Each week I look at a different topic around the film industry, focusing on the data and statistics which reveal what’s going on.
Today is the first full day of the 2020 Cannes Marché du Film. I’ve written a lot in the past about how Cannes works and how to get the best out of it. And all that’s useless. Well, for 2020, at least. That’s because the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Cannes to move online and offer […]
Change in the film industry is often an extremely gradual process. The views of those involved tend to be entrenched and hard to shift. Therefore, how the film industry will operate one year can reasonably be expected to be very close to that of the year before. Not so 2020. The current COVID-19 pandemic has […]
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 […]
Industry watchers (and regular readers) will know that there is an increasing concern in the film business about the declining cinema attendance among young people. Teenagers and young adults have always formed the biggest group of cinema attendees and yet we have seen a decline in many countries in the current decade. Last week, I […]
Last week, I was chatting with a cinema owner who was angrily complaining about Martin Scorsese’s new movie, The Irishman. The movie has proved controversial on a number of fronts: It has a very short ‘release window’, thanks to it being entirely funded by Netflix. This means that it will available to stream only 19 […]
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 […]
For many independent filmmakers, whether or not their film reaches the big screen means everything. No matter the money to be made via television deals or the massive audiences possible with VOD, a theatrical release is where it’s at. In a new piece of research for the American Film Market, Bruce Nash and I set […]
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 […]
Last week, I used the release of Robin Hood as a catalyst for an article about box office flops. Normally, I don’t like to single films out for undue criticism but sometimes it can’t be avoided. I’ll try and be more restrained in future articles. This week, I’m turning to the completely different topic of […]
In the last few weeks, there has been a resurgence of news articles about movie flops (sometimes called ‘box office bombs’). These have been sparked by recent under-performing releases such as London Fields, Robin Hood and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and fueled by the public’s Schadenfreude at watching big movies fail. A few […]
