Crime screenplays cover more dramatic territory than any other genre. Heists, murder investigations, drug operations, organized-crime epics, courtroom procedurals, undercover infiltrations, noir mysteries, true-crime adaptations: each subgenre demands different structural choices and different moral architectures, and the writer who treats "crime" as a single category produces scripts that fail to commit to the specific subgenre's expectations. The successful crime spec knows what kind of crime story it is and writes inside that frame with discipline.

This guide is for writers building original crime specs and producers evaluating them. It treats crime screenwriting as a craft with subgenre-specific demands. The films cited are anchors for analysis, drawn from across the crime genre's range; the principles each illustrates extend to scripts that share their structural DNA without mimicking their plots.

The single most useful frame for thinking about crime screenwriting: crime is a vehicle for moral examination, and the films that endure are the ones that take the moral examination seriously. A crime film that reduces to plot mechanics and surface tension entertains for ninety minutes and disappears. A crime film that uses its plot to interrogate something real lasts. The discipline applies across subgenres. Read alongside the broader principles of how to write a screenplay, crime craft is one of the most demanding applications because the genre's surface conventions can mask weak underlying work.

Subgenre Discipline: Knowing What Kind of Crime Story You Are Writing

The first commitment a crime screenplay makes is its subgenre. Heists are not procedurals. Procedurals are not noir. Noir is not organized-crime epic. The audience reads each subgenre with different expectations, and the script that does not commit to one tends to satisfy none.

The heist is the most structurally constrained subgenre. The audience expects setup (the team is assembled), planning (the heist is designed), execution (the heist runs), and aftermath (the consequences land). The structure is so legible that minor structural deviations register as authorial choices. Inception (2010) treats the heist conventions and bends them through a dream-layer architecture; the audience can track the structural inheritance because it is so familiar.

The procedural centers on investigators methodically pursuing perpetrators. The expected pleasures are competence porn, accumulating evidence, and the gradual narrowing of suspects. Zodiac (2007) is a master class in extending procedural form past its conventional length: the investigation never closes, and the script's subject becomes the obsessive cost of the investigation itself.

Noir is character-driven crime where the protagonist is morally compromised from the opening pages. The expected pleasures are the slow descent, the femme fatale or doomed romance, the pessimistic worldview. Chinatown (1974) is the canonical text; L.A. Confidential (1997) and Memento (2000) are second-generation applications.

The organized-crime epic is a multi-character study spanning years or decades. The expected pleasures are family dynamics, generational change, the tension between criminal pragmatism and human cost. The Godfather (1972) is the genre's organizing text; Goodfellas (1990) is its rebuttal at street level; Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is the recent extension into historical epic.

Writers building crime specs need to identify their subgenre on page one. The script that opens like a noir cannot pivot to procedural at page sixty without losing its audience. The script that opens like a heist cannot reveal it is actually an organized-crime epic in act two. Subgenre commitment is not a constraint; it is the contract with the reader that lets every other craft choice land.

Moral Architecture: The Genre's Defining Question

Crime is the genre most explicitly built around moral inquiry. Every crime film, even the breeziest heist, takes a position on the relationship between crime and the people who commit, investigate, suffer, or benefit from it. The films that endure take that position deliberately. The films that fade default to a position without examining it.

The Godfather positions itself sympathetically with the Corleones. The audience experiences Michael's transformation from outsider to capo not as horror but as gravitational. The film's moral argument is that the family business is a kind of inevitability for someone with Michael's mix of intelligence, wound, and circumstance. That argument is debatable; the film commits to it.

Goodfellas (1990) positions itself differently. Henry Hill's voiceover lets the audience inside the lifestyle's appeal and then withdraws the lifestyle's protections in act three. Scorsese's argument is that mob life is intoxicating until it is not, and that the not-intoxicating-anymore moment arrives without warning. The film's moral position is not Henry's nostalgia but the gap between Henry's nostalgia and the reality the script methodically documents.

No Country for Old Men (2007) takes a third position: that the moral universe the genre presupposes has eroded, that good and evil are no longer the categories that organize criminal violence, and that the older men who once kept the moral framework are watching its disappearance without being able to arrest it. The script's moral argument is more difficult than the genre's conventions and is part of why the film outlasts most of its peers.

Writers building crime specs should write down, in a single sentence, what their script believes about crime. The sentence is the script's moral spine. Scripts whose moral spines are clear produce scenes that line up with the spine; scripts without clear moral spines produce scenes that contradict each other in ways the writer cannot diagnose.

Setup Work: Why the First Half of a Crime Screenplay Carries the Second

Crime screenplays live or die in the first half. The setup work, establishing the world, the players, the rules, the moral economy, is what makes the second half's reversals land. Scripts that rush the setup produce climaxes that fail because the audience has not been trained to read them.

Heat (1995) spends ninety pages building the parallel character architecture before its central diner scene can land. The Godfather spends nearly an hour at Connie's wedding establishing the Corleone family's social and business world before any plot mechanics begin. Goodfellas uses extensive voiceover and montage to compress fifteen years of Henry Hill's induction into the lifestyle so that the act-three collapse can register as collapse rather than as plot.

The discipline these films share is patience with setup. The audience does not feel the time investment because the setup is itself dramatic; characters are revealed, relationships are established, the world's rules become legible. By the time the script's central pressures begin to operate, the audience has invested enough that the pressures register as pressure rather than as plot.

Writers who shortcut the setup tend to write scripts that read as event lists. Scenes happen, plots advance, but the audience has not been given the time to care. The fix is structural: design the first act around the establishment rather than around the inciting incident, and let the inciting incident land at the moment the audience has enough context to feel its weight. The principle is closely related to the structural work covered in the breakdown of Heat (1995), where eighty-nine pages of parallel work make the diner scene possible.

Character Through Decision Under Pressure

Crime, like action, reveals character through decision under pressure. The difference is that crime's pressure is moral as well as physical. The protagonist is asked not just whether they will survive, but whether they will betray, whether they will keep silent, whether they will participate, whether they will confess.

The Departed (2006) is built on this. Costigan and Sullivan are inverse characters revealed through how each handles the pressure of impersonation. Costigan's identity erodes; Sullivan's identity hardens. Neither character announces what they are; both demonstrate it through choices the script extracts from them. Pulp Fiction (1994) operates similarly with Vincent and Jules: the same situation produces different choices, and the choices reveal what each man is when stripped of context.

The technique connects to broader craft questions about building morally complex antagonists who carry equal weight to protagonists. Crime is the genre where this principle is most often tested because the genre's plots routinely put protagonists and antagonists in direct moral conversation. The strongest crime scripts treat both as fully constructed; the weakest treat the antagonist as obstacle and the protagonist as occasion.

Ending the Crime Script

The ending of a crime film does as much work as its opening. The audience reads the ending against the moral architecture the script has built, and the ending either pays off the architecture or reveals the architecture was inconsistent.

Chinatown's ending is famously bleak: the villain wins, the hero fails, the system that produced the crime continues. The ending pays off the film's moral position that some institutions cannot be reformed by individual heroism. No Country for Old Men's ending refuses closure: the protagonist as audience identifies one is killed offscreen, the actual protagonist watches from the margins, the killer escapes. The ending pays off the film's argument about moral erosion.

The Departed's ending is the inverse: every major character dies, the moral universe is restored only through near-total destruction. The Coens' ending is the alternative: the moral universe is not restored, and the story closes on the gap between what the older sheriff understands and what the younger generation will not.

Each of these endings is consistent with the script's setup. The ending is not surprising in the sense of unprepared; it is consistent in the sense of paid off. Writers building crime specs should write the ending early and check that every prior scene either supports or productively complicates the ending. Scenes that do neither are decoration. Scenes that contradict the ending are warning signs; either the scene needs to change or the ending does.

Dialogue and Voice in Crime Writing

Crime dialogue carries more genre weight than dialogue in most other forms. The audience expects criminals to speak in voices distinct from civilians, investigators to speak in voices distinct from suspects, and the subgenre's specific milieu to color every line. Writers who default to neutral dialogue across all characters produce scripts that read as flat regardless of plot quality.

Pulp Fiction (1994) is the contemporary master class. Tarantino's criminals speak in a hybrid of street idiom and unexpected literary register: hitmen discussing fast-food culture, mob bosses quoting biblical passages with theatrical conviction. The dialogue is deeply specific to its subgenre and to the film's particular tonal commitment. Other writers who have attempted this register without Tarantino's specificity tend to produce dialogue that reads as imitation. The lesson is not to imitate Tarantino but to commit as deliberately as he does to a specific dialogue strategy.

Goodfellas (1990) operates in a different register: working-class New York Italian-American speech rendered with documentary specificity. The voiceover and the dialogue together create a dense linguistic environment that is the film's primary atmosphere. The audience learns the Goodfellas world through how these characters speak as much as through what they do.

Zodiac (2007) operates in the procedural register: investigators speaking in clipped, jargon-heavy English appropriate to the police and journalist worlds. The dialogue is realistic in a way that is itself a stylistic choice; the film commits to the realism so completely that any deviation would jar.

The discipline these films share is dialogue calibrated to character and subgenre simultaneously. Writers who master this produce crime scripts whose voices carry as much information as their plots. The technique connects to the broader work of planting setups that pay off later, because in crime writing the dialogue is often where the planting happens, with throwaway lines in act one carrying load-bearing weight in act three.

The Crime Spec Market in 2026

Crime remains one of the most consistently financed genres at the spec level, but the specific subgenres that move have shifted. Indie thrillers and horror have absorbed much of what used to be crime production at the lower budgets. Streaming has absorbed most of what used to be theatrical procedural and noir. The premium spec sales for crime scripts in 2026 cluster in two areas: contained heist or thriller scripts at three to fifteen million budget brackets, and prestige-eligible adaptations of true-crime or literary source material at higher budgets.

True-crime adaptations specifically have become the most active subsegment of contemporary crime production. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is the recent prestige example; the broader streaming-platform appetite for true-crime documentaries has translated into significant fictional-adaptation activity. Writers acquiring underlying rights to true-crime source material need to budget legal review carefully; the chain-of-title questions are more complex than for original crime fiction and can stall productions that did not do the diligence.

Original noir at indie budgets continues to find acquirers but at low volume. The genre's ambition tends to outscale its commercial appeal. Writers attempting noir specs should know that the path runs primarily through festival placement and specialty distribution rather than through general spec sale.

Procedural at theatrical scale has narrowed sharply since 2018. Television has absorbed most procedural production, and the procedural feature is now an unusual sale. Zodiac and Prisoners (2013) represent a kind of feature procedural that has become harder to finance at theatrical scale.

What Working Writers Should Take From Crime Craft

Three lessons from crime translate to scripts in adjacent genres.

Subgenre commitment is craft, not constraint. The script that knows whether it is a heist or a procedural can make every other craft choice deliberately. The script that does not produces ambiguity that reads as confusion.

Moral architecture is the genre's spine. Every crime script takes a position on the moral universe of crime. Scripts whose positions are deliberate produce scenes that compound; scripts whose positions are accidental produce scenes that contradict.

Setup is the engine. Crime scripts that invest their first half in establishment produce second halves that pay off. Crime scripts that race to plot produce second halves that fail to land because the audience has not been given the time to invest. The principle generalizes; crime just makes the failures most legible.

The crime script that endures is one that understood what kind of crime story it was, what the script believed about its subject, what setup work the second half required, and how the ending would pay off the architecture. The genre's surface conventions are easy to imitate; the structural work underneath is what separates working crime specs from competent ones. Working writers learn to recognize the difference and to apply it.

The producers who acquire crime scripts in 2026 are looking for the same diagnostic clarity. They read for subgenre commitment first because subgenre commitment is the script's earliest legible craft choice. They read for moral architecture next because moral architecture is what makes the script defensible to the financing partners who will ask what the film is actually about. They read for setup discipline because rushed setups produce films that fail in the third act, where their money is most exposed. The reader's questions and the writer's craft questions are the same questions; the writer who answers them on the page is the writer whose script gets made. Everything else, voice, set pieces, dialogue rhythm, follows from those answers.