Each week I look at a different topic around the film industry, focusing on the data and statistics which reveal what’s going on.
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 […]
In much of human life, we equate the length of time someone has been performing a task with their level of skill. Businesses proudly state how long ago they were founded, a lawyer with “30 years’ experience” can charge more than one fresh out of college and ‘time served’ often denotes seniority. But is this […]
I have produced films alone and I have produced in partnership with other producers. Personally, I prefer the latter. Producing a movie is a big undertaking and so it’s good to have people to share the load and journey with. Plus the film gets to benefit from multiple people’s strengths, passion and contacts. Recently, I […]
In the last couple of weeks, I have looked at a number of topics around movie budgets. To complete this trilogy, I am turning to the connection between a movie’s budget and the amount of money it collects at the box office. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the “Domestic” gross, i.e. all the money spent […]
Among the most frequent questions I’m asked by those new to the film industry is “How much does the average movie cost to make?” The short answer is “it depends”. It’s similar to asking “How much does the average meal cost to make?” It depends where you are, who’s making it, for whom and whether […]
In the past few months, I have received a growing number of questions relating to international collaboration on movies. Some relate to the individual level of cast and crew working across borders while others focus on films as commercial products manufactured in more than one country. It’s hard to tell why the topic of international […]
Last week, I looked at producers’ careers and this week I am going to use the same data to look at how the picture differs between male and female film producers. This research harnesses my dataset of every feature film released between 1949 and 2018 inclusive. This includes 631,365 producer credits across 274,991 films and […]
A few months ago, I looked at the average number of films a director is likely to make over their career. This led to people asking about producers and so I agreed to take a look. The role of a movie producer is wide-ranging, flexible and often confusing. Added to that, there are a number of […]
One of the reasons it’s hard to make your first movie is that much of the information you need is not available. While we can all read granular box office figures online, it’s often hard to reliably discover how much a movie cost to make and it’s near impossible to know how they spent that […]
This is the fourth of four articles I co-authored with Bruce Nash on behalf of the American Film Market. We have previously looked at drama, comedy and family films and today we turn to horror. Specifically, horror movies budgeted between $500,000 and $5 million which were released domestically (i.e. in the US and Canada) between […]
