Recent articles on the Film Data Blog

Each week I look at a different film industry topic, focusing on the data and statistics to reveal what's really going on.

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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Who dominates the screenwriting software market?

March 11, 2019 10 comments

Screenwriting was one of the first sectors of the film industry to embrace digital technology.

Way back in the early 1990s, software packages were being launched which empowered screenwriters to craft their work safe in the knowledge that they could maintain multiple versions, back up important scripts and meet the industry’s tough formatting guidelines.

Cut to thirty years later and now there are dozens of packages available, many offering extra features to help writers with brainstorming, planning and reporting on all aspects of the script.

I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at the biggest packages on the market and see how they stack up against each other.

I’m going to measure three things:

  • Awareness – Market penetration among screenwriters
  • Activity – Percentage of …
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    How do film budgets change as they grow?

    March 4, 2019 7 comments

    One of the reasons it’s hard to make your first movie is that much of the information you need is not available. While we can all read granular box office figures online, it’s often hard to reliably discover how much a movie cost to make and it’s near impossible to know how they spent that money.

    And so I’m pretty excited to share today’s research. It’s a collaboration with Wayne Marc Godfrey, film producer and financier of more than 125 independent feature films. Later this year, he’s launching a new receivables and collections platform for creators and distributors called purely.capital.  In the lead-up to purely.capital’s launch, we’re working together on a few articles to shine a light on the financial side of independent film.

    First …

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    Are women less likely to direct a second movie than men?

    February 25, 2019 2 comments

    Last week, I looked at the average number of films a director is likely to make in their career, and also how many directors work on the average film.

    Today I am taking into account the gender of directors and looking at how the experiences of male and female directors differ.

    As a quick reminder, my dataset is of all feature films produced around the world between 1949 and 2018 (over a quarter of a million movies).  You’ll find more detail on this in the Notes section at the end of the article and in last week’s piece using the same dataset.

    What percentage of film directors are women?

    It should come as no surprise to anyone (least of all readers of this blog) …

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