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By Steven Hartman · June 24, 2024
From campy horror to heartfelt fun, summer movies have ways to move us as the temperatures heat up. What makes a great summer movie? Is it the way the sweltering heat makes emotions run high? Is the taste of freedom being away from work and school? Regardless, movies that take place in the summer are filled with the desire to have fun, spend time with friends and family, and even go a little mad when things get hot.
If you’re headed to the beach or the pool or want a good script with summer vibes, here is a great place to start.
Screenplay by: Harmony Korine
Sure, Spring Breakers is not a summer movie, but it throws out the summertime vibe as four cash-strapped college girls decide to break the law and get in some danger to find the money to enjoy Spring Break. The adventure continues in Florida, where they come across a drug dealer who all but recruits them into the fun, with some of the girls spiraling out of control, leading to danger they never expected.
Download the script!Read More: Pushing Boundaries with A24’s Indie Scripts
Screenplay by: John Michael Hayes and Cornell Woolrich
A photojournalist with a broken leg is going a bit stir-crazy sitting in his New York apartment all summer long. He constantly peeps out his window with his camera at the building across the street until he suspects that one of the tenants murdered his wife.
He gets his police officer friend, caretaker, and girlfriend involved in solving the mystery, even though they all continue to poke holes in his theories and find proof of the man’s innocence. Is the summer heat that is refusing to break getting to him? Or did the elusive man really murder his wife?
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Screenplay by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb, Howard Sackler, John Milius, and Robert Shaw
The movie that launched the summer movie blockbuster and Steve Spielberg’s career, Jaws has the scares that make people think twice before entering the water.
This creature feature is about a menacing shark wreaking havoc on the beaches of Amity Island. But this being the summer season and the time when the island thrives economically, the mayor refuses to close the beaches. It’s up to the town sheriff, a shark specialist, and a kooky, rugged sailor to hunt down the dangerous shark and save the island from continued disaster. Luckily, the world has learned its lesson and no longer puts a little economic gain over human life.
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Screenplay by: Brian Doyle-Murray, Harold Ramis, and Douglas Kenney
This classic comedy follows a group of caddies working a snooty, exclusive golf course. The film focuses on a young caddie determined to raise money to go to college and the comedic antics of those around him.
But more than that, Caddyshack looks at the haves and the have-nots, how people with means treat each other, and the silly rituals that go along with playing the links. There is also a destructive gopher and the groundskeeper who will stop at nothing to get rid of it. This movie features a murderers’ row of comedic minds from the late-1970s and early-1980s, including Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Chevy Chase.
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Screenplay by: Victor Miller and Ron Kurz
Kids all over the country will spend time at camp in the summertime learning how to build campfires, spending time on the water, and enjoying a little independence away from family. The counselors, who aren’t much older, get to fall in love and have their own adventures. Then there’s Camp Crystal Lake.
As the counselors prepare to reopen the camp with a dark past, they are subjected to the horrors of violent death. Taking a cue from previous teenage slasher movies like Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th is a classic horror film that birthed a memorable villain…just not in this first film.
Download the script!Read More: Top 10 Most Influential Slasher Films
Screenplay by: John Hughes
Also known as National Lampoon’s Vacation, this movie set off a series of films about the Griswold family and their whacky adventures. The goal of the patriarch Clark (Chevy Chase) is to go on a memorable cross-country trip with his family to Walley World. But the trip isn’t as easy as it seems, as they encounter a series of mishaps between Chicago and Los Angeles. Even as Clark’s optimism wanes, he refuses to let anything get in the way of family fun at Walley World.
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Screenplay by: John Hughes
The Great Outdoors has all the hallmarks of a John Hughes-written story around family or friends who get on each other’s nerves but end up coming together for a heart-warming conclusion.
The movie follows Chet (John Candy who always plays the well-meaning husband/father) who is thrown into crazy circumstances and decides to re-live the good old days at a family resort. The wrench that gets thrown into his ideal plans involves his obnoxious brother-in-law, Roman (Dan Aykroyd), who shoves his way into the vacation. It’s a classic PG comedy at the tail-end of the 1980s before they grew out of fashion.
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Screenplay by: Spike Lee
New York City has its fair share of scorching summer days, and many movies have used this aspect to turn up the heat on conflict. Do The Right Thing takes this to a whole new level as Spike Lee’s masterpiece follows a young Mookie (Spike Lee) going through a day filled with rising racial tensions in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The hatred grows until it boils over into violence in this look at bigotry in Brooklyn and how several races and ethnicities view each other.
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Screenplay by: Laurice Elehwany
Vada (Anna Chlumsky) is a young girl who finds death all around. Her mother died when she was a baby and her father owns a funeral parlor. One summer, a woman enters her father’s life and they begin to fall in love. Vada wants to break them up and will stop at nothing to accomplish this.
She recruits her friend Thomas (Macaulay Culkin) to help in this scheme. Vada and Thomas are somewhat outcasts with one being a tomboy and the other an unpopular kid with a lot of allergies. This sweet yet heartbreaking, coming-of-age film is a classic about the love between friends and family.
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Screenplay by: David M. Evans and Robert Gunter
When Scott Smalls moves to a new town, his mom encourages him to play outside and get into trouble. Scott loves baseball. Unfortunately, he never had a dad who taught him how to catch, throw, or hit.
When this young kid meets a ragtag group of baseball players who play an endless game in a nearby sandlot, the leader of the pack takes Scott on and teaches him the game. But baseball isn’t their only fun in their summer—trips to the pool, a carnival, and a lost ball signed by Babe Ruth helps make this a classic film with often-quoted lines and memorable characters.
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Screenplay by: Roderick Thorp and Jonathan Hensleigh
Although not originally a Die Hard script, Warner Bros. bought it to turn into a Lethal Weapon sequel and ended up selling it to 20th Century Fox who turned it into the second Die Hard (1988) sequel. The result was a great blockbuster action flick in New York on a sweltering summer day. A terrorist named Simon who has a vendetta against John McClane (Bruce Willis) sends him all around the city solving riddles and finding bombs. Along for the ride is Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson) who gets dragged into McClane’s bad day. But it’s all a cover for another crime (don’t worry, that’s not really spoiling it).
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Screenplay by: Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan
One summer day on a train speeding through Europe, a man and a woman meet and end up spending an evening together in Vienna. The emotional bonds that drive them together will only hurt them when they part in the morning. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) has a flight he must catch and Celine (Julie Delpy) has her studies to return to. The conversations they have and the love they begin to feel for one another conflict with the impending time when they are forced to go their separate ways.
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Screenplay by: Lois Duncan and Kevin Williamson
In the late-1990s there was a new surge of horror movies about a group of teenagers hunted down by a mysterious figure. I Know What You Did Last Summer presented a small cast of soon-to-be big stars such as Sarah Michelle Geller, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Ryan Phillippe from the writer of Scream (1996) (the film that reintroduced the “kids are dying/where are the parents?” genre).
The movie follows a group of recent high school grads who end up striking down a mysterious man on a windy road after a night of partying. Instead of calling the police, they dump the body. When they all return to their small fishing town the following summer, a figure in fisherman’s slicker starts on a killing spree insisting to these teenagers, “I know.”
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Screenplay by: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
This quirky Wes Anderson movie follows two 12-year-old kids, a young boy scout and a young girl on the island with her family, who decide to leave their respective caretakers and take off into the wilderness. Both have been corresponding and decided that now is the time to run away together. Unfortunately, a storm soon approaches making the grown-ups worry and eager to find them.
Download the script!Read More: 24 Short Films Wes Anderson Wants You to See
Screenplay by: Chris Galletta
The Kings of Summer was a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and is an independent film about a trio of adolescent boys eager to escape their lives. They head out into the forest to build their own house and create an environment where they are the kings of their domain. Nothing is as easy as it seems as these three boys who have run away are now considered kidnapped and their lives in the woods aren’t going according to plan. A coming-of-age comedy with a lot of emotion, this is a great script to read if you’re trying to write authentic adolescent dialogue.
Download the script!Read More: Growing Pains: The Best Coming-of-Age Movies and Scripts
Screenplay by: James Ivory, Luca Guadagnino, and Walter Fasano
Call Me by Your Name starts unassuming. It’s about a family spending time in 1980s Italy with a son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) who spends his time reading, playing music, and enjoying his time in a different country. His relationship with his parents is even pretty good.
What upends this peaceful little existence is the entrance of his father’s research assistant who Elio develops a crush on which blossoms into a relationship. Throughout the summer, their love grows for one another even as each one knows that it must remain secret and will end in only a matter of weeks.
Download the script!—
A season can play a role in the screenplay and stories you choose to tell. Summer is the ideal time for these movies to take place and is a pivotal piece in how they are told. Many of these screenplays have situations such as heat waves in the city, family bonding, or a brief moment in time that use summer as more than just a season, but a catalyst to help tell the story.
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