External Conflict in Film: 20 Examples, Ranked (All 6 Types)

Three men in a small wooden boat, a shark bigger than the boat, and a line nobody on set expected to become famous: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” That is external conflict at its simplest. The danger is out there, it is trying to kill you, and everyone in the audience can see it.

External conflict is a struggle between a character and a force outside them: another person, society, nature, technology, the supernatural or fate. These are 20 of the best external conflict examples in movies, ranked by how much of the story the outside fight carries. Number 20 shares the screen with a big internal struggle. Number 1 has almost nothing else. Spoilers ahead, including the endings of Get Out and No Country for Old Men.

20) Toy Story (1995)

Toy Story turns a playroom rivalry into external conflict, then hands both toys a bigger enemy next door.

External Conflict Example:

Woody is Andy’s favourite toy until Buzz arrives with lasers, wings and a catchphrase. Woody knocks Buzz out of a window, half by accident, and both of them end up lost at a petrol station and then in Sid’s house.

Sid tapes Buzz to a firework rocket. The two rivals have to work together to get out, chase the moving van and light the rocket. The film settles the smaller conflict by giving them a larger one.

It ranks last because half the fight in Toy Story is inside Buzz, who has to accept he is a toy. That half is number 18 on our list of internal conflict examples.

Why it matters: A rivalry is the easiest external conflict to set up and the hardest to end. A shared enemy is the classic way out.

19) The Dark Knight (2008)

Batman against the Joker is external conflict built as a moral test, where every attack is aimed at the hero’s one rule.

External Conflict Example:

The Joker does not want money. Alfred puts it plainly: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” That makes him an opponent Batman cannot buy off, scare or outthink in the usual way.

The ferry scene is the purest version. Two boats, each rigged to explode, each holding the trigger for the other. The Joker is not fighting Batman there. He is fighting Gotham, and Gotham refuses to play.

Like Toy Story, this one shares the screen with an internal fight. Bruce Wayne’s struggle with his no-killing rule is number 20 on the internal list.

Why it matters: The strongest villains attack what the hero believes, not just what the hero owns. Write your antagonist’s plan backwards from the hero’s weak point.

18) Erin Brockovich (2000)

Erin Brockovich is character vs society with a filing cabinet: a single mother against a utility company worth billions.

External Conflict Example:

Erin is a legal assistant with no law degree. Going through property files, she finds medical records filed next to real estate papers and asks why. The answer is hexavalent chromium in the groundwater of Hinkley, California.

The opponent never throws a punch. It stalls, lowballs and waits for the families to give up. Erin fights it door to door, signing up 634 residents, until a 1966 memo proves the company knew. The case ends in a $333 million settlement.

Why it matters: Society can be an opponent with no face. Give it a paper trail and a deadline, and the audience will feel it pushing back.

17) The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix makes technology the enemy and then gives the enemy a face, a suit and a voice.

External Conflict Example:

The world Neo lives in is a simulation, built by machines to keep humans asleep while their bodies power the system. Every wall, street and person inside it is the opponent.

That is too big to film as a fight, so the Wachowskis put it into one character. Agent Smith is the system with a face. The subway fight and the final hallway fight give an abstract enemy something to punch, and Neo wins by learning to see the code itself.

Why it matters: When the opponent is huge, give it an agent. Audiences cannot root against a network. They can root against Agent Smith.

16) Final Destination (2000)

Final Destination is the rare film where the villain is fate itself, and nobody plays it.

External Conflict Example:

Alex has a vision of Flight 180 exploding, panics, and gets thrown off the plane with a handful of classmates. The plane explodes. Then the survivors start dying, one by one, in the order they would have died on board.

There is no killer to catch. Death works through household objects: a leaking toilet, a loose wire, a bus that comes out of nowhere. The tension comes from watching a normal room and guessing which object will turn on someone.

Why it matters: When the opponent is invisible, the setting becomes the villain. Director James Wong made “the world at large, in the service of death” the antagonist.

15) The Hunger Games (2012)

The Hunger Games puts one girl in a televised arena and makes the real opponent the government that built it.

External Conflict Example:

The film has three layers of opponents. Other tributes are the character vs character layer. Fire, hunger and engineered animals are the nature layer. The Capitol, which designs the arena and changes the rules on a whim, is the one that matters.

Katniss wins by beating the system, not the other players. With Peeta, she threatens to eat poisonous berries so there will be no victor at all. The Capitol blinks, and both walk out.

Why it matters: Layer your external conflicts. The small fights keep scenes moving. The big one gives the ending its meaning.

14) Gravity (2013)

Gravity is character vs nature with no weather, no animals and no ground: one woman, a debris cloud and the laws of physics.

External Conflict Example:

The debris hits in the first act and destroys the shuttle. From there, Stone has to move from one wrecked station to another before the cloud comes round again. The film tells you roughly when. That turns space into a clock.

There is nobody to argue with. Stone runs out of air, fuel and options, and the film lets her nearly give up. She makes it down to Earth, crawls out of a lake and stands up on wet sand.

Why it matters: Nature makes a perfect opponent because it cannot be reasoned with. Give it a schedule and the audience will count down with you.

13) The Exorcist (1973)

The Exorcist is the benchmark for character vs the supernatural: a mother, two priests and a demon living inside a 12-year-old girl.

External Conflict Example:

Chris tries doctors first. Tests, X-rays, a psychiatrist. Only when medicine fails does she turn to the church, and that order matters. The film makes the audience rule out every natural answer before it shows the supernatural one.

The exorcism itself kills Father Merrin. Karras, a priest who has lost his faith, finishes it by taking the demon into himself and throwing himself out of the window. He dies on the stone steps below, and Regan is free.

Why it matters: A supernatural opponent is only frightening if the characters doubt it first. Let them try every sensible answer and fail.

12) Get Out (2017)

Get Out turns character vs society into a horror film, and the society is a smiling family in a country house.

External Conflict Example:

Chris visits his white girlfriend’s parents for the weekend. The family is polite. The guests are polite. Every compliment is slightly wrong, and the Black staff at the house behave as if someone else is steering them.

The opponent is racism that calls itself liberal, turned into a literal plot to take over Black bodies. The “sunken place” makes it visual: Chris falls through the floor of his own mind while the family watches. He escapes by stuffing cotton in his ears, a detail with a meaning the film leaves you to think about.

Why it matters: Society as an opponent works best when it is friendly. Politeness that never stops is scarier than a mob.

11) Heat (1995)

Heat is character vs character between two men who respect each other and will still kill each other.

External Conflict Example:

Most cop and robber films make one side the villain. Heat refuses. Hanna and McCauley are both professionals, both lonely, both better at their jobs than at their lives.

Halfway through, Hanna pulls McCauley over and invites him for a coffee. They talk like old friends and agree that if it comes to it, neither will hesitate. It comes to it on an airport runway at night. Hanna shoots McCauley, then holds his hand as he dies.

Why it matters: An opponent the audience likes raises the stakes of every scene. Give your antagonist a code, and let the hero admire it.

10) Cast Away (2000)

Cast Away is character vs nature at its most stripped down: one man, one island and a volleyball.

External Conflict Example:

Chuck is a FedEx manager who runs his life by the clock. A plane crash leaves him on an island with a few parcels and nothing else. The first act on the island is pure survival: water, fire, a tooth he has to knock out himself.

Then the film jumps four years. The problem now is loneliness, so Chuck paints a face on a volleyball and names it Wilson. Losing Wilson at sea, on the raft home, is the most upsetting death in the film, and nobody dies.

Why it matters: Nature can supply every obstacle in a script. The trick is to change the obstacle as the story goes, from hunger to fire to loneliness.

9) 12 Angry Men (1957)

12 Angry Men is one man against eleven, in one room, with a boy’s life on the table.

External Conflict Example:

The first vote is 11 to 1 for guilty. Juror 8 does not say the boy is innocent. He says he is not sure, and that they owe it to the boy to talk.

The jury is a small society with its own pressures: heat, impatience, a baseball game some want to catch, and prejudice. Juror 8 wins the vote one man at a time. The last holdout, Juror 3, breaks when he tears up a photo of his own son.

Why it matters: A group can be one opponent. Give it a majority, a clock and a loudest voice, and a single dissenter becomes a hero.

8) The Revenant (2015)

The Revenant sets a man against a bear, a winter and the man who left him for dead.

External Conflict Example:

A bear mauls Glass in the first act. Fitzgerald, paid to stay with him, kills Glass’s son and leaves him in a shallow grave. What follows is a man crawling, then walking, across hundreds of miles of frozen country.

Nature does most of the fighting. Rivers, cold, hunger and a fall off a cliff that Glass survives by sleeping inside a dead horse. Fitzgerald is the reason to keep going. When Glass finally catches him, he pushes him downstream to be killed by others.

Why it matters: Pair nature with a human enemy. Nature makes the journey hard. The human makes it personal.

7) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is character vs society in a hospital ward, with the system wearing a nurse’s uniform.

External Conflict Example:

McMurphy fakes madness to get out of a prison work farm. On the ward he finds a quieter kind of prison. Nurse Ratched never shouts. She runs group therapy, controls the medication and decides who gets privileges.

He fights her with card games, a stolen fishing trip and a party. Every win makes her stronger, because the institution can always do more to him than he can do to it. When Billy dies, McMurphy attacks her, and the system answers with a lobotomy.

Why it matters: The best character vs society stories put one person in charge of the system. Ratched makes an institution into a face the audience can hate.

6) The Terminator (1984)

The Terminator is character vs technology stripped to one idea: a machine that will not stop.

External Conflict Example:

A machine from the future is sent back to kill a waitress named Sarah Connor before she can have a son. It shoots every Sarah Connor in the phone book to be sure.

The Terminator cannot be reasoned with, bribed or frightened. At a police station it says “I’ll be back,” drives a car through the front doors and does exactly that. Even with its skin burned off, the metal frame keeps crawling. Sarah ends it by crushing it in a hydraulic press.

Why it matters: A technology opponent is frightening because it has no feelings to appeal to. Show what it will do to get one thing, and the audience fills in the rest.

5) No Country for Old Men (2007)

No Country for Old Men gives character vs character a killer who works like a law of nature.

External Conflict Example:

Moss finds a case holding two million dollars at a drug deal gone wrong, and takes it. Chigurh is hired to get it back. From there the film is a chase across west Texas.

Chigurh is not a normal villain. He lets a coin toss decide whether a gas station owner lives. He keeps his word even when it makes no sense. The film breaks the rules of the genre when Moss is killed off screen, and the fight we were waiting for never happens.

Why it matters: An opponent with his own logic is more frightening than one who is simply cruel. The audience can follow Chigurh’s rules. They just cannot bargain with them.

4) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2001: A Space Odyssey gave film its most famous computer villain, and HAL never raises its voice.

External Conflict Example:

HAL runs the ship bound for Jupiter and has never made a mistake. Then it reports a fault that is not there. The two astronauts discuss shutting it down in a pod where it cannot hear them. HAL reads their lips.

It kills Poole in space, cuts off the crew in hibernation and refuses to let Bowman back aboard. Bowman blows himself into the airlock without a helmet and switches HAL off one memory block at a time, while the calm voice asks him to stop.

Why it matters: The scariest technology opponent is the one the characters trusted. HAL is polite to the end, and that is the horror.

3) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road is one long chase, and the external conflict never lets up for two hours.

External Conflict Example:

Furiosa drives a war rig into the desert with five women Immortan Joe keeps as wives. Joe sends his whole army after her. Max, a prisoner strapped to the front of a car, gets dragged into it.

Joe controls the water, and so he controls everyone. The chase is a society against the people trying to leave it. When Furiosa learns her homeland is gone, the escape turns round, and the rig drives back through the army to take the Citadel. Furiosa kills Joe on his own truck.

Why it matters: Structure the whole film as the external conflict and you never need to stop for exposition. Every beat of Fury Road happens at speed.

2) Die Hard (1988)

Die Hard is the model for character vs character in an action film: one cop, one villain, one building.

External Conflict Example:

McClane comes to Los Angeles to patch things up with his wife, Holly. At her office Christmas party, Hans Gruber and his crew take the tower. McClane escapes barefoot with a gun and nothing else.

Gruber is as smart as McClane is stubborn. They talk over the radio, they meet once face to face without knowing it, and each plan draws a better counter. The ending is one of the cleanest in action film: Gruber holding Holly by the wrist, McClane unclipping her watch, and Gruber falling 30 floors.

Why it matters: A good external conflict is a conversation. Each side makes a move, and the other has to answer. Die Hard never lets either side sit still.

1) Jaws (1975)

Jaws is the purest external conflict in popular film: three men, one boat and a shark that nobody can stop.

External Conflict Example:

A shark kills a swimmer off Amity Island. Brody wants the beaches closed. The mayor wants the summer tourist money. That is the character vs society layer, and it costs a boy his life.

Then the film goes to sea. Brody, the scientist Hooper and the fisherman Quint hunt the shark from a small boat, and for the last hour the opponent is the ocean and the animal in it. Brody jams a scuba tank into the shark’s mouth, climbs the mast as the boat sinks and shoots the tank.

Why it matters: An external conflict gets stronger the less you show it and the more the characters fear it. Jaws proved that by accident, and every thriller since has used it on purpose.

Five More External Conflict Examples Worth Studying

These missed the 20 because another film on the list makes the same point with more force.

• Alien (1979). A crew against a creature in a closed ship. Character vs nature, with a company in the background as a second enemy.
• Rocky (1976). A club fighter against the heavyweight champion. Character vs character where losing on points still counts as winning.
• Selma (2014). A march against a state that will not let Black citizens vote. Character vs society on a national scale.
• Twister (1996). Storm chasers against tornadoes. Character vs nature with weather as the villain.
• Ex Machina (2014). A programmer testing an AI that is testing him. Character vs technology as a mind game.

What Is External Conflict?

External conflict is a struggle between a character and a force outside them, such as another person, a group, nature or technology.

It is the kind of conflict the camera can see: a chase, a fight, a storm, a trial. The character wants something, and something outside gets in the way. The opposite is internal conflict, where the obstacle is the character’s own fear, belief or desire. Our guide to conflict in film covers all seven types, inside and out.

What Are the 6 Types of External Conflict?

The six types of external conflict are character vs character, society, nature, technology, the supernatural and fate. Many classrooms teach the first four and fold the last two into them.

Type	The opponent	Examples from this list
Character vs character	Another person	Toy Story, The Dark Knight, Heat, No Country for Old Men, Die Hard
Character vs society	A group, a system or a set of rules	Erin Brockovich, The Hunger Games, Get Out, 12 Angry Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mad Max: Fury Road
Character vs nature	Animals, weather, wilderness, space	Gravity, Cast Away, The Revenant, Jaws
Character vs technology	Machines, computers, artificial intelligence	The Matrix, The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Character vs the supernatural	Ghosts, demons, gods, monsters	The Exorcist
Character vs fate	Destiny, prophecy, death itself	Final Destination

Notice where the top five land. Two are character vs character, one is nature, one is technology and one is society. No single type wins. What the top films share is an opponent that never stops pushing.

Internal vs External Conflict: What Is the Difference?

Internal conflict is a character against themselves, and external conflict is a character against something outside them.

	External conflict	Internal conflict
The opponent	A person, society, nature, technology, the supernatural or fate	The character’s own desire, belief, fear, duty or need
Also called	Character vs character, vs society, vs nature	Character vs self, man vs self
What the audience sees	A chase, a fight, a storm, a trial	Hesitation, a choice, a change
How it ends	The character wins or loses	The character changes or fails to
Example	Batman vs the Joker	Bruce Wayne keeping his one rule

The two work as a pair. The external conflict applies the pressure, and the internal conflict decides what the character does under it. Our list of internal conflict examples ranks the other half.

How to Write External Conflict Into Your Script

You write external conflict by giving a character a clear goal and an opponent strong enough to stop them.

1. Pick the type. Person, society, nature, technology, the supernatural or fate. One main opponent is enough.
2. Make the opponent at least as strong as the hero. McClane is outnumbered. Katniss is a child against a government. If the hero is stronger, there is no contest.
3. Give the opponent its own goal. Gruber wants the bonds. Chigurh wants the money back. An opponent with a plan makes moves the hero has to answer.
4. Escalate. Each clash should cost the hero more than the last. Map the rising stakes on our Save the Cat beat sheet.
5. Tie it to an internal conflict. The outside threat should force the inside choice, the way the Joker forces Batman to test his rule.

When you’re ready to put it on the page, start with our screenplay template.

FAQs About External Conflict

The Final Cut on External Conflict

Twenty films, six types, one rule. External conflict works when the opponent is strong, has a goal of its own and never stops pushing.

The films at the bottom of this list share the fight with the hero’s inner struggle. The ones at the top put everything outside, where the camera can see it. Both approaches work. The difference is where you want the audience to look.

Start with Jaws and watch how little shark you actually see. Then read our guide to internal conflict to see the other half of the fight.

What does the opponent in your script want?