Length is a subject that travels by convention, so contradictory numbers circulate with equal confidence. This note gives the values we counted ourselves, and says where and how many.
An English screenplay page reads as roughly one minute, so a 120-minute feature runs about 120 pages. The conversion comes out of typography — with fixed margins and indents in a monospaced face, the amount that fits on a page is stable.
Ninety minutes is ninety pages; a hundred and thirty is a hundred and thirty. Competition guidelines asking for “about 120 pages” are working from the same convention.
This is where the numbers actually diverge. The figure in wide circulation is 1,800, which comes from an assumption about a standard manuscript sheet — not from counting a screenplay page.
Counting characters per page directly, using the page numbers printed on English scripts, gives a median of 817 (excluding spaces, n=4). An independent measure against running time converges at 827 per minute (14 English scripts; mean 858, standard deviation 129). One page is one minute, so the two should agree — and they do.
Which makes the familiar 1,800 about 2.2 times the measured value. Budget with it and scenes come out more than twice as long; estimate running time with it and you get less than half.
Korean fits far fewer characters into the same minute — about 385, excluding spaces.
| Item | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Feature running time | 약 120분 | Convention; 90–130 min is the common band |
| English script length | 약 120페이지 | One page ≈ one minute |
| Characters per English page | 약 820자 | Measured median 817/page (n=4) |
| Characters per English minute | 약 827자 | Measured median across 14 scripts |
| Characters per Korean minute | 약 385자 | Measured, excluding spaces |
| Korean : English ratio | 약 1 : 2.13 | Matches the known ~2× growth in translation |
The Korean-to-English ratio of roughly 1 : 2.13 matches the known result that Korean roughly doubles in character count when translated into English. The older pair (385 against 1,800) gives 1 : 4.7, which does not match — the ratio itself tells you which number was wrong.
Hollywood has a spec. Six inches of text width (ten characters per inch, so sixty per line), character names starting 3.7 inches from the left, parentheticals at 3.1, dialogue at 2.5. That is why the amount per page holds steady.
Korea has no such standard. Neither KOFIC nor the writers' guild publishes a page format. What is actually used is the convention of competition submission forms: A4, 20 mm left and right, 10 mm top and bottom plus 10 mm for header and footer, 11 pt, 160% line spacing.
The absence itself matters in practice. When a brief asks for a page count, you have to ask what typography it assumes — otherwise the same draft reads as a different length under every guideline.
Scene count is not fixed by convention the way page count is. It falls out of the average length of a scene, and genre sets that average — stories cut fast run near 45 seconds a scene, stories that stay with a character run closer to 70.
Divide 120 minutes across that band and you land between roughly 100 and 160 scenes, action at the low end and drama at the high. Above 200 or below 80 usually signals that genre and rhythm have come apart.
Hitting the average is not enough on its own. If every scene runs the same length there is no rhythm. Real scripts run several short scenes and then let one decisive scene stretch, and that long scene usually lands where a driving question gets answered — the same place a treatment measures.
Estimated running time for the Final Draft is calculated from the measured values above: 385 per minute for Korean, 820 per page for English, decided by looking at the text itself.
Scene length distribution shifts with genre. Export supports both Hollywood typography and Korean practice — the Korean side follows the submission-form convention above, since no standard exists.
For where each beat falls, see Save the Cat 15 Beats and the Hero's Journey 12.