What's lost if the protagonist fails — the reason the audience leans in.
Stakes are the cost of failure, and they work when they're specific and personal. 'The world ends' is weightless until it's somebody's world; 'she loses the house her mother died in' can carry a whole film.
Stakes also need to escalate — what failure costs on page 90 should dwarf what it cost on page 10. When notes say a script 'loses urgency', flat stakes are the usual culprit.
Go deeper: How to Write a Logline
