Do more experienced directors make longer movies?
Last week I was teaching a group of early-stage filmmakers and the topic of running time came up. Filmmakers often feel limited by the demands on them to make shorter movies. The indie film market doesn’t favour longer movies (partly because cinemas hate long movies) and due to the fact that a longer running time […]
Is movie casting dominated by a small number of women?
Last week I had a (good-natured) email exchange with a reader who asked a follow-up question to my piece entitled ‘Are movies dominated by a small number of old male composers?’. The research found that 95% of film composers were men, and that just the top 20 film composers accounted for 48.2% of box office […]
Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a journalist at the New York Times, who asked if I felt that film critics were losing touch with the tastes of the broader public. Naturally, I turned to the data to have a look at what’s going on. I built up a database of 10,449 movies […]
Is the use of film pre-visualisation on the rise?
A single shot within a modern Hollywood blockbuster can be incredibly complex, take years to create and require the coordination of hundreds of people around the world. To ensure that shots are created on time, on budget and as the director intended, they need to plan out every detail before anything is actually shot. Hand-drawn […]
Do male and female critics judge films differently?
Last week, a row erupted over a film review in Variety of Carey Mulligan’s new movie Promising Young Woman. In an interview for The New York Times, Mulligan discussed her frustration of reading character descriptions along the lines of “Beautiful but doesn’t know it”, and with the way movies present women as sexual objects for […]
How old is the average film director?
Five years ago I researched the average age of top Hollywood directors. Since then, I have received a number of requests to update and extend the study. Today I am sharing what I found when I looked at the directors behind all theatrically released movies (not just top grossing) and dug a little deeper into […]
Which film jobs have the greatest overlap?
In my previous article, I looked at the number of people who have only worked once in key film jobs and departments across their whole career. A number of readers got in touch to ask how frequently people work in multiple positions across their career. If it were commonplace for people to work within more […]
What percentage of film crew members only work on one film?
Many outsiders to the movie industry would regard the chance to be part of the crew making a movie as a once in a lifetime experience. Little do they know, for the majority of people who actually get that chance, it quite literally is! I have written before about how only about a third of […]
Do film critics punish films with bigger budgets?
Last week, a reader reached out to ask a question around film reviews. They were discussing the critical reaction to Tenet with friends and one suggested that many of the poor reviews were unreliable as they were the typical reaction snotty film critics have towards big-budget movies. The reader asked what the data reveals on […]
Do films with positive messages make more money than those without?
One of the features I love most about movies is their ability to give us shared stories which entertain, inspire and soothe us. And in trying times, this function becomes ever more essential. In the 1940s, musicals provided a colourful escape from war, stories of rebellion in the 1970s gave hope to audiences losing faith […]