Today, I’m sharing another project I carried out for the American Film Market along with Bruce Nash from The Numbers. In this article, we’re going to look at the performance of dramas, and what it takes for them to be successful.

The moniker ‘drama’ is often maligned by distribution professionals as not being a real genre.  There is some truth to this claim – many films which lack a clear genre are simply labelled as dramas, and drama is a rather broad classification (i.e. any moment in life can technically be labelled as drama, whereas not every event can be classed as romantic, sci-fi, western etc).

The main purpose of genre classification is to set the audiences’ expectations.  What will they get in return for …

Last week, I shared the results of a research project I conducted into the genre of global film production.

Today, I’m drilling into those numbers to look at how filmmaking tastes change between different countries.

This comes from my dataset of every movie I could find that was produced over the past twenty years – that’s over 117,000 movies from in 151 countries, shot between 1998 to 2017, inclusive.

Let’s start by breaking down the movies into continent of origin and then later we’ll zoom into the individual nations.

The chart below shows which continent movies of each genre come from, over the twenty-year period I studied. For example, 50% of all Historical movies made over that time came from European nations.  …

A few years ago, I looked at what genres are disproportionately popular with cinema audiences around the world.  We learned that Italians enjoyed more comedies, that Asian nations love action, Europeans love drama and that romance burns brightest among Mexican film fans.

That study looked at how films were received in cinemas, but a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that there was another group of people whose genre tastes we could measure – the filmmakers making the movies.

So I set about building a database of the movies made in each country and what genre they are.  Now, I’m willing to concede that the scale of the research I did for today’s article was slightly out of proportion with the value of its findings, …