10 Things I Hate About You (1999) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A razor-sharp teen comedy where Shakespeare, high school politics, and reluctant romance all collide.
This 10 Things I Hate About You screenplay reimagines William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew inside the cliques, rumors, parties, and power games of Padua High School. Kat Stratford is smart, furious, intimidating, and allergic to conformity, while her younger sister Bianca wants the ordinary teenage privileges Kat rejects. When Bianca is forbidden to date until Kat does, a scheme forms around Patrick Verona, the school’s resident bad-boy myth, who is paid to win Kat over. What begins as manipulation slowly becomes something more honest, forcing both Kat and Patrick to drop the protective performances that keep everyone else at a distance.
For writers and film students, this screenplay is a terrific study in adaptation, character contrast, comic voice, and ensemble teen storytelling. Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith do not simply update Shakespeare with lockers and prom posters. They translate the original’s social machinery into a late-1990s high school ecosystem where popularity, reputation, gender expectations, money, and romantic bargaining all become part of the plot. The result is a comedy with bite, velocity, and surprising emotional lift.
10 Things I Hate About You Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
The 10 Things I Hate About You screenplay is about performance. Nearly every major character is playing a role: Kat performs indifference and hostility, Patrick performs danger, Bianca performs sweetness and popularity, Joey performs desirability, Cameron performs confidence, and Walter performs tyrannical parental control because fear has made him ridiculous. The screenplay’s comic engine comes from watching those performances collide. Its emotional engine comes from watching Kat and Patrick gradually become less interested in impressing, frightening, or fooling other people. The adaptation works because it understands that high school is already theatrical. Reputation is costume, gossip is publicity, cliques are casting departments, and romance is often a badly rehearsed scene until someone finally tells the truth.
Craft Focus
- Adaptation with attitude: The screenplay keeps the matchmaking, social bargaining, sister dynamic, and gender conflict of The Taming of the Shrew, but translates them into a recognizable teen comedy world.
- Character introductions: Kat’s opening confrontation, Bianca’s hallway worship, Patrick’s counselor scene, and Cameron’s guided tour all establish personality with comic efficiency.
- High school as ecosystem: Cliques, parties, tutoring rooms, parking lots, bathrooms, and cafeterias all function as social arenas where status is constantly negotiated.
- Romance through resistance: Kat and Patrick’s chemistry is built through verbal sparring, suspicion, challenge, and reluctant curiosity rather than instant softness.
- Comedy from specificity: The script’s jokes come from sharp details: fake pregnancy bellies, caffeine snobs, Shakespeare insults, bad rumors, prom politics, and teenage self-mythology.
- Ensemble plotting: Cameron, Michael, Bianca, Joey, Patrick, Kat, Walter, Mandella, and Miss Perky all push the machine forward, giving the story a buoyant, crowd-pleasing rhythm.
Questions for Writers
- How does the opening tour of Padua High quickly establish the movie’s social rules?
- Why does Kat’s hostility feel defensive rather than simply unpleasant?
- How does the script make Patrick dangerous, funny, and romantic without sanding off his edge too early?
- What does the “paid dating” premise add to the romance’s eventual emotional conflict?
- How does Bianca’s subplot mirror Kat’s story while moving in the opposite direction?
- Why is Walter’s overprotectiveness comic, but still rooted in real parental fear?
- How does the screenplay update Shakespeare without requiring the audience to know the source play?
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10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
A pretty, popular teenager can't go out on a date until her ill-tempered older sister does.
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