it was ever made into a film, it would be 100 minutes, but i'm not sure how many pages it would have to be around. Also, my script keeps going shorter and shorter, and by the end it will probarbly be like 25 pages, even though it is supposed to be 100 mins. I have tried putting all the description I can, and done formatting right, but it just keeps getting shorter! Can someone help me with this please?

So, it's 100 pages but it keeps getting shorter? Why is it getting shorter? I'm confused.

85 plus is probably the average for films being made, they can run really long or really short even at 80 pages.

25 pages probably won't get you 100 minutes even if you've got a lot of long-winded description and action. But you might get that out of 85, depending on what happens. The Academy (theatrical) version of Return of the King that you can find linked from Simplyscripts is 150 pages, but the movie clocks at 200 minutes (including the end credits).

That's because cerain sequences were longer than the descrition in the script. Lighting the fires between Gondor and Rohan, for example, was one sentence in the script, but it took a minute or two for the scenic mountain sequence to play out.

The rule of thumb for page to minute ratio is one page per minute, if properly formatted, so you'd be shooting for 100 pages. Getting shorter? That's weird...

it varies

The standard way of thinking in the industry is 1 page = 1 minute. It varies, of course, but it still is a decent estimate.

It's supposed to be 100 minutes? Why? I understand that the idea, as you originally conceived it, would (you guessed) run a 100 minutes. Obviously, you guessed wrong. If you have written a few drafts and the latest is only 25 pages, then clearly you don't have  enough story to fill 100 minutes. You could just settle on it being a short or, if you insist that in needs to be feature length, add some subplots or action scenes or something (I don't know what sort of script you're writing).  

Or what you could do is make that whole 25 pages a subplot itself in a larger story. What's the script about? Are you sure the story warrants an hour and a half+ to tell it?

-Pete

Don't pad your script with description.  It won't help.  You have to had more to the story.


Phil