How to Write a Montage in a Screenplay: Format and Craft

A montage is a time machine: it compresses boring time into watchable images, and it only earns its place if the story is different after it than before it. Format it with MONTAGE or SERIES OF SHOTS as the scene element, then write each beat like a tiny scene with its own change. If the montage ends and nothing moved, cut it.

That last sentence is where most montages die. Writers use them as music videos. The good ones use them as storytelling shortcuts.

The two minutes that replaced an entire first act

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has a problem most epics have. It needs to establish Arthur's entire early life before the story can start, and in another director's hands that is thirty slow minutes of childhood scenes. Guy Ritchie solves it by cutting together a compilation of quick visual moments in montage fashion. Short, essential images. No dialogue at all.

What takes Christopher Nolan the entirety of act one in Batman Begins, Ritchie achieves in just under two minutes. Pure visual storytelling. You know exactly who Arthur is and how he came to be, and the film never slowed down to tell you.

That is the montage working perfectly. It skipped the parts of the story that would have been boring to watch in full, and it landed somewhere new: a grown Arthur, ready for the story to begin. Every beat in those two minutes changed your understanding of the character.

But the same film carries the warning. King Arthur leans so hard on the technique that the whole movie starts feeling like one long montage, jumping from moment to moment, and the journey gets lost. A movie can have a montage or even a few montages to swiftly skip through certain parts of the story. But your entire movie cannot be one big montage. If the main purpose of your film is to skip through the whole story, then what is the point of having a film? Knowing how to write a montage in a screenplay means knowing when to stop. The montage is a spice. The film is the meal.

How to write a montage in a screenplay, practically

There are two standard ways to put a montage on the page.

MONTAGE as an element. Type MONTAGE in caps as a scene heading, then write each beat as a short action line or mini slug. This works for a sequence in one flowing location or theme, like a training sequence or a relationship forming.

SERIES OF SHOTS. Use this when the beats jump across locations and time. Each shot gets its own mini slug line, and the camera jumps from place to place. The reader should feel the rhythm on the page: short lines, white space, momentum.

Either way, the craft rules are the same.

Every beat must change something. A montage is not a slideshow of cool moments. Each beat should move time forward and move character or plot with it. The trainee fails, then improves, then succeeds. The couple meets, then fights, then reconciles. If you can remove a beat and nothing is lost, remove it.

Give it an arc, not just a theme. The best montages have a beginning, middle, and end compressed into minutes. Start in one emotional place, end in another. The classic training montage starts with the hero getting humiliated and ends with the hero ready. The audience feels the distance traveled, which is the whole point of the device.

Music is not a substitute for story. In the edit bay I have watched many montages that were really just a song with footage under it. If your montage only works with the music on, it does not work. The images have to carry meaning on their own.

Three montages that failed, and what they teach

Army of the Dead: the montage that ate the movie. Zack Snyder opens with a signature backstory montage showing Las Vegas falling to zombies, establishing them as unstoppable killing machines in a light-hearted, comical tone. It is spectacular. It is also a promise the film immediately breaks: the zombies turn out to be shamblers, then hibernating, then intelligent negotiators, and the audience never knows what to feel. Worse, the montage spent all its energy on spectacle and left nothing for the intimate material. How the outbreak affected the hero and his daughter, what infected his wife, why they are estranged, all of that gets reduced to tiny flashbacks and assumptions. Sometimes you have to let go of the big stuff you want to do and spend that time on the small intimate stuff that carries more value. A montage should never cost you the scenes that matter.

Mortal Kombat: the montage with no stakes. The third act becomes a fight montage where the heroes take on the villains one by one. It exists mostly to showcase signature fight moves. There is no buildup, no anticipation, no stakes or intensity, nothing a third act needs. It is a cool fun thing the film suddenly does. The exception proves the rule: the one fight with personal history behind it is the only one that lands. A montage of empty spectacle is just a trailer for a movie you are already watching.

Suicide Squad: the montage as information dump. The film opens with a montage introducing every character at once through Amanda Waller's briefing. Twenty minutes of files and dossiers. The problem is not the information. The problem is that introducing a character is not enough; you have to make the audience care, and care needs a point of view. Ocean's Eleven does not open with a montage of the crew. It opens with Danny Ocean. Lord of the Rings does not open at the council. It opens with Frodo. Anchor the story in one person first, then branch out. A montage that introduces everyone introduces no one.

Key points

• A montage is a time machine: it compresses boring time into watchable images, and it only works if the story is different afterward.
• Format it as MONTAGE or SERIES OF SHOTS, with each beat written as a short action line or mini slug.
• Every beat must change something. Give the montage its own small arc, from one emotional place to another.
• Music is not story. If the montage only works with the song on, the images are not doing their job.
• A montage must never eat the scenes that matter. Army of the Dead's spectacular opening cost the film its intimate character material.
• Montages without stakes (Mortal Kombat) or without a point of view (Suicide Squad) are just expensive filler.

Try this

• Take any sequence in your draft that covers days or weeks and rewrite it as a five-beat montage this week. If you are learning how to write a montage in a screenplay, this single exercise teaches the mechanics faster than any rulebook. Then remove one beat. If nothing is lost, keep it out.
• Watch the opening of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and count how much of Arthur's life you absorb in two minutes with zero dialogue. Then ask which beats you would cut and what would break.
• Find a montage in your script that runs on music alone, mute it in your head, and read the images. If they tell no story, rewrite the beats until they do.