How To Write A Movie Overview

This article will discuss how to write a movie overview, and by doing so it will teach you how to write one that excites an audience, making them want to see more.

What is a movie overview?

The movie overview is the most direct way to convey why your movie is good, what your movie does well, what it gets right, and why it’s going to work.

You can literally write a movie summary for a concept that you’re just seeing now, and your audience will get it in less than 10 seconds.

Basically, a good movie overview will let your audience know that what they’re about to see, will be cool (or at least interesting).

They will also like the lead characters, and they’ll be hooked from the get-go. So don’t be stingy with your description, be honest with them about what the movie is about.

You want your audience to want to know more about what happens, but don’t overload them with detail. If you do, they’ll feel like they’ve missed something.

By the way, that’s not how we write our synopsis for a book.

The book synopsis is much more detailed than a movie summary is. But it’s still not the primary selling point for a movie, so be sure to include a synopsis and film poster.

Summary

That’s really it, if your movie is titled Insurgent or The Kings of Summer, you’ll want to write something like this:

"Girl finds out that her boyfriend is trying to lose her in a battle royal. She ends up joining the battle royal, and losing in order to help her ex-boyfriend win".

You could do it much simpler. It’s just a summary, not a comprehensive review.
However, if your movie is called Live Free or Die Hard, you’ll want to write something like this:

"A group of war veterans have to take down a terrorist group that has developed a special army. One of the group members is a veteran, and he was supposedly shot in the head at war.

They find out the sniper isn’t really dead and must save him".

Again, you could do it simpler. The action movie Live Free or Die Hard would be really easy to summarize as a good old, action packed space opera.

The movie does about one third of the work for you by having a synopsis that is just two paragraphs.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret: when you’re writing a movie synopsis, you’re not really writing a synopsis.

That’s where your description comes into play

The big difference between your movie summary, and a movie overview is that the movie summary describes everything the audience needs to know to decide if they want to see your movie, and to decide if they want to see the next one in the series.

It tells them what your movie is about, who the protagonists are, what the bad guy is, what happens in the middle, and why it’s a good movie.

Your description gives the audience what they want to know, and it also describes everything your movie is about.

This is one of the reasons that there are so many reviews in the movie review section of Amazon. It’s because the reviewer describes the movie just enough that the reader will decide whether or not to watch the movie.

Most readers don’t want to read a detailed description of your movie, they want to know whether or not they want to watch it. Your description should serve this purpose, but you don’t want to use it so heavily that you turn the book into a movie review.

How do you go about writing the summary?

You can either work on it at night or during the day, as there are lots of writing ideas online. My favorite thing is to do a word search for the word summary in the book you’re reading.

The more obscure and more difficult a word is, the more ideas you’ll get.

Here’s a sample. I’m trying to use a movie that I didn’t like very much, and I was forced to describe what the movie was about because the review had ruined it for me.

(“None of the characters are likable”) Here’s how I wrote it:

"Guy steals the train to get to his girlfriend’s wedding. She accepts the ride on condition that he takes her parents with him. Guy doesn’t want to, but he owes her.

The trip turns out to be anything but smooth. One of the drivers is dead and another is asleep.

The van hits a tree and the passengers are killed. The girl and her parents are saved, but the guy who stole the train is crushed to death.

The guy and girl reunite, but the ex-boyfriend is also on the train. The ex-boyfriend gives chase to the girl.

The ex-boyfriend is played by Hans Gruber. Gruber was born with a disfigurement that forced him to be an criminal. The person who trained him was played by Alan Rickman. Gruber and Rickman have an on-again, off-again relationship.

Rickman also is known as Professor Severus Snape, a Harry Potter bad guy who saves the day on a few occasions. The girl is played by Tessa Thompson.

Tessa’s parents were killed when she was a child, but she’s found a family who tries to keep her safe. Tessa is beautiful, but does not know it.

The ex-boyfriend is played by Jason Statham. Statham has lost his arm in a fire in an accident. He takes out a tattoo of the girl’s name on the empty limb.

Statham is a biker and a mercenary. The movie ends with the girl and the ex-boyfriend reuniting and living happily ever after".

Those are the basics. You should write at least a few paragraphs on your summary, but you should also cut down the description to a few sentences or two paragraphs.

You want to make it short enough that someone can read it in less than a minute, but if you don’t get through it in under a minute, you’re going to feel bad.

You want to work hard and get it done, but you don’t want it to take you longer than you’d like.

For each character, I’m going to list the good and the bad about each character, and then how important the character is to the movie. So for example, the bad would be how the character is evil, while the good would be what the character does that keeps them from being totally evil.

The final sentence is how important the character is in the movie.

For example, if you have a main character named Joe, he is a good guy, but sometimes he’s a little nerdy. The character would be important, but not a character that was developed enough to be described in one paragraph.

You might say that he’s too nice and might have a huge crush on the main character, so he becomes her bodyguard to protect her and make her life more interesting.

Or you might say that he is too smart for his own good, so he plays things wrong in order to teach her a lesson. That’s it. I’m not going to say a whole paragraph about Joe.

Once you’ve got the ideas down, it’s time to start writing.