Screenwriting and television

How much money can you make selling a movie script?

August 16, 2026 · The StoryProp team

Sell an original spec screenplay outright to a Writers Guild signatory and the floor is about $126,900 for a film budgeted at $5,000,000 or more, or about $61,980 below that line. Those are item C of the WGA Schedule of Minimums, published at $125,023 and $61,064 for the year that ran to May 1, 2026 and raised 1.5% by the 2026 Basic Agreement on May 2. No standalone 2026 schedule has been posted yet, so the figures below are quoted at that last published rate, before the increase. The floor is not the market. The WGA's own Screen Compensation Guide, drawn from nearly 800 screen deals for high-budget features made under that agreement, reports a median of $450,000 in committed compensation on a one-step first-draft deal, and $500,000 at the major studios and streamers.

Above that sits a documented top end. TheWrap reported in November 2024 that Fifth Season and Makeready bought Natan Dotan's spec thriller Alignment for $1,250,000 committed against $3,000,000 payable if the film is produced; Joe Wright was attached to direct by February 2025. Below it sits the other honest figure: an 18-month option on that same high-budget spec carries a WGA floor of roughly $12,502. The distance from a $12,502 option to a seven-figure sale is the real answer, and almost every rung of it is published. Here is how to work out where you land.

The floor is published, and it is not small

The guild sets minimum compensation that a signatory company cannot go beneath, and it prices screen work by category and by budget. The dividing line is $5,000,000 in production cost: at or above is high budget, below is low budget. The categories are where the money hides. An outright purchase of an original spec is priced as an original screenplay excluding treatment. An original screenplay written to order, treatment included, is a different and higher item — $170,655 high budget, paid in three installments of $68,205 on the treatment, $68,205 on the first draft and $34,245 on the second. Which line of the schedule your deal sits on is worth tens of thousands before anyone negotiates.

Two things have moved since that schedule was printed, and both favour the writer. The 2026 Basic Agreement, ratified in April 2026 by 90.38% of the votes cast, raised every one of those minimums 1.5% on May 2, 2026 and adds 3% on each May 2 through 2029 — 10.5% over the four-year term. It also created a category that did not exist before, and the guild has published its rate outright rather than as an uplift: the page-one rewrite, $57,500 high budget and $31,500 low, for revisions where the company directs you to replace substantially all of the existing screenplay. That premium applies only where the contract says so explicitly, which is a good reason to read the paperwork before signing it.

The median deal is more than three times the floor

Minimums describe the worst legal outcome. The WGA's Screen Compensation Guide describes the middle, and it is a different picture: analysing close to 800 screen deals for high-budget features made during the 2023 agreement, it puts the median committed compensation on a one-step first-draft deal at $450,000 across all companies and $500,000 at the majors and streamers. A one-step rewrite deal runs $200,000 and $250,000. Committed means the company owes it whether or not it orders another step, so those medians are conservative — they exclude bonuses and production payments.

One structural protection sits underneath those medians, and it doubles the money on a scale-level deal. Under the second-step provision, a company that hires a writer for a first-draft screenplay — or buys one from a professional writer — at or below a threshold percentage of minimum must also employ that writer for the rewrite. The 2026 agreement raised that threshold from 200% to 225% of minimum, widening the band of deals that arrive with a second paid step attached. For a newer writer paid near scale, that is the difference between one fee and two.

An option is a rental, and the standard fee is not what you were told

Far more scripts get optioned than bought. An option buys a producer the exclusive right, for a fixed term, to set your project up somewhere; the purchase price is negotiated at the same time but paid only if the option is exercised. The most repeated claim in screenwriting advice is that the option fee is 10% of the purchase price. It is not a rule, and no published source establishes it. What is published is the guild floor: for theatrical material from a professional writer, no less than 10% of the applicable minimum per option period of up to 18 months, and another 10% of minimum for every renewal. Against the $125,023 high-budget minimum on the last published schedule, that is about $12,502 for eighteen months of exclusivity. Television runs cheaper and shorter — 5% of minimum for an initial 180 days, then 10% for each further 180-day period.

That floor binds signatory companies. Independent producers who are not signatories option material for nominal sums all the time, and nothing prevents it. Below even that sits the shopping agreement, in which the producer pays nothing and acquires no rights, taking exclusivity for several months to about a year in exchange for pitching your project to buyers you cannot reach yourself. Sometimes that access genuinely is the trade. The distinction to carry into any meeting: in an option, someone actually gets paid.

What actually reaches your account

Representation comes off the top. The WGA agreement caps a franchised agent's commission at 10% of initial compensation, and — the clause worth memorising — residuals, program fees and sequel payments are not commissionable at all. Managers and lawyers fall outside that rule. Screenwriting-specific practitioners such as Lee Jessup put a manager at 10%, rising toward 15% where a manager negotiates in place of an agent, and an entertainment lawyer at around 5%. Fully represented, plan on roughly a quarter of the gross going to the team — and note that only the agent's 10% is a published rule rather than trade practice.

When the money arrives is written down too, and the terms beat most freelance work anywhere. For a flat-deal writer paid at twice minimum or less, at least 50% of the compensation for a step is due upon commencement, a further 25% if the writer has not delivered within nine weeks, and the final 25% on delivery. Everyone else receives, on commencement, the greater of 10% of the agreed compensation or $6,867. Payment falls due within seven days of delivery, late payment carries interest at 1.5% a month, and payment cannot be made contingent on the company approving the material or on the picture finding financing. Half the fee before you write a word is not a bad arrangement.

Residuals are the part most people have backwards. There is no writer's residual for the worldwide theatrical release itself, in-flight showings included. Residuals begin when the film is reused: 1.2% of the distributor's gross receipts for free television, pay television, basic cable and new media, shared among all credited writers, plus 1.5% of producer's gross on the first $1,000,000 of disc revenue. In aggregate that stream is substantial — Variety, reporting on the guild's annual financial report, put total WGA West residuals at $535.5 million in 2025 — but it arrives from reuse over years, not from opening weekend.

The market you are selling into

The spec market is small and it is climbing. Spec-sale tallies compiled by Scott Myers of Go Into The Story, relayed by No Film School, count 11 publicly reported spec deals in 2023, 24 in 2024 and 28 in 2025, with 7 announced early in 2026. For scale, 1995 saw 173. These count announced deals rather than a complete registry — quiet sales go untracked — but the shape is unambiguous: the strike year was the trough, and the line has risen every year since.

Thin does not mean small. Alongside Alignment, 2024 produced a run of documented seven-figure spec deals: Julia Cox's Love of Your Life to Amazon MGM Studios at a reported $2,000,000 in October; Caroline Dries's Over Asking to Paramount Pictures in July, seven figures after a bidding war involving Amazon, Apple, Skydance, New Line and Sony; Ross Evans's How to Save a Marriage to Sony in March, also seven figures. Trade prices are gross deal values, and Dotan was an essentially unknown writer, which is precisely why his sale made news. The top of this market is reachable from a standing start, with a document rather than with capital.

The steadier numbers underneath tell a better story than the headlines do. Feature writing held its value while television contracted: Deadline, reporting on WGA West's annual financial report, put feature film writer earnings at about $521 million in 2025, up 7.2% year over year. The guild's own Writer Employment Snapshot counted 1,651 working screenwriters in the first three quarters of 2024, down 15% from 1,947 in 2022, while WGA-covered films released held flat at 198, 195, then 197. Roughly the same number of movies, a pot of similar size, fewer people dividing it. There is no meaningful average to set against that: only 5,072 people reported any earnings to WGA West in 2025, and a handful of very large deals dominate that total.

Why the arithmetic argues for writing it

Start from the entry cost. A screenplay is a single document one person produces alone, with no capital, no permission, no crew and no gatekeeper between the idea and the finished draft. Against that, the floor for selling it outright to a signatory is about $126,900, the median deal in the guild's own dataset is $450,000, and the ceiling is documented in the trades at seven figures. Very little else you can make by yourself carries a published six-figure floor. The odds on any one script are long; the loss on a failed one is time, and that time bought you a sample.

That sample is the point people miss. A spec's ordinary success is not a sale — it is the script that gets the meetings, and the meetings produce assignment work, where a company already controls the underlying material and hires you to write it in paid steps at those same minimums. None of those hires get announced, which is why the public picture of this business is so distorted. The other real route in is the WGA Low Budget Agreement, for films budgeted at $1,200,000 and below: an original screenplay pays $15,266 under a $200,000 budget, $30,532 from $200,000 to $499,999, and the full $61,064 from $500,000 up. Modest money, a produced film, a credit that changes every conversation afterward.

What you control is short, and all of it sits upstream of any negotiation. How many finished screenplays you have, because one spec is not a strategy and the writers who sell are rarely selling their first. Whether the material has an obvious production shape — a contained setting, a role an actor wants, a genre with a visible audience. Whether the pages read as a professional document, since format failures turn a reader into a proofreader inside a minute, and whether the logline makes a stranger ask a question. If the first script is still unwritten, the mechanics are learnable in an afternoon, and the drafting is what AI screenwriting software should be carrying. Each of those is a drafting problem before it is a business problem — solvable on a schedule, by you, starting this week.

The offer, when it comes, is priced against a finished screenplay — so finish the screenplay. StoryProp drafts in real screenplay elements with professional pagination, exports clean to FDX and Fountain under your own byline, and keeps every pass so you can try the bolder version of act three without losing the one you already trust.

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