Who are the people and films at Cannes 2020 virtual market?
Today is the first full day of the 2020 Cannes Marché du Film. I’ve written a lot in the past about how Cannes works and how to get the best out of it. And all that’s useless. Well, for 2020, at least. That’s because the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Cannes to move online and offer […]
How long is the typical film actor’s career?
There are a number of ways an actor may assess how their career is going. They could consider their income, fame, power, time employed, quality of roles/movies, how closely it aligns with their ideal career or if it enables them to buy as many Mongolian dinosaur bones as they feel they need. Another metric is […]
Survey: What does the film industry think is the future of exhibition?
Change in the film industry is often an extremely gradual process. The views of those involved tend to be entrenched and hard to shift. Therefore, how the film industry will operate one year can reasonably be expected to be very close to that of the year before. Not so 2020. The current COVID-19 pandemic has […]
How many countries do Hollywood movies shoot in?
The current pandemic has shut shown pretty much all filming worldwide. As we start to leave this lockdown period, we will need to consider how to restart our industries. Social distancing on a film set will be tricky (albeit not impossible) and some have proposed that crews could quarantine together. However, it’s not just the […]
How long does a film take to recoup?
Today I am answering a question from a reader who got in contact to say “I am working on a project right now and the investors are asking how long it will take to get their money back. Have you any idea what percentage of total lifetime revenues the average movie earns in Year 1, […]
How many people work on a movie?
I have been contacted by a number of readers asking how many people have lost work due to the cancellation of film productions. Sadly, the complexity of the industry means I cannot calculate the exact number of people unemployed. However, it is possible to look at how many people would typically work on a feature […]
Analysing half a million reviews of British cinemas
As I write this, we’re in turbulent times due to the outbreak of COVID-19. It’s far from clear what the outcome will be on the overall film economy, but already we can see one area which is being hit hard – cinemas. A mix of fear of infection and government mandates mean that projector lights […]
Does one page of a film script really equal one minute of screentime?
A few weeks ago, John August dropped me an email which included a simple question: “How accurate is the page-per-minute rule of thumb?” The rule John is referring to is that a film based on a (properly formatted) 90-page screenplay will be roughly 90 minutes long. This is useful to a number of people, including; […]
What percentage of screenwriters write a second movie?
Last week, I looked at the average number of credited screenwriters on movies. This gave me an insight into how many scripts were written by just one person, and how many were written as part of a team or chain of writers. The same data on screenwriting credits can reveal other aspects of what it’s […]
How many screenwriters does it take to write a movie?
Over the next few weeks, I am aiming to answer a number of readers’ questions around screenwriting. To do so, I have built a dataset of all live-action feature film movie credits over the past seventy years, covering over 280,000 movies and 145,000 people. We’re going to start with a straightforward question and in the […]