Of all the trophies handed out on the Lido, Best Screenplay is the one that rewards a specific temperament: the writer who trusts a line of dialogue to do the work a set-piece usually does. It is a prize for construction rather than spectacle, and in a competition thick with silent auteurs and image-first stylists, the sharpest bet is the one filmmaker whose reputation was forged at the desk before it was forged behind the camera. Nobody has seen a frame of these twenty films yet; what we can read is method, premise, and casting — and on those grounds the frontrunner announces itself early.

That frontrunner is Martin McDonagh, whose Wild Horse Nine looks tailor-made for exactly this award. McDonagh is a playwright first and a director second, and the Venice jury has already validated that hierarchy once: he took Best Screenplay here in 2017 for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. His pages are the most recognizable in modern English-language cinema — morally combustible, profane, structured like a stage play that keeps detonating its own premises. The casting reinforces the read: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Steve Buscemi are not action figures but talkers, actors who bend a sentence until it draws blood. You do not assemble that ensemble for silence; you assemble it for a script that gives three virtuoso voices room to spar. A screenplay prize honors the architecture beneath performance — the escalation, the reversals, the way cruelty and comedy share a single breath — and no other title in competition wears that architecture so openly. If the film lands anywhere near his ceiling, it is the default winner of this category, not a hopeful.

The most serious threat is Nanni Moretti with Succederà Questa Notte. Moretti’s screenwriting is a different species entirely — self-reflexive, essayistic, folding the author’s own anxieties into the fiction until the two are inseparable. A jury sitting on the Lido tends to respect that authorial voice as writing in the truest sense, and Moretti is a home favorite whose command of tone the festival has honored before. With Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca carrying the interior register his scripts demand, the film could read as the purest expression of screenwriting-as-thought in the field, and juries have a documented weakness for that.

Florian Zeller offers the other credible upset, and from a wholly different direction. Where Moretti writes the essay, Zeller builds the machine: he is a dramatist whose adaptation of The Father won the Adapted Screenplay Oscar precisely for its ruthless structural engineering. Bunker arrives with a heavyweight cast, but Zeller’s real weapon is theatrical construction — the interlocking, perspective-warping architecture that makes a screenplay feel like a trap snapping shut. If the jury prizes formal daring over voice, he is the name that benefits.

The obvious flaw in all of this is that it is D-30 and nobody has seen anything. A screenplay prediction is the most fragile kind, because a script only reveals itself in the edit; McDonagh’s own worst tendency — the punchline that curdles into glibness — could just as easily read as a weakness. Venice juries also love to reward the film they simply loved most, folding screenplay into a broader consensus rather than isolating the writing. And a wildcard prose voice we are underrating — Lee Chang-dong’s return chief among them — could redraw the whole category in a single screening.

We will know on 12 September 2026, when the jury delivers its verdict on the Venice Lido. MCM will be covering the ceremony live, weighing this forecast against the result and tracking every prize as it lands.

Tags: awards, Venice Film Festival, 2026, Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse Nine, Best Screenplay

Best Screenplay at Venice 83: McDonagh Returns to the Prize That Suits Him

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