Good Boys (2019) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
An early draft of a coming-of-age comedy where innocence drives the getaway car.
Good Boys follows a group of sixth-grade friends whose attempt to solve one problem quickly detonates into a full day of bad decisions, misunderstood adult situations, and suburban chaos. Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky’s early 2017 screenplay shows the basic comic engine that would later become the 2019 film: kids behaving with total confidence in a world they absolutely do not understand.
For writers and film students, this draft is especially useful because it is not the final on-screen version. Character details, story beats, and comic set pieces differ noticeably from the released film, making the script a sharp study in how a studio comedy can evolve from early draft to finished movie while keeping its central joke machine intact.
Good Boys Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this early screenplay draft
Good Boys is useful to study because this early draft shows a studio comedy still in active formation. The screenplay’s core engine is already clear: young boys misunderstand adult language, sex, drugs, danger, gender politics, and basic logistics, then turn every bad assumption into a bigger problem. Because this is an early version, readers can also compare how premise, tone, character names, set pieces, and comic escalation changed before the final film reached the screen.
Craft Focus
- Innocence as comic fuel: The boys are not trying to be outrageous. The comedy comes from how confidently they misread adult situations and vocabulary.
- Escalation by consequences: A broken drone leads to a stolen bag, missing drugs, school escape, money problems, freeway chaos, and a mall mission that keeps mutating.
- Early-draft visibility: This version contains notable differences from the released film, making it useful for studying how comedy drafts get reshaped, tightened, softened, or redirected.
- Set-piece construction: The script builds big comedy sequences from simple physical goals: retrieve the drone, replace the drone, avoid the older girls, cross town, and get back before anyone notices.
Questions for Writers
- How does the opening drone sequence establish the boys’ immaturity, curiosity, fear, and bad judgment all at once?
- Where does the script turn a small misunderstanding into a large comic set piece?
- How does the early draft balance kid logic with very adult subject matter?
- What changes might a later draft make to sharpen character empathy, adjust tone, or make the comedy more filmable?
While reading, pay attention to the difference between premise and execution. Good Boys is not funny simply because kids say adult things. The stronger craft move is that the boys almost never understand the adult world correctly, but they act on those misunderstandings with mission-level intensity. In this early draft, that engine is loud, messy, and still wearing construction goggles, which makes it especially useful for seeing comedy development before the final polish arrives with a tiny hard hat.
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Good Boys (2019)
After breaking a toy drone, Max, Thor, and, Lucas skip school and set off on a raunchy odyssey of epically bad decisions involving stolen drugs, a frat-house, and running from both the cops and girls!
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