MATERIALISTS(2025)

Title: Materialists

Written by: Celine Song

Draft date: 04/08/2024

LOGLINE

A sharp-tongued New York matchmaker who treats love as an equation of height, income, and attractiveness finds her clinical worldview shaken when a client is assaulted on a date she arranged, forcing her to choose between a wealthy "unicorn" boyfriend who offers her everything on paper and the broke ex she never stopped loving.

Genre: Romance, Drama

Sub-genre: Romantic Drama, Romantic Comedy, Coming-of-Age Drama

Keywords: Matchmaking, Workplace, New York City, Female Protagonist, Class Divide, Wealth Disparity, Materialism vs. Love, Dating Culture, Ex-Lovers, Love Triangle, Stone Age Framing Device, Wedding, Single Life

MPA Rating: R (pervasive strong language throughout, sexual situations, references to sexual assault)

Budget Tier: Medium ($10M–$40M) — multiple upscale Manhattan restaurants, a lavish wedding venue, an upstate wedding venue, a Tribeca penthouse, a Brooklyn walk-up, a prehistoric field sequence requiring costuming and outdoor shooting, and a New York City Marriage Bureau interior

Pages: 108

Time Period: Present, with brief flashbacks to approximately 7 years prior and a framing device set in 20,000 B.C. Main action spans roughly 2-3 months.

Locations: Approximately 60% across various upscale Manhattan restaurants, a matchmaking office bullpen, and Harry's Tribeca penthouse. 15% at two wedding venues (one lavish Manhattan hotel, one rustic upstate). 10% in John's run-down Brooklyn apartment and surrounding streets. 10% in Lucy's modest studio apartment and Sophie's apartment. 5% in prehistoric open fields (stone age prologue/epilogue). Special requirements include a period-appropriate stone age setting with handmade tools and cave dwelling, a spectacular high-end wedding reception, an upstate outdoor wedding viewed from a distance, and a New York City Marriage Bureau interior for the credits sequence.

Lead: Female, mid-30s, race/ethnicity unspecified but implied American. Attractive, sharp, composed in professional settings but privately insecure about her economic status. A former actress turned elite matchmaker who views relationships through a transactional lens while secretly yearning for something she cannot quantify.

Comparables: Past Lives (Celine Song's prior work — two people whose romantic connection is complicated by divergent life paths and timing), Jerry Maguire (a protagonist whose professional crisis catalyzes a personal reckoning about love vs. business), The Big Sick (a romantic drama where cultural and economic expectations clash with genuine feeling), Two for the Money (a world where human value is reduced to numbers and the protagonist must confront the moral cost).

SYNOPSIS

In 20,000 B.C., a YOUNG CAVEMAN crafts stone tools and gathers wildflowers, then walks across rough terrain to present them to a YOUNG CAVEWOMAN at her family's cave. She has a crush on him and offers him food. He gives her the tools and flowers, fashions a ring from a bloom, and places it on her finger. They gaze at each other in love.

In present-day New York, LUCY (mid-30s), a matchmaker at the elite firm Adore, scouts a handsome man on the street and hands him a business card. She meets her client SOPHIE (39), a lawyer, at a French bistro. Lucy has just learned that Sophie's date JAMES rejected Sophie, calling her fat. Lucy delivers the news gently and pivots to pitching a new match, MARK (48), a doctor. Sophie resists, skeptical about his height and age. Lucy assures Sophie she will marry the love of her life.

At the Adore office, Lucy's colleagues celebrate her ninth client marriage. On the fire escape, Lucy confides to recruiter DAISY that Sophie has no standout quality and is nearly impossible to place. Daisy asks if Lucy is seeing anyone. Lucy jokes she will die alone or get a rich husband.

At client CHARLOTTE's lavish wedding, HARRY (late 30s), the groom's brother — tall, handsome, wealthy — notices Lucy networking. He switches place cards to sit beside her at the singles table. Their flirtation is interrupted when Lucy's ex-boyfriend JOHN (mid-30s), a struggling theater actor working as a cater waiter, delivers her usual drink order from memory. Later, Lucy finds Charlotte in tears before the ceremony. Charlotte confesses she wants to marry PETER because he makes her sister jealous. Lucy validates this, and Charlotte proceeds with the wedding. Harry's FATHER gives a moving speech about love. Outside, Lucy and John smoke and reminisce. John kisses her. She rides home in John's old car instead of Harry's limo. A flashback reveals their breakup seven years earlier — a vicious fight about parking and money that exposed Lucy's shame about poverty and John's inability to provide for her.

Lucy begins dating Harry. Over a series of expensive dinners, she interrogates him with matchmaker precision. Harry is charmed. At the office, Lucy learns that Sophie was assaulted by Mark on their date. VIOLET, Lucy's boss, forbids her from contacting Sophie, citing legal protocol. Lucy is devastated, reviewing her notes on Mark and finding no warning signs.

Lucy attends John's play opening with Harry. John and Lucy share intense chemistry at the after-party. John notices Lucy is upset. When she attributes it to work, John dismisses matchmaking as trivial, which enrages her. In bed with Harry, Lucy notices large, symmetrical scars on his legs. At a client meeting, Lucy's composure cracks. She tells client PATRICIA that she is not a catch and cannot customize a man. Patricia cancels her membership. Violet puts Lucy on mandatory leave.

Alone in her apartment, Lucy stalks Sophie's Instagram, discovers Sophie frequents the same French bistro, and waits outside it for hours. Sophie appears. Lucy chases her through the streets. Sophie confronts Lucy furiously, calling her a pimp who treated her as worthless merchandise. Lucy can only apologize.

Back at Harry's penthouse, Lucy discovers an engagement ring in his suitcase and confronts the scars on his legs. Harry confesses he and his brother underwent limb-lengthening surgery — gaining six inches — calling it an investment. Lucy tells Harry she is not in love with him and he is not in love with her. Harry is afraid he is incapable of love. Lucy assures him it will be easy when it is real.

Lucy arrives unannounced at John's Brooklyn apartment. He drives her upstate. They crash a stranger's wedding, slow dance, and kiss. John pulls away, demanding to know if they are getting back together or if she is using him. Lucy confesses she is materialistic and cold, that she is doing math even now. John asks how she can still love him. She walks away sobbing — then sees a missed call from Sophie. Mark is buzzing Sophie's apartment. Lucy calls Sophie and talks her through it while John drives them back to the city. They arrive. Mark has fled. Lucy stays on Sophie's couch overnight.

At dawn, John tells Lucy he loves her — simply, as the easiest thing. Lucy says she loves him too. John makes his offer: a lifetime guarantee of love, with nothing else to give. Lucy accepts. She helps Sophie get a restraining order and sets her up with BRIAN (36), a dentist, who likes her back. Violet calls to offer Lucy a promotion to head matchmaker. Lucy, who had planned to resign, says she will think about it. John pulls a flower from a bodega bouquet, fashions it into a ring, and proposes. Lucy nods yes. The film ends at the New York City Marriage Bureau, where John and Lucy wait for their number to be called, and among the crowd of couples, the young caveman and cavewoman from the prologue can be spotted.

COMMENTS

PREMISE — Excellent

The premise — a matchmaker who reduces love to metrics confronts the limits of her own framework — is inherently rich with tension, because the protagonist's expertise is the very thing preventing her from living authentically. The central dramatic question, whether love can survive Lucy's relentless cost-benefit analysis, provides a clean engine for both comedy and heartbreak. The love triangle between Lucy, a wealthy "unicorn," and a broke ex-boyfriend externalizes the internal conflict with satisfying symmetry: Harry represents the math working out, John represents the math failing, and the choice between them is the choice between Lucy's ideology and her heart. The matchmaking world is a sharp lens for examining how contemporary dating culture commodifies people, and the stone age framing device elevates the premise from romantic comedy to something more thematically ambitious — arguing that love predates and transcends every system humans have built to contain it. The premise compares favorably to the territory of Jerry Maguire (professional crisis as catalyst for romantic awakening) while occupying a more satirical, anthropological register. Where it distinguishes itself is in treating the transactional language of dating not merely as something to be overcome but as a genuine worldview with its own logic and appeal, making Lucy's eventual rejection of it more costly and therefore more dramatic.

STRUCTURE — Good

The narrative builds cleanly from Lucy's professional competence through escalating crises to a romantic resolution, with structural beats landing at proportionally sound positions. The inciting incident — Harry switching place cards at the wedding — occurs around page 18 (roughly 17%), which is slightly late but acceptable given the extended prologue and world-building. Lucy's commitment to dating Harry arrives around page 48 (44%), functioning as the midpoint, while the Sophie assault revelation at page 54 (50%) serves as a destabilizing reversal that reframes the second half. The break with Harry at pages 80-83 (roughly 75%) is well-positioned as the "all is lost" beat, and the climactic sequence — Sophie's call, the drive back, Lucy and John's dawn confession — peaks around pages 97-103 (90-95%). The client montages in pages 36-38 and 64-67 risk feeling episodic, as each meeting introduces a new character who exists solely for thematic commentary and then vanishes. However, these scenes are structurally justified because they progressively erode Lucy's faith in her own profession, building toward the Patricia explosion (67) that triggers her leave. The flashback to the parking fight (31-35) is well-placed, arriving exactly when context about why Lucy and John broke up is needed to understand the stakes of her choice. The stone age bookends create a satisfying circular structure, with the flower-ring motif paying off precisely in the final scene (107-108).

CHARACTER — Good

Lucy is a fully realized protagonist with clear backstory (former actress, raised poor), a specific want (financial security through marriage), a deeper need (to feel worthy of love without a price tag), and an active approach to her goal that generates conflict at every turn. Her arc completes when she accepts John's proposal — choosing love over math — but the resolution earns its power because the material never pretends Lucy has shed her materialism entirely. She is still weighing tradeoffs on page 96 even as she declares love. Harry functions effectively as both a viable romantic option and a mirror for Lucy's transactional worldview. His leg-lengthening revelation (78-80) is the most inventive character detail, transforming him from a fantasy object into a person who, like Lucy, has literally restructured himself for the marketplace. John is compelling because his self-awareness about his inadequacy (94-95) elevates him beyond the archetype of the lovable broke artist. Sophie, however, is the character who undergoes the most harrowing journey — assault, stalking, vulnerability — and her arc is largely in service of Lucy's. Sophie's final scene (99-101), where she jokes about dying alone while trembling, is the most emotionally potent moment in the material, yet her resolution (a successful date with Brian, mentioned in a phone call on page 107) arrives secondhand, which slightly diminishes its impact.

CONFLICT — Fair

The central conflict operates on two registers simultaneously: externally, Lucy must choose between Harry and John, and internally, she must reconcile her belief that love is math with her experience that it is not. The external conflict escalates effectively — the Harry relationship builds through increasingly lavish dates while the John relationship simmers through loaded encounters — but the Sophie subplot introduces a third axis of conflict that proves the most dramatically potent. Sophie's assault (54) and its aftermath create the only stakes in the material that are genuinely dangerous, and they function as the mechanism that breaks Lucy's professional confidence and, by extension, her romantic calculus. The confrontation between Lucy and Sophie on the street (71-75) is the sharpest conflict scene, because Sophie articulates what the material has been circling: that reducing people to categories has real consequences. The John-Lucy fight at the upstate wedding (93-97) is emotionally rich but structurally familiar — two people listing reasons they should not be together until love wins — and it runs long enough that the energy diffuses before the Sophie phone call re-ignites urgency. The weakest conflict thread is Harry's, because his resistance to Lucy's breakup is brief and mild (80-83). A man described as a unicorn accepts rejection with a handshake and a quip, which makes the breakup feel costless.

DIALOGUE — Good

The dialogue is the material's most consistent strength, distinguished by a voice that is simultaneously clinical and emotionally raw. Lucy's speech patterns shift measurably between professional and personal contexts — compare her polished pitch to Patricia (13-14) with her unguarded confession to John about hating herself for being materialistic (96). Harry's dialogue is calibrated to sound like a man who has never needed to be persuasive and therefore is effortlessly so, as in his investment-metaphor speech (47) where he reframes Lucy's self-deprecation in financial language she respects. John's voice carries a specific texture of self-deprecating humor masking pain, most effectively in "How does it look like it's going?" (25) about his acting career. The client dialogues — Mason's Frankenstein request (36), Robert's definition of "older" (37), Trevor's BMI threshold (38) — are sharp satirical set pieces that also function as exposition about the matchmaking world. The weakest dialogue belongs to Charlotte's pre-wedding confession (16-18), which leans toward the schematic: her revelation that Peter makes her sister jealous is delivered too neatly and accepted too smoothly, making the scene feel more like a thesis statement than a crisis.

PACING — Fair

The first forty pages move briskly, establishing the world through a series of efficiently structured encounters — the street recruitment (4), the Sophie meeting (6-8), the wedding sequence (13-28) — each of which introduces character, conflict, and theme simultaneously. The dating montage with Harry (38-50) sustains momentum through escalating intimacy and increasingly pointed dialogue. The material slows in the post-assault section (54-70), where Lucy's burnout manifests as a series of client meetings that, while individually sharp, collectively create a plateau. The Patricia confrontation (66-67) and the Violet conversation (67-69) cover similar thematic ground — Lucy's disillusionment with commodifying people — and could be consolidated without loss. The upstate wedding sequence (87-97) is the most indulgent stretch: the ceremony dubbing (89-91) and the slow dance (92-93) are charming but delay the John-Lucy confrontation that the audience is waiting for. The final fifteen pages (97-108) compress a great deal — Sophie's crisis, the resolution, the promotion offer, the proposal — and the speed creates an exhilarating momentum that compensates for the earlier lull.

TONE — Good

The material achieves a distinctive tonal register that might be called "romantic materialism" — treating love and commerce as genuinely interchangeable vocabularies without fully endorsing either. This tone holds remarkably well across wildly different registers: the prehistoric prologue (2-3) is tender and wordless, the matchmaker office scenes (8-10) are bro-y and comic, the Sophie assault aftermath (54-57) is devastating, and the upstate wedding crash (87-93) is whimsical. The one significant tonal disruption occurs when Lucy stalks Sophie to her neighborhood bistro (70-72) and chases her through the streets. The material acknowledges this is "like a fucking stalker," but the scene plays as emotionally cathartic rather than troubling, which creates dissonance given that Sophie has just been stalked by Mark. The juxtaposition — Lucy pursuing Sophie immediately after Sophie was pursued by her assailant — introduces an uncomfortable parallel that the tone does not fully reckon with. The stone age framing device risks preciousness but earns its place through restraint, appearing only at the beginning and end, and through the specific callback of the flower ring (3, 107).

ORIGINALITY — Good

The matchmaking profession as a lens for examining romantic commodification is not unprecedented — Hitch explored a male dating consultant, and The Matchmaker treated the profession as comedy — but this material's specificity about the economics of desire (BMI thresholds, height-to-income ratios, limb-lengthening surgery) occupies substantially different territory. The closest comparables are Past Lives, which shares a writer and a triangulated romantic structure where two men represent divergent possible lives, and Jerry Maguire, which similarly uses professional crisis to precipitate romantic clarity. The leg-lengthening surgery reveal is the most original plot element, transforming the "unicorn" love interest into someone who has literally purchased his desirability, which reframes every scene preceding it. The prehistoric framing device — arguing that matchmaking is humanity's oldest transaction — is ambitious in conception, though the execution is more illustrative than revelatory. The client meeting montages, while individually witty, follow a pattern recognizable from satires of professional services (the unreasonable client, the bigoted client, the oblivious client). Where the material most distinguishes itself from its predecessors is in refusing to let Lucy fully transcend her materialism — she chooses love, but she does not pretend the math has stopped mattering.

LOGIC — Fair

The most significant logical strain is Lucy's decision to stalk Sophie at her neighborhood bistro (70-71). Violet has explicitly forbidden Lucy from contacting Sophie (55-56), and Lucy is a professional who understands liability. That she would stand outside Sophie's restaurant for hours, then chase her through the streets, strains credibility — particularly because the material later has Sophie call Lucy voluntarily (97), suggesting patience would have achieved the same result. Mark's behavior also raises questions: he was described as "nice but boring, charmless" in Lucy's notes (58), and while the point is precisely that predators are undetectable, his later escalation to stalking Sophie's apartment (97-98) while she has filed charges against him implies a boldness inconsistent with someone who would have passed a matchmaking intake. The ring box in Harry's suitcase (78) is convenient — an engagement ring tucked visibly enough for Lucy to find while he showers — but this functions within the logic of romantic drama conventions. The timeline of Lucy's leave, Sophie's Instagram stalking, the upstate trip, and the return to work is compressed in a way that makes the chronology slightly unclear between pages 64 and 107.

CRAFT — Good

The writing operates in a mode that blends novelistic interiority with cinematic economy, most effectively in the character introductions: Sophie is "(39, resting frown face, definitely not 'fat', quite beautiful for a lawyer i.e. doesn't look like an instagram model or an actress)" (6), which communicates volumes about the world's values in a single parenthetical. The action descriptions carry editorial personality without becoming intrusive — "This is like a scene from Mad Men and the Wolf of Wall Street, except it's just fifteen hot women" (8) establishes tone efficiently. The CLOSE-on technique in the opening (2) and in Lucy's makeup application (3) creates a visual language of scrutiny that mirrors the thematic preoccupation with surfaces. The notebook page listing Mark's attributes (58) is a strong visual storytelling choice — showing rather than telling us what a matchmaker's assessment looks like and how inadequate it is for predicting character. Formatting is clean throughout, with scene numbers and time markers handled consistently. The omitted scene placeholders (pages 77, 70, etc.) suggest this is a shooting draft with revisions, which occasionally disrupts reading flow but does not affect comprehension. One minor error: "momenta" appears instead of "moments" in the slug on page 24.

OVERALL — Recommend

Materialists is a romantic drama about a New York matchmaker who commodifies love professionally while struggling to value herself and the people she matches as more than marketplace assets. The material's greatest strength is its dialogue, which sustains a distinctive voice — simultaneously funny, cutting, and emotionally transparent — across more than a hundred pages without flagging. The love triangle is smartly constructed because Harry and John are not competing suitors so much as competing philosophies, and Lucy's choice between them is genuinely uncertain until the final act. The Sophie subplot elevates the material beyond romantic comedy by introducing real consequences for the transactional worldview that Lucy and her industry embody, and Sophie's confrontation scene is the emotional centerpiece. The primary weakness is pacing in the middle third, where client meetings and Lucy's burnout create a repetitive stretch that delays rather than deepens the central conflict. The breakup with Harry, while thematically satisfying, is too smooth — a protagonist rejecting a $12 million apartment and a proposal should cost more dramatically than a handshake. The prehistoric framing device is elegant in its simplicity and earns the flower-ring payoff, though its thematic contribution (love is ancient and pre-transactional) is stated more than explored. This is confident, voice-driven material with a clear vision and strong emotional architecture, slightly undermined by structural softness in its middle act and a resolution that arrives with more speed than earned weight.