Online screenplays: gifts or smoke and mirrors?
- Déborah Braun
- Dec 24, 2025
- 2 min read
With Christmas fast approaching, I’m seeing links to downloadable film screenplays shared as if they were gifts. In reality, they perpetuate a misunderstanding about what a screenplay actually is and how a film is made.
The screenplays you find online are almost never the pre-shooting drafts. Most of them are revised versions produced after the edit.
At the end of editing, the screenplay is updated so that it matches the cut and approved film. I did this myself several times when I was an intern.Scenes are cut, dialogue is rewritten, actions are clarified, and so on, based on what was actually shot and edited.
These versions are intended, for example, for subtitling or dubbing work. Confusing the two is problematic because it implies that a written screenplay must be followed to the letter, and it completely distorts the understanding of how a film is written and how it is made.
What then disappears, and this is fundamental, is the evolution of the screenplay during the film’s making. If a screenplay is the reference point at every stage of production, it is not frozen. It is (and must be) a living material that allows everyone involved (actors, technicians, producers, etc.) to enrich it without going off in all directions and without betraying it.
This is why the intention of the screenplay (the story) must be absolutely clear at the writing stage: so that the inevitable adjustments and creative contributions strengthen it rather than weaken it.
A film is a collective work from the moment the writing begins. And that essential dimension is obviously absent from the post-editing versions you can easily find online.
So yes, reading a screenplay is useful. But only if you know what you’re reading.
If you get hold of a pre-shooting draft, read it carefully. Those are the real gifts.
Read them, then watch the film. And read again.
It’s in that gap that you truly understand how a screenplay makes a film, and how the making of the film transforms it. That’s how you grasp why we speak of the three writings of a film: screenplay, shoot, and edit. And that’s how you come to understand how to write a screenplay, and why.
Happy reading and viewing!
