STAGE: A Full-Screenplay Benchmark for Reasoning over Evolving Stories
Movie screenplays are a demanding testbed for long-form narrative understanding, as characters' goals, beliefs, knowledge, and relationships evolve continuously across scenes. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate isolated facts from the completed screenplay, leaving unassessed whether models can track the evolving state of characters as the story unfolds. We introduce STAGE, a benchmark over 151 English and Chinese full-length screenplays, built on a provenance-linked narrative backbone that recovers the state and epistemic access of each character at every point along its timeline. Three tasks derived from the backbone jointly probe whether models can maintain, explain, and act on evolving narrative state: Character Development Tracking updates a focal character's state between checkpoints, Cross-Scene Narrative Evolution Reasoning targets cross-scene state transitions, and In-Script Character Role-Playing requires responses bounded by the character's state and knowledge at a specified point. We identify three failure modes of current LLMs: silent forgetting under recursive state updating, limited cross-scene reasoning even when all relevant evidence is supplied, and a trade-off in role-playing where stylistic character fidelity and screenplay-grounded memory faithfulness are optimized by different memory-access strategies. STAGE thus provides a unified framework for diagnosing how current models fail to track, reason about, and enact story evolution.