How many lines of dialog in a typical feature film?

Just a ballpark figure will be fine. 500?

They say 1 page of a screenplay usually translates into 1 minute of screentime. If you want to take a general stab at it (purely unscientifically), find a few different screenplay pages (you can dig them up on the internet), count the number of lines on a random page, average that out and do the math from there.

There are lots of scripts out there. Here are some from rather typical movies. I was going to try to do some counting via computer but not everything is real dialogue and the definition of a line is up for debate.

Yeah, that’s where I got the 500 number. I was figuring about 5 lines per page in a typical 100 page script. I was hoping for a more official number from a movie buff or someone in the biz.

I’m working with a game developer who (I think) is going overboard in the dialog department and I wanted to compare what they’re proposing with the amount of writing that goes into a typical screenplay.

I work in subtitling. I’d say the average feature film has between 900 and 1400 subtitles. This doesn’t directly translate into 900-1400 sentences of dialogue, since some sentences might be too long for a single subtitle and sentences from two speakers might share a subtitle. For ballpark figure, I’d say about 1100.

What are we talking about when we say a “line?” A single dialogue element (which can vary from one word to a ginourmous speech) or a sentence, or an actual line on the page?

Let’s say the first. We’ll work with the notion that really long speeches and single-words average out to a “line.” In that case, screenplays I read usually have around 1000 dialogue elements total. On average, between 7 and 9 dialogue elements per page.

The first. That’s how the developer in question is counting. Apples to apples.

Thanks, guys. From what AudreyK and **friedo ** are saying 1000 lines is about the right order of magnitude.