A stranger opening a spec script does not start with theme. They start with the PDF footer. One hundred and five pages means “this will feel like a feature.” One hundred and forty means “this will take the afternoon.” Eighty-eight can mean lean horror — or an unfinished second act. That first impression is a page count signal, not a runtime measurement and not a grade.
The commodity answer on the web is still “90 to 120.” It is not wrong. It is incomplete. It does not say which contests publish a full-draft window, which first-five-page caps are not length rules, or how to use a word corpus that never stored pagination. The Screenplay Length desk is the longer answer: reader bands, official windows, and a private checker that stays in the browser.
What the number is actually doing
Page count is an early estimate of two things at once: how long the read will feel, and whether the writer appears to know the job. A cold reader uses it the way a traveler uses a posted drive time — useful until the road disagrees.
That is why one page per minute is a planning convention, not a stopwatch. Dialogue-heavy pages run faster on screen. Action-heavy pages run slower. A table read will tell you more about runtime than the footer. The table-read planner estimates room time from dialogue and action words for that reason.
Title pages do not count. Cheated margins do not count. A word total from Final Draft or Fountain is not a page count. Confirm the visible PDF before a contest, lab, or manager asks for a number.
Three clocks, not one target
A feature spec, a half-hour sample, and an hour pilot are different jobs. Forcing a 110-page feature habit onto a half-hour draft produces a sample that reads like a truncated movie. The desk keeps those clocks separate.
Genre bands sit inside the feature clock. Comedy and horror often finish shorter. Drama has more range. Action and sci-fi can justify more pages when the scale is on the page — they do not excuse empty ones. A 102-page comedy and a 102-page drama can both be finished. A 130-page comedy usually is not.
Official windows are a third clock. The reviewed Academy Nicholl range is 80–125 pages. That is a contract for a named cycle, not a second opinion on craft. Sample-only caps — first five pages, first ten — are not length rules. The Submission Center is where those windows live; the desk only surfaces spans that actually describe a full draft.
Words when you do not have pages yet
The Screenplay Anatomy Atlas measures 2,077 structurally usable MovieSum records in aggregate. Median story words sit near 21,579. Median scenes sit near 130. MovieSum does not preserve stable pagination, so those numbers are not pages. They are the second clock when you have a draft file and not a laid-out PDF.
The length checker can open a Final Draft .fdx and place those story words on the distribution. Use that when you do not have a PDF yet. Do not write the implied number on a cover letter. The PDF is the count a reader will see. Page numbers inside Final Draft are not that count.
What to do with a number that sits outside the band
Short can be a feature if the story is finished. Long is not a fail by itself; unexplained length is a common pass reason. Compare two recent produced comps in your lane. Cut empty late pages before you cut the scene that earns the ending. Use the screenplay analyzer for scene rhythm and dialogue share — length tells you the clock; rhythm tells you where the draft spends it.
Then name a save point. A shorter pass should not erase the longer one. Plot keeps the laid-out page count on the draft you are actually writing, so the next cut is a choice, not a disappearing file.