Three years ago, I looked at Hollywood’s switch from shooting on film to using digital acquisition methods.

Since then, I have received a number of questions about the topic.  Some are requests to update the piece with more recent data while others ask for more detail on how the use of digital formats differs between genres.

As requested, this article will bring the data up-to-date, add twice as many films (looking at the top 200 movies each year, where previously I looked at the top 100) and go into more detail over the differences between genres.

I researched the cameras used on all live-action fiction feature films within the top 200 grossing charts of each year. Please …

Last week, the UK’s film censorship body, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), announced new rules on the depiction of sexual violence on screen.

The BBFC’s certification guidelines are updated every five years after extensive public consultation.  Their most recent study highlighted the public’s worries about seeing sexual violence on the big screen and the “pornification” of modern movies.

The example cited in most of the press was The Duchess, a film which is currently a 12A but which could be upped to a 15 if it were ever re-certified under the new guidelines.  This led me to wonder: how many other films would be affected by the change?

To answer the question and to look into levels of sexual violence on the big …

Ok, enough bickering and fighting.

Let’s settle this once and for all in the only way I know how – going into a topic in way too much detail. As we prepare to enter the year 32 ADH (a.k.a. After Die Hard), the world is gripped by a constantly nagging question.

No, it’s not “Why does everyone call Hans Gruber and his gang ‘terrorists’ when they were clearly bank robbers?”

Today we’re going to use data to answer the question “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” Along the way, we’re going to test Die Hard’s Christmas bona fides against all movies in US cinemas for the past thirty years, using a variety of methods.

I have put details of my sources and methodology at …

Boxing movie Creed II opens in a few weeks and the early reviews suggest that it will be worth watching.  This has spurred me on to investigate a couple of related questions asked by readers about sports movies.

Nada asked about the accuracy of the industry adage that “sports films don’t work” and Jason asked “Am I right to think sports movies are normally pretty bad?”

Let’s a take a quick look at sports movies over the past twenty years to see how true each of these assertions is.

To study this topic, I looked at all movies released in US cinemas over the past two decades (1998-2017, inclusive) and figured out which were classed as “sports movies” by IMDb. …

Today’s topic was suggested by my wife (hello, honey!). For the longer story as to how this topic came up, see the epilogue at the end of the article.

For now, I’ll focus on what she suggested I research: Are romantic comedies shorter (and do they receive poorer reviews) than non-comedic romance movies?

I built a dataset of all movies which grossed at least $1 in US cinemas between 1980 and 2017 (13,159 movies) to try to discover the answer.

Let’s start by having a look at how the romance genre compares to other genres.  For each movie I gathered three pieces of information (where available):

• Length, measured in minutes, from IMDb.
• Metascore, which is the average score of all major critics, out of 100.
• IMDb user …

Today, I’m sharing my most recent collaboration with Bruce Nash for the American Film Market.

This time, we investigated the common factors behind successful comedies.

To understand how to make a comedy successful, we first looked at who watches them. We used data from UK cinema audience surveys by Pearl and Dean from the past twenty years to compare comedy films to those of other genres.

Let’s start with gender. At 54%, comedy had the second-highest percentage of women in their audiences, when compared all major genres, behind only romance (which stood at 59%). The other basic demographic category is age. To analyse this, we sub-divided the audience data by MPAA certificate to see how audiences differ between types of comedy.

As …