Stephen Follows

What percentage of film producers are women?

April 15, 2019 3 comments

Last week, I looked at producers’ careers and this week I am going to use the same data to look at how the picture differs between male and female film producers.

This research harnesses my dataset of every feature film released between 1949 and 2018 inclusive. This includes 631,365 producer credits across 274,991 films and 269,385 individual producers.

For today’s article, I’m going to assume that readers are familiar with the different types of producing credits. If you would like a quick primer then head over to last week’s article, entitled On average, how many films does a producer produce? In the opening section, I have detailed the different credits and what they mean.

What percentage of film producers are women?

In 2018, 26.4% of all …

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On average, how many films does a producer produce?

April 8, 2019 8 comments

A few months ago, I looked at the average number of films a director is likely to make over their career. This led to people asking about producers and so I agreed to take a look.

The role of a movie producer is wide-ranging, flexible and often confusing. Added to that, there are a number of different types of producer credit, each holding different meaning and power.

I used my dataset of every fiction feature film made between 1949 and 2018 inclusive, and zeroed in on the producer credits. This includes 631,365 producer credits across 274,991 films and 269,385 individual producers.

Let’s start by looking at what producer credits there are and then move on to producing careers.

Producers award producer credits

For most senior positions on major films, there …

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How does VidAngel filter objectionable content from movies?

April 1, 2019 3 comments

Today I am sharing research I have conducted on VidAngel – a service which offers censored versions of Hollywood movies.

You may have heard about VidAngel last month as they hit the headlines due to a ruling in a court case against major Hollywood studios, including Disney.

The news spurred me on to take a close look at what they do, how they do it and what exactly they are filtering out of Disney movies. I built up a dataset of all filters they have for feature films on their site – over half a million objectionable items across 2,974 feature films.

VidAngel in a nutshell

VidAngel is a Utah-based company which seeks to help audiences filter out objectionable material from mainstream movies. They have …

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How are movie advertising budgets spent?

March 18, 2019 2 comments

The marketing of movies is a fascinating topic. There is an inherent contradiction, because it is both very visible and highly opaque at the same time.

We see movie marketing every day on almost all possible platforms and yet filmmakers struggle to learn about the economics of how it works.

To help with this, I am going to take a look at how money is spent to market movies in the UK. This article is based on professional industry estimates of marketing spend for 1,288 movies released over the past decade (more info in the Notes section at the end).

How are movies promoted?

According to Nielsen Media Research, £229.5 million was spent advertising movies to the British public in 2017.

The spend is broken …

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