Each week I look at a different topic around the film industry, focusing on the data and statistics which reveal what’s going on.
In an interview last week, Al Pacino revealed that he enjoys starring in bad movies as he views it as a challenge to improve them to the point of mediocrity. As Al put it… Sometimes they offer you money to do something that’s not adequate. And you talk yourself into it. And somewhere within you, […]
A common belief among sales and distribution professionals is that “names sell”. As in, films starring famous actors (“names”) are more marketable than films without any famous names. But how true is this? Bruce Nash and I teamed up to find out in the latest of our research projects for the American Film Market. Studying […]
Acting is a strange profession, with many contradictions. The job officially requires no qualifications but actors are expected to train to a high level in a wide variety of skills. Good actors convince audiences that they are the character (rather than an actor pretending) and yet top actors have loyal fanbases keen to see the specific […]
On-screen nudity has always been a contentious topic for new actors. Many movies and television shows have small roles for actors who are willing to bare their bodies, meaning that if an up-and-coming actor disrobes on-screen, they can potentially give their CV a boost. On the other hand, doing so means that there will forever […]
I have been asked a number of times over the years to study actors and the acting profession. The interested parties tend to fall into one of two camps: Young, fresh-faced up-and-coming actors looking to understand how they can best succeed in their exciting new career of acting. Working professional actors asking why the industry […]
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 […]
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 […]
Last week, I was chatting with NYU professor Paul Thompson and he asked me about the predominance of actor-directors. In the past, I have looked at the writer-director hybrid, as well as other facets of directing (including age, gender, career path and hardest working), but never the actor-director. It’s certainly a relevant topic, as actor Bradley Cooper’s directing debut, […]
Last week I shared my research into movie posters, in which I used facial recognition to track the emotions displayed on the faces of the lead actors. Today I thought I would follow another thread made possible by this method and look at the brands of some major Hollywood actors. When deciding what movie to watch, we […]
Age is a touchy subject for many actors, and last September actors in California have won the right to have their date of birth removed from IMDb. IMDb claims that a date of birth is just a piece of biographical data (therefore fair game for publication) whereas the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) claim that it […]
