The Cold Open: Starting Your Screenplay With a Bang

Whether you write for film or TV, a cold open can provide a vital and dynamic way into your screenplay.

They say that in the business, nobody will read past the first ten pages if they aren’t interested in what they see. Much in the same way, the first five to ten minutes of runtime can mean the difference between a viewer sticking through to the end or going back to the Netflix homepage.

Those five to ten pages or minutes strategically coincide with the cold open. This part of the script has to be irresistibly intriguing, either through the mystery it teases, the quality of its jokes, or the characters it introduces.

The cold open is the key to grabbing your audience’s attention. A lot of pressure rests on those first few minutes. It’s important to know how to make the most of them.

But it’s also important not to rest on cliches in your cold open. If used lazily, it can seem like a cheap way of suggesting what is to come without doing work in the rest of the first ten pages. So don’t rest on your laurels. Make your cold open mean something.

What Is a Cold Open, Anyway?

A cold open is an introductory scene that precedes a film or show’s opening credits. Often, it’s used to set up the general story arc, or the theme of a particular episode.

Every cold open has the same goal: to hook the audience so they keep watching and to suggest the nature and tone of the story.

Let’s talk about the notion of hooking an audience. The term “hook” describes the quality of a story that captures the viewer’s attention. It’s the selling point, the big draw, the money piece of your story – and you should know what it is before you take to the page.

The hook is directly related to the “why” of your story. The two main questions this “why” leads into are: Why is this story compelling? and Why is this story worth anybody’s time?

The art of persuasion is very much alive in screenwriting, and the cold open can be your opening argument.

In your pitch, you are trying to convince agents, producers, executives, etc. to invest in your script. In your cold open, you are trying to convince viewers to stay in their seats.

For the latter, you need to give the audience a taste of what is going to unfold before them. What are they about to get themselves in for?