Films With the Best Opening Scenes

A great opening scene is the story, compressed into its essential argument and delivered before the audience has time to settle in. The best openings establish tone, genre, character, stakes, and theme at once, through action, not through explanation, and they do it in a way that makes everything that follows feel inevitable.

I can tell that a film respects me within the first two minutes. Too many movies burn their first ten minutes on establishing shots and characters explaining their own lives to each other, and I’ve checked out before the story starts. The films here know what they are from the first image and say so before the audience has settled in. That confidence is what I want from any storyteller, on screen or on the page.

Each entry here identifies the technique at work. What the opening is doing beyond simply starting the film, and what fiction writers can take from the way these scenes are constructed.

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1. The Godfather (1972)

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“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

The film opens in darkness. Bonasera’s voice begins before the image arrives, “I believe in America”, and then the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the Godfather listening in his darkened study on his daughter’s wedding day.

In four minutes, without a single line of exposition, Coppola establishes everything: the Corleone family’s power, the nature of that power (it works in darkness while the world celebrates in the light outside), the code of obligation and loyalty that governs it, and Vito Corleone himself, a man who listens completely before he speaks.

The contrast between the dark study and the sunlit wedding outside, cutting between them throughout the opening, is the film’s central visual argument stated before any character has explained it. The Corleones exist in the shadow of legitimate society while being its mirror image. Everything the film will spend three hours showing is present in this opening in compressed form.

No film on this list deserves the top spot more. Coppola trusts the audience to sit in the dark with Bonasera and work out the rules, and I find that trust thrilling. Most directors would’ve opened on the wedding and all its noise. Coppola makes us wait in the study, and I’m engrossed from that moment on.

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2. Touch of Evil (1958)

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“A medium-sized bomb.”

Welles opens with a close-up of a bomb timer being set, and then the camera pulls back and up into a three-minute unbroken crane shot that follows the bomb being placed in a car trunk, the car moving through a Mexican border town, pedestrians passing, conversations starting and stopping, until the car crosses the border into America and the bomb detonates. The audience knows from the first shot that the car will explode. The entire sequence is the dread of knowing and being unable to stop it.

The technical achievement, a continuous take of this complexity in 1958, is only part of what the shot does. The unbroken nature of the take makes the audience complicit: they’ve been watching, they knew, they couldn’t intervene. Welles establishes the film’s moral world, one in which you can see what’s coming and can’t prevent it, in the form of the opening shot before the story begins.

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3. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

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“Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip.”

The first shot of Indiana Jones is a silhouette, a figure in a hat in a jungle. In the next ten minutes, before he’s exchanged meaningful dialogue with anyone, the audience knows everything essential about Indiana Jones: he’s competent, resourceful, willing to improvise, occasionally wrong in his confidence, and capable of the mixture of bravado and pragmatism that defines him. The boulder sequence is the sequence that every later action film has tried to replicate, and none have quite matched, because it introduces a character by testing him.

The opening also establishes the film’s tonal contract with the audience: this is an adventure film that takes its action seriously enough to make the danger real while maintaining a sense of fun that prevents the danger from becoming grim. The trap-filled temple, the betrayal, the boulder, the snake. Each element is both threatening and somehow enjoyable. Spielberg established this tonal balance in the first ten minutes and sustained it for two hours.

This is the opening I’d hand to anyone who claims action can’t reveal character. By the time the boulder rolls I know Indy better than I know the heroes of whole franchises, and he hasn’t said a meaningful sentence yet. Every imitator since has copied the traps. They forgot about the man running from them.

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4. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

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“The best thing for them boys to do is get the hell off this beach.”

Twenty-seven minutes of the Omaha Beach landing: handheld, desaturated, chaotic, without musical score, shot with a shutter speed that removes the fluid motion of conventional cinema and replaces it with the strobed clarity of combat photography. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński made deliberate technical choices to eliminate the comfortable distance of conventional war film cinematography and place the audience inside the experience. Veterans reported that the sequence matched what they remembered more closely than any prior film.

The sequence’s achievement is that it makes the stakes of the later story real in a way that no amount of conventional dramatic preparation could achieve. When the film asks the audience to care whether one man is found and brought home, the opening sequence has already established what the war costs per minute of engagement. The human cost of the landing gives everything that follows that weight.

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5. Apocalypse Now (1979)

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“Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon.”

The jungle dissolving into the ceiling fan dissolving into the jungle again, “The End” playing, helicopter rotor blades becoming ceiling fan blades.

Coppola opens inside Willard’s psychological state before establishing where he is or who he is. The superimposed images of the jungle over the Saigon hotel room communicate everything about Willard’s condition: he’s in the room but he’s also somewhere else, already consumed by a war that hasn’t yet given him a mission. The opening is the film’s argument stated as sensation before it’s stated as plot.

Willard’s narration, delivered over footage of him drunk and barely functional in his hotel room, establishes the unreliable narrator’s specific quality immediately: a man who sounds lucid and sounds like he’s a perspective on his own situation while being demonstrably incapable of governing himself. The gap between what the narration claims and what the image shows is the film’s central technique, established in the first two minutes.

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6. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

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“You brought two too many.”

Three gunmen wait at a train station. Leone gives them twelve minutes. A fly lands on a face and is allowed to crawl. A water drip falls rhythmically into a hat. Wind moves through the station. The men stretch and sweat. The train arrives late and leaves. A harmonica plays. Violence arrives in an instant after twelve minutes of accumulated tension.

Without a word of dialogue, the opening communicates everything: this is a film that will require your patience, that takes its time seriously, and that will make you feel every second of the wait before it delivers.

Leone’s opening is also a formal statement about what the Western means to him, not the fast-draw excitement of the Hollywood Western but the existential weight of men waiting to kill or be killed, for whom violence is the only available resolution to a world that offers nothing else. The twelve minutes of waiting are the film’s argument about the world it depicts.

Twelve minutes of flies and dripping water, and I wouldn’t cut a frame. I lose patience fast with filmmakers who mistake slow for deep, and Leone shows the difference better than anyone. Every second of that wait tightens something, so by the time the harmonica plays, the tension has nowhere left to go.

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7. The Dark Knight (2008)

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“Why so serious?”

The bank heist opening introduces the Joker through the technique of progressive revelation: a clown mask among clown masks, never distinguished from the others until the sequence of betrayals eliminates everyone else. Each of the Joker’s accomplices describes the plan’s architect (smart, cautious, crazy) without naming him, and then he removes his mask last, already the only one standing, and delivers the film’s thesis in a single line to a bank manager who has just been shot.

The audience has just watched a careful criminal operation executed by a man who improvises at every step. The opening establishes the paradox that makes the Joker terrifying for the entire film.

The heist structure, familiar enough that the audience tracks it without explanation, allows Nolan to focus entirely on the Joker’s specific qualities within a structure that needs no setup. The form is borrowed; the content is entirely original.

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8. Goodfellas (1990)

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“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

The film opens with a car driving through the night. A thumping in the trunk. The car stops. Three men get out. They open the trunk to finish what they started. Freeze frame on Henry Hill’s face, lit red. “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

The freeze frame on Henry’s face (which will be shown completing this scene only at the film’s end) is the film’s entire argument in a single image: the glamour and the consequence in the same expression, the man who wanted this and who has arrived at exactly where the wanting leads.

The line is the film’s other achievement, eleven words that contain the entire trajectory of the story in a single sentence. Henry wanted this. He got it. The film is what getting it looks like from beginning to end. Every later scene is the elaboration of that sentence, and the freeze frame is the elaboration of that look on his face.

That’s the best line of opening narration I know. Henry says it with pride, and we’ve just watched what the pride costs. Scorsese dares you to be charmed anyway, and I am. That’s the most uncomfortable compliment I can pay a film.

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9. Up (2009)

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“Adventure is out there!”

Pixar compresses an entire marriage (meeting, courtship, wedding, the discovery they can’t have children, growing old together, illness, death) into four wordless minutes set to Michael Giacchino’s score. By the time the montage ends and the actual story begins, the audience has fully invested in Carl Fredricksen’s loss and fully understands why an old man would tie balloons to his house and fly away from everything. The opening establishes the film’s emotional premise before a single scene of conventional storytelling has occurred.

The technical achievement is compression, an entire relationship’s emotional arc in the time most films spend on establishing shots. But the greater achievement is that the compression doesn’t feel truncated. Every beat is chosen for maximum emotional efficiency and placed in the exact sequence that produces the grief the film needs. It’s the best four minutes of filmmaking Pixar has produced, in a career of exceptional filmmaking.

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10. There Will Be Blood (2007)

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“I’m an oil man.”

Anderson opens with Daniel Plainview alone in the desert, mining silver with hand tools, falling down a mine shaft, climbing back up with a broken leg, and dragging himself to a land office to file his claim. Fifteen minutes of near-silence. No dialogue. No other characters. Jonny Greenwood’s score and the sounds of physical labor.

By the time Plainview speaks, the audience already knows the essential quality of the man: he’ll break himself in half before he stops, he works alone, and he’ll drag himself however far is necessary to claim what he’s found. The drive that will become pathological is already present in the opening sequence in its most purely physical form.

Anderson understood that Plainview’s obsessive drive had to be established before the film’s social and religious conflicts could matter. A man introduced through dialogue could be charming or deceptive. A man introduced through fifteen minutes of solitary physical labor is already known in his bones before he opens his mouth.

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11. Gravity (2013)

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“Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission.”

Cuarón opens with a long, slow take of the Earth from orbit (serene, beautiful, the blue of the planet from space) and astronauts at work in the silence of vacuum. For several minutes, nothing happens except the ordinary procedures of a spacewalk. Then debris arrives at orbital velocity and the film’s entire premise is activated in seconds. The contrast between the opening’s serenity and the catastrophe’s sudden onset is the opening’s primary achievement: having established the peace that space offers when it’s not trying to kill you, the catastrophe hits with its full weight.

Cuarón’s unbroken take, which continues for several minutes into the disaster sequence, keeps the audience in the experience instead of cutting to safety through editing. The continuous shot refuses the comfort of a cut between the calm and the chaos. That means the audience can’t reset emotionally between the two states. They’re already in the calm when the chaos begins.

Those first minutes in orbit awe me more than anything else I’ve seen in a movie. My reservation comes later. Once the debris hits, the film trades that serenity for one near-miss after another, and somewhere around the third or fourth I’m watching the machinery instead of the astronaut. The opening sets a bar the rest of the film can’t quite clear.

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12. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

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“I love rumor. Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing.”

Hans Landa arrives at a French dairy farmer’s home, asks for milk, sits down, discusses the differences between rats and squirrels, and proceeds to show complete knowledge of the Jewish family hidden under the floorboards. Landa conducts the entire sequence in conversational French and then switches to English, his choice, which he explains like a man who enjoys revealing that his interlocutor has no secrets. Tarantino shows no violence. He implies it entirely; it arrives only after Landa has left. The opening is twenty minutes of sustained dread delivered through politeness.

Christoph Waltz’s performance and Tarantino’s screenplay establish Landa as the most complete villain in the film’s world: a man who’s charming, intelligent, enjoying himself, and completely indifferent to the human cost of what he’s doing. The menace is in the charm. The horror is in the milk.

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13. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

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“Tonight, you pukes will sleep with your rifles.”

Kubrick opens on a line of young men having their heads shaved in sequence, each face passing through the frame as an individual and emerging indistinguishable from the others.

Then Hartman arrives. The opening sequence of Hartman’s abuse is the film’s most formally complete section: in ten minutes, Kubrick shows the mechanism of institutional identity replacement, the process by which individuals are broken down and reassembled as soldiers. It’s the entire film’s first half compressed into its essential action.

R. Lee Ermey’s Hartman (an actual Marine drill instructor whose improvisations became the script) delivers abuse that’s so specific and so relentlessly personalized that it communicates the film’s central point: the institution sees every weakness individually and attacks it. Institutional brutality that’s tailored to the individual is more disturbing than institutional brutality that’s generic, because it implies knowledge. The institution has assessed you and found your vulnerability.

Hartman scares me more than anything in the film’s second half, and I suspect Kubrick knew that would happen. Ermey makes every insult feel aimed at one specific recruit, and that specificity is what makes the barracks so hard to sit through. My one gripe is that nothing after the barracks matches it.

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14. The Matrix (1999)

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“He’s beginning to believe.”

The Wachowskis open with Trinity, not Neo, in a police confrontation that shows the film’s physics before the film explains them.

The bullet-time sequence, the impossible jumps, the wall-running: the audience sees what this world permits before anyone explains why it permits it. This is the correct order. The rule showed before it’s explained produces curiosity. If the film had opened with an explanation of the Matrix, the audience would evaluate the explanation. By opening with the demonstration, the audience accepts the rules and then receives the explanation.

In the opening, the film also introduces Trinity as its most capable character: she escapes a situation that kills Agents. That establishes Agents as dangerous. That makes the later revelation that Neo is more capable than Trinity carry actual weight. The opening provides the baseline from which all later character capabilities are measured.

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15. Se7en (1995)

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“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”

Kyle Cooper’s title sequence (razor blades, journal pages, spliced film, Nine Inch Nails) establishes John Doe’s inner world before the audience knows his identity.

The sequence is the killer’s psychology rendered as images: obsessive, careful, religious, operating at a remove from human contact. The audience has been inside John Doe’s preparation before the film’s first scene. When the detectives eventually discover the murders, their details feel inevitable instead of surprising because the opening sequence has already communicated the mind that produced them.

Fincher uses the title sequence, a formal element that most films waste, as a narrative device. The credits are the prologue. By the time the film begins, the killer’s presence is already established in the audience’s nervous system even though they haven’t yet seen him.

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16. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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“Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

Kubrick opens the film in prehistoric Africa: hominids, a waterhole, territory, and then the monolith. One hominid picks up a bone, understands it as a weapon, and kills. Kubrick cuts on the bone thrown in the air to a nuclear weapons satellite in orbit. The entire history of human technological development, from the first weapon to the ultimate weapon, in a single cut across four million years.

The Dawn of Man sequence is the film’s thesis expressed as pure cinema, requiring no dialogue and no explanation, complete in itself and announcing the film’s argument about intelligence, tools, and violence before the story’s present-tense action begins.

The match cut, bone to satellite, is the single most famous cut in cinema history and the most compressed statement of a film’s theme available in any opening sequence. Everything the film will spend two hours exploring is present in that cut.

The Dawn of Man sequence and that match cut belong here, and I’d defend both anywhere. The rest of 2001 tests my patience more than it rewards it. Kubrick said everything in one cut and then spent two hours saying it again more slowly. I admire the opening and I respect the ambition, and that’s as warm as I get about this one.

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17. Blade Runner (1982)

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“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

Scott opens on an extreme long shot of a dark industrial landscape, oil refineries flaring against a black sky, and then pulls slowly back to reveal Los Angeles 2019: a city of perpetual night, rain, and layered neon. Scott introduces no character.

No story begins. The opening sequence is a pure act of worldbuilding: Scott places the audience inside a world that already exists fully, before any character arrives to inhabit it. By the time Deckard appears, the film has completely established the world’s character.

He exists within a world the audience already knows instead of arriving in a world they’re discovering at the same time.

Those first images also set the film’s emotional tone, not excitement or adventure but melancholy beauty, a world that’s spectacular and dying at the same time. Every later image of Los Angeles 2019 inherits the emotional quality of the opening shot. I’ll take that opening shot over most of what follows it. The city is gorgeous and sad, and Scott builds it with more care than he gives Deckard, who never interests me the way Los Angeles does. I enjoy the film. I just wish its hero felt as alive as its skyline.

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18. The Social Network (2010)

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“You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

Sorkin opens with a four-minute conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Erica that moves so fast and covers so much ground that most viewers need a second viewing to catch everything. In four minutes, Zuckerberg shows every quality the film will spend two hours exploring: the intelligence, the social blindness, the kind of arrogance that mistakes intelligence for permission.

Erica’s final line to him (that he’ll be thought an asshole not because he’s a tech geek but because he’s an asshole) is the film’s entire thesis delivered as a breakup line four minutes in.

The speed of the opening is itself characterization. This is how Mark Zuckerberg’s mind moves, and if you can’t keep up you’re already in the position of everyone he’s ever left behind. The film places the audience inside the experience of someone outpacing them with no awareness that they’re doing it.

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19. Alien (1979)

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“In space, no one can hear you scream.”

Scott opens on the Nostromo drifting through space: silent, vast, indifferent. No music initially. The ship is impossibly small against the void.

The opening sequence (slow, quiet, letting the scale communicate itself) establishes the film’s central truth before a human being appears: you’re very small, you’re very alone, and the universe has no interest in your survival. When the crew wake from hypersleep, they wake into a world that the opening has already established as hostile to their presence.

Scott and cinematographer Derek Vanlint’s decision to hold on the Nostromo in silence (to let the audience feel the scale before introducing the characters it will overwhelm) is the opening’s essential decision. The alien isn’t the primary threat in Alien. The scale is. The alien is simply the mechanism by which the scale expresses its indifference.

That silent drift is the bravest choice in Alien, and it’s why the film frightens me. My reservation is the crew. Scott spends so long on the ship that the people aboard stay thin for too long, and I end up caring more about the dark around them than about who makes it out.

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20. No Country for Old Men (2007)

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“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.”

Bell’s voiceover opens over images of the West Texas landscape (flat, brown, relentlessly horizontal) describing a world that’s changed in ways he can’t account for, where violence has become something outside his experience and his comprehension. The Coens open with the ending’s emotional tone: defeat, incomprehension, the sadness of a man who has outlived the world he understood. Before Chigurh appears, before Moss finds the money, before the film’s plot begins, the audience already knows the emotional destination.

Everything that follows is the story of how Bell arrives at the voiceover that opened the film.

Beyond the setup, the opening also establishes the film’s central formal quality, the West Texas landscape as something vast and indifferent and older than the human drama being played out across it. The landscape doesn’t care about the money or Chigurh or Moss or Bell. The opening communicates this before the drama begins and holds it throughout.

What Every Great Opening Scene Does

Across these twenty openings, the technique varies enormously: twelve minutes of silence, four minutes of fast dialogue, a wordless montage, a single unbroken take, a title sequence. What they share is more fundamental than technique: every opening on this list communicates the film’s essential argument before the plot requires it to be stated.

The one thing no great opening does: begin with information the story doesn’t immediately need. Every second of every opening on this list is necessary. If a scene can be cut without losing something essential, it’s not the opening scene. It’s the scene before the opening scene. That shouldn’t exist.

Openings that warm up infuriate me, in film or in fiction. Every movie here threw its audience into the deep end and trusted them to swim, and none of them needed a prologue or a lecture to do it. If a filmmaker can make me understand a whole world in four minutes, a novelist has no excuse for spending twenty pages clearing their throat.

What film has the best opening scene?

The Shining’s hedge maze. Jaws’s beach. Pulp Fiction‘s diner. All strong arguments. Drop your nominations in the comments.