Something strange is happening to the role of second unit director… and I don’t know why.

I have crunched the data in a number of different ways and spoken to a fair number of industry insiders but I remain none the wiser as to what’s causing the trend we’ll see today.

I don’t normally publish results I can’t explain, but in this case, I’m stumped.  My hope is that intrepid readers will have theories I can test or insights into what’s shifting within the industry.  (I’ll be sure to update this article if I do ever find a satisfying answer).

Let’s start by familiarising ourselves with the role of second unit director and then we can turn to the mysterious trend.

Today’s topic was suggested by a number of readers, all of whom asked a variation of “What has been the effect of the Coronavirus on movies featuring viral outbreaks?”

Most had presumably read the news that the 2011 movie Contagion had (albeit briefly) reached number 10 in the iTunes chart.  This is backed up by Google Trends data which shows that interest in the movie is sitting at a five-year high and related searches include: “Coronavirus”, “Wuhan” and “bubonic plague”.

The plot of Contagion is eerily similar to the current Coronavirus outbreak, save for the fact that in the movie Gwyneth Paltrow gets the virus whereas in real life she got a Netflix series.

But what of other virus-based movies?  Which are the …

Short films are a medium close to my heart.

They provide emerging filmmakers with an opportunity to practice their craft, explore their ideas, meet peers and showcase their abilities to audiences and the industry.

There’s nothing quite like watching a festival programme of shorts and being transported to a different vision of reality every ten minutes or so.

But they are poorly tracked by researchers and industry watchers.  The nature of short films makes them hard to quantify and there is rarely a commercial drive to invest the time needed to dig deeper.

To go a small way to redress this oversight, I have sought to get a sense of the scale of short filmmaking.

This is a …

Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has been ruffling feathers throughout the film industry.  Most notably for its unusual release pattern.

The film was funded by streaming giant Netflix, meaning that it was available on SVOD just 19 days after it first hit cinema screens.

This is a highly unusual ‘collapsing of the theatrical window’.  A film of this size and scope would be expected to have at least four months between first appearing on the big screen and then going into consumer homes (it’s three months in North America).

This has led the Big Three cinema chains in the UK, Vue, Odeon and Cineworld (which also owns Picturehouse), refusing to screen the film.  The Irishman opened on 8th November on the screens …

Last year, I used a variety of data-led indicators to assess the claim that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

If you don’t want any spoilers as to the result, stop reading this now and head on over to that article.

I used three categories of indicators through which a movie’s “Christmasness” could be judged – artistic, commercial and cultural. The first considers what’s in the movie, the second how it’s sold and the third how it’s perceived.

As time moves on, it’s the final of those three which becomes most crucial.  The artistic nature of the film remains static (well, unless George Lucas gets to it) and the commercial lens is not very reliable, given movie marketers’ penchant for pushing literally anything …