Each week I look at a different topic around the film industry, focusing on the data and statistics which reveal what’s going on.
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 […]
Short films are a medium close to my heart. They provide emerging filmmakers with an opportunity to practice their craft, explore their ideas, meet peers and showcase their abilities to audiences and the industry. There’s nothing quite like watching a festival programme of shorts and being transported to a different vision of reality every ten […]
In the most recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, they covered the efforts being made to increase the representation of women in below-the-line roles. As part of this coverage, I was asked to crunch the data on the number of women working in specific film departments. So I built a dataset of all feature films […]
Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has been ruffling feathers throughout the film industry. Most notably for its unusual release pattern. The film was funded by streaming giant Netflix, meaning that it was available on SVOD just 19 days after it first hit cinema screens. This is a highly unusual ‘collapsing of the theatrical window’. […]
Last year, I used a variety of data-led indicators to assess the claim that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. If you don’t want any spoilers as to the result, stop reading this now and head on over to that article. I used three categories of indicators through which a movie’s “Christmasness” could be judged […]
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, […]
