Each week I look at a different topic around the film industry, focusing on the data and statistics which reveal what’s going on.
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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; […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Last week, I shared research I have conducted into the number of short films made over the past two decades. I focused on live-action shorts which had played at least once at any film festival. While production levels are interesting, they were not the original reason I conducted the project. I was responding to requests […]
