A logline is a one to two sentence description of a film that shows the most interesting elements of the storyline to hook the reader.
64 Movie Logline Examples From Famous Films
- All the Right Moves: A Pennsylvania steel town’s ambitious and hot-headed high school coach tries to spoil a football hero’s scholarship dream.
- Amarcord: A young man, a stand-in for the director Federico Fellini, romantically views life in the 1930s Italian village of the director’s youth.
- American Assassin: A young American joins a deniable group of government assassins in the hope of revenge against the terrorists who murdered his fiancé. His first mission is to prevent one of his predecessors from building a nuclear weapon.
- American Beauty: Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis, decides to turn his hectic life around after becoming infatuated with his daughter’s attractive friend.
- American Made: When the CIA ask a pilot to fly clandestine missions in South America for them, he soon realizes it’s an ideal cover for smuggling drugs into the U.S. He has to play the CIA, drug cartels, law enforcement, and even the White House off against each other to keep his operation running.
- Apocalypse Now: During the U.S.-Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe.
- Argo: During the 1979 Iranian revolution, a CIA officer plans to help six American diplomats escape the country disguised as a Canadian film crew, but with the Revolutionary Guards closing in and no support from his superiors, he must move fast to avoid being caught and executed.
- The Artist: Hollywood, 1927: As silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, he sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer set for a big break.
- Atomic Blonde: MI6 send their best troubleshooter to Berlin to retrieve a watch full of vital information, and the defector who produced it. Betrayed by a mole in MI6, the agent must outmaneuver the rival intelligence services competing for the watch to save the defector and discover who the traitor is.
- Back to the Future: A young man is transported to the past, where he must reunite his parents before he and his future cease to exist.
- Big Night: Two very different brothers promote their struggling 1950s New Jersey Italian restaurant by inviting Louis Prima and his band to take part in a sumptuous dinner there.
- Bridge of Spies: At the height of the Cold War, a Soviet spy and an American spy plane pilot are captured. An American lawyer has to use all his negotiating skills to navigate between the bitter enemies and broker a spy-swap deal.
- Bridges of Madison County: An Iowa housewife, stuck in her routine, must choose between true romance and the needs of her family.
- Casablanca: Set in unoccupied Africa during the early days of World War II: An American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.
- Charade: When a woman’s husband is murdered, she discovers that he was a rogue agent who stole a fortune from the CIA. With her life in danger and both the CIA and her husband’s double-crossed accomplices on her tail, she has to find the money and decide whether she can trust the mysterious man who’s helping her.
- Complicit: When an MI5 agent who is obsessed with stopping a terror plot that he can’t convince his superiors is real flies to Egypt to interrogate the British man he believes to be organizing it, he must decide how far he will go to prevent the attack.
- Cypher: When a mild-mannered company man gets embroiled in futuristic mega-corporations’ cyber-espionage wars, he must decide whether to trust his instincts about the only woman who might be able to save him
- Django Unchained: After being rescued by a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.
- Elf: A Christmas Elf goes to New York City.
- The Final Countdown: A modern aircraft carrier arrives near Pearl Harbor in 1941 and discovers the Japanese ready to attack. The time travelers must decide whether to change history by destroying the Japanese fleet.
- Finding Nemo: When his son is swept out to sea, an anxious clownfish embarks on a perilous journey across a treacherous ocean to bring him back.
- For a Few Dollars More: A man with no name and a man with a mission hunt a Mexican bandit for different reasons.
- Forrest Gump: Forrest Gump, while not intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny Curran, eludes him.
- The Godfather: The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
- The Hangover: A Las Vegas-set comedy centered around three groomsmen lose their about-to-be-wed buddy during their drunken misadventures, then must retrace their steps in order to find him.
- Hanna: When a teenage assassin’s mission goes wrong, she is pursued across Europe by a ruthless CIA agent and must come to terms with the secrets of her childhood in order to survive.
- The Help: An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African American maids’ point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.
- Hype!: A smart, thoughtful look at the Seattle grunge-rock scene and the way in which commercialism screwed it up. Interviews with all the key players, some terrific music, and a candid piece of work.
- Inside Man: A cop has to talk down a bank robber after the criminal’s perfect heist spirals into a hostage situation.
- Iron Sky: In 2018, a US astronaut is captured on the moon by Nazis who’ve been living there since 1945. He’s forced to help them with their plans to conquer the Earth. As the invasion begins, he tries to prevent the Nazi’s super-weapon from destroying the world.
- Kingsman: The Secret Service: When a billionaire businessman plots to “cull” the human race, a trainee in a secretive independent intelligence agency has a chance to prove himself a better agent than the more privileged candidates.
- Lean On Me: A tough principal takes revolutionary measures to clean up a notoriously dangerous inner-city New Jersey high school.
- Legally Blonde: An airhead blonde goes to Harvard Law School.
- The Lion King: Lion cub and future king Simba searches for his identity. His eagerness to please others and penchant for testing his boundaries sometimes gets him into trouble.
- Little Miss Sunshine: When a wannabe child beauty queen learns that a spot has opened up in the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant, she convinces her dysfunctional family to make the cross-country trek, despite her father’s (and society’s) protestations that she may not have what it takes to win.
- Lone Star: A small-town Texas sheriff investigates a convoluted case, despite warnings not to, when a brutal predecessors’ remains turn up 40 years after he was supposedly run out of town.
- The Matrix: A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.
- Midnight Cowboy: Naïve Joe Buck arrives in New York City to make his fortune as a hustler, but soon strikes up an unlikely friendship with the first scoundrel he falls prey to.
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith: When man and wife assassins discover they are working for rival agencies, they have to decide whether to put love ahead of business.
- Napoleon Dynamite: A listless and alienated teenager decides to help his new friend win the class presidency in their small western high school, all while he must deal with his bizarre family life back home.
- North by Northwest: When an innocent advertising executive is framed for murder by foreign spies, he must evade the authorities for long enough to uncover the spies’ plot, and save the enigmatic woman who is mixed up with them.
- Notorious: The self-destructive daughter of a convicted traitor is asked by the American agent she loves to seduce a Nazi in South America. When the Nazi asks her to marry him, she has to decide how far she will deceive him in order to discover his plans.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: Blacksmith Will Turner teams up with eccentric pirate “Captain” Jack Sparrow to save his love, the governor’s daughter, from Jack’s former pirate allies, who are now undead.
- Pulp Fiction: The lives of two mob hit men, a boxer, a gangster’s wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.
- Rear Window: A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.
- Reservoir Dogs: After a simple jewelry heist goes terribly wrong, the surviving criminals begin to suspect that one of them is a police informant.
- Rushmore: A precocious private high school student whose life revolves around his school competes with its most famous and successful alumnus for the affection of a first-grade teacher.
- Salt: When a CIA agent is accused by a defector of being a Russian deep-cover infiltrator who’s part of a plot to assassinate the President of Russia and cause a nuclear war, she must decide where her loyalties lie as she takes her revenge on the powerful forces from her past that have set her up.
- The Shawshank Redemption: Two imprisoned men bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.
- Shovel Buddies: In a world where their best friend died, a group of friends bands together to honor his last wish and put him in his football jersey, otherwise, their friend will be cremated without his last wish being fulfilled.
- The Silence of the Lambs: In order to catch a killer who skins his victims, a young FBI cadet must seek help from an incarcerated and manipulative killer.
- Skyfall: After a hard-drive containing agent names is stolen by an ex-MI6 agent with a vendetta on M, Bond must face demons from his past and present to try and save M.
- Spectre: When Bond’s past comes back to haunt him, he has to choose between revenge on his secretive nemesis and potential happiness with the daughter of an old adversary, whilst trying to prevent a threat to world freedom.
- Speed: A young police officer must prevent a bomb exploding aboard a city bus by keeping its speed above 50 mph.
- Spies Like Us: US intelligence promote two incompetents, give them perfunctory training and send them to draw attention away from real spies. But when the real spies are killed, the hapless dupes must carry out the mission for real.
- The Spy Who Loved Me: When British and Soviet submarines are stolen, Bond and his female Soviet counterpart must work together to prevent a megalomaniac and his indestructible henchman using the submarines’ nuclear missiles to provoke world war three.
- Star Wars: A New Hope: A spirited farm boy joins a rebellion to save a princess from a sinister imperial enforcer — and the galaxy — from a planet-destroying weapon.
Scene from “Star Wars: A New Hope” - The Sweet Smell of Success: A press agent, hungry to get ahead, is pushed by a ruthless columnist to do cruel and evil things and is eventually caught in the web of lies that he has created.
- Taxi Driver: A mentally unstable Vietnam war veteran works as a night-time taxi driver in New York City where the perceived decadence and sleaze feeds his urge for violent action, attempting to save a preadolescent prostitute in the process.
- Titanic: Two star-crossed lovers fall in love on the maiden voyage of the Titanic and struggle to survive as the doomed ship sinks into the Atlantic Ocean.
- Toy Story: A cowboy doll is profoundly threatened and jealous when a new spaceman action figure supplants him as top toy in a boy’s room.
- The Wild Geese: An aging mercenary is hired to rescue an African politician from execution. When the operation goes wrong, his commando group has to fight its way to the border in order to escape.
- Wild Strawberries: After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence.
- Zero Dark Thirty: After 9/11, a CIA analyst spends years tracking Osama bin Laden down and must negotiate terrorist bombs, moral dilemmas, and skeptical superiors to find the terrorist leader’s hiding place and persuade the government to attack it.
10 TV Series Logline Examples
TV scriptwriters also utilize loglines to appeal to producers and studios.
- 30 Rock: The socially awkward head writer of a sketch comedy show must deal with an arrogant new boss and a crazy new star, all while trying to run a successful television show without losing her mind.
- Arrested Development: A young man leads his oddball family and their real-estate-development business following a securities-fraud fiasco that put the father in jail (stake).
- Deutschland 83: In 1980s Germany, the East German secret police send a young soldier from the East to the West as a spy. When the spy’s masters misinterpret the strategy papers he steals as a plan for an imminent western attack on East Germany, he tries to prevent the Cold War turning hot.
- The Game: In 1970s London, a KGB defector warns MI5 of a Soviet plot to destabilize Britain. With MI5 infiltrated by a KGB agent, the service’s operatives must decide who they can trust, discover who is betraying them and somehow stop the plot.
- London Spy: In London, a gay man discovers his MI6-operative lover dead. He suspects a cover-up, but with the conspirators seemingly all-powerful, he has to sacrifice everything to discover the truth.
- Restless: In 1976, an elderly and paranoid spy recalls how she was sent to the USA before World War Two as an agent-provocateur and how the betrayal that has haunted her ever since needs revenge in the present.
- Silicon Valley: A shy silicon valley engineer tries to build his own company.
- The Sopranos: The capo of a New Jersey syndicate goes to a psychiatrist to deal with the changing nature of his business, a wife who no longer trusts him, kids who are growing up, and his murderous extended family.
- Spies of Warsaw: As the Second World War approaches, a French spy in Poland discovers German battle-plans, and has to fight off Nazi and Soviet assassins as he tries to alert both countries to the danger.
- Stranger Things: When a young boy disappears, his mother, the police chief, and his friends must confront terrifying forces (central conflict) in order to get him back.
Need help writing the perfect logline? Follow these tips. If you want to apply a formula when writing loglines, check out this example.
You can learn more about logline examples in film and how you can improve your skills by applying to the Nashville Film Institute here.
