10 Amazing Opening Scenes & What Screenwriters Can Learn From Them

A first impression counts. We all know that. And in screenwriting it’s no different. Your screenplay’s opening scene is vital.

Screenplay readers will often tell you that the first ten pages of a screenplay is key to their overall impression or even to whether or not they will continue reading.

But your opening scene is not only vital in making an impression, it can be a crucial way of efficiently and concisely introducing your characters, world and themes.

The best opening scenes have a clear agenda. They have the story’s overarching themes in sight. They might not always be clear in setting up the protagonist and the world in its entirety. But they can set the tone and atmosphere, thereby introducing the audience to the film immediately.

From the opening scene we can garner what the story might be and what kind of film this is, with or without all the main characters.

So let’s take a look at 10 great opening scenes from films. These are unforgettable scenes in their own right but ones that do a brilliant and distinct job of introducing the story they are about to tell.

We’ve picked scenes we believe are comprehensive in what they achieve, as opposed to scenes that are just striking in their imagery. We’ve also primarily picked opening scenes that exist as one, rather than great opening scenes that come in the form of a montage (such as Goodfellas or Trainspotting).

1. Little Miss Sunshine

The opening of Little Miss Sunshine does a brilliant job of efficiently introducing us to the film’s themes and characters.

It occurs in montage form because it has to in order to introduce the ensemble. This is a story in which the family as a unit is the protagonist and therefore the film introduces the family as one.

Just the opening shot conveys a great deal in terms of the film’s themes:

• Young Olive stares at the TV screen. Reflected in her eyes are the images of a beauty pageant.
• This striking image conveys how a young impressionable girl like Olive is affected by the images she sees on screen.
• She then pauses the video recording and rewinds it, trying to mimic the perfect response the beauty pageant winner has to winning.
• We know just from this that Olive idolises these beauty pageant winners and fantasises about being one. This sets up the film’s primary narrative arc.

Consequently, after the initial scene with Olive, the film introduces the rest of the characters. It does so with a similar efficiency.

• The father is shown giving an impassioned speech about success, only for it to be revealed the class he gives it to is near empty.
• The teenage son is focused on himself, reading, working out, bettering himself.
• The grandfather retreats to the bathroom to take drugs.
• The mother stress smokes in a hurried car journey towards her brother, who is in hospital.

Overall, whilst the inciting incident is yet to come, the film’s opening scene brilliantly establishes the film’s narrative drive, characters and themes. Each character is given a small introduction but it’s all we need to understand how their arcs will feature in the upcoming story.