Which actors most frequently appear in excellent / awful movies?
In a previous article, I have looked at the ‘brands’ of top actors by studying the genres they most frequently appear in. Today, I am going to look at another facet of an actor’s brand: what their presence in a movie signals to the audience about the movie’s quality. Quality is obviously a subjective term […]
A data-led analysis on how to survive the Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes Film Festival and Market are just around the corner. It’s a mad mix of five-star movies, five-minute meetings and five-Euro bottles of water. To help attendees get the most out of their trip, I have gone through my archives of Cannes research, and conducted some new research, to see what a data-led analysis […]
To what degree do actors stick to just one genre?
When the public first hears of a new movie, they don’t have much information to judge it on. This is before they can get a steer on the quality of the film (i.e. no reviews, no word of mouth) so they have only scant information with which to form an opinion on whether or not […]
Which countries most commonly team up to create film co-productions?
In the past few months, I have received a growing number of questions relating to international collaboration on movies. Some relate to the individual level of cast and crew working across borders while others focus on films as commercial products manufactured in more than one country. It’s hard to tell why the topic of international […]
What percentage of film producers are women?
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 […]
On average, how many films does a producer produce?
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 […]
How does VidAngel filter objectionable content from movies?
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 […]
How are movie advertising budgets spent?
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 […]
Who dominates the screenwriting software market?
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 […]
How do film budgets change as they grow?
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 […]