I know it takes a whole team of moviemakers to create a film. But who (novel adaptations aside) do we thank for the story of the film? Seems like directors take most of the credit, but is it really them who create the story?

If you want to thank (or condemn) someone for the story of a movie it's mostly the writer or writers.

A writer creates the story. The director visualizes their own treatment of it.

They are both very much story tellers in a sense.

It's different for every film. If you have a great script from one person and a mediocre director, you have to thank the writer. Often in book adaptions, you have to give a lot of credit to the director. Some amazing movies like Casablanca were written by a ridiculous amount of people, but the acting was great, the direction was great, the editing was great, on top of a script that evolved through many writers. There's no one answer.

A good director has the ability to take what's written in words and convert it to a visual representation. This isn't as easy as it sounds.

"The brown fox jumped over the fence."

A simple enough sentence, but how did you picture it? Did you add music? Explosions? What was the fence like? Did you follow the fox jumping over the fence or was it a passive view?

It takes a good team to bring a good scene, but the director will always get credited because they are the final word in its final form.

Personally, I take notice of the screenwriter, because it takes immense talent to convert an idea into words, or to shave a 600 page book into a 2 hour script. If done really well, the script pretty much dictates how the final product will be made.

Unless the director is Michael Bay.

Maybe you could say that a great director can't make a great movie out of a bad script, but a bad director can make a bad movie out of a great script.

3 people.

Writers
Screenplay writers
Directors

Writers come up with the idea and the plot. Screenplay writes puts that idea into script format so a director can visualize. Directors take the script and visualize the scenes and shoot the film with cinematographers.