I was surprised to learn that the Venice Debut Film Prize comes with a $100K split between the director and the producer team. Makes me wonder.... who else has a cash prize and how do they all fall in the year? Can you be eligible for more than one? Do they all require premieres?

It’s a great question, and it got me digging. I started reading the rules of the biggest festivals, widened my net to all Oscar-qualifying short film festivals, and ended up hunting for film festivals that claim to offer a prize of at least $5,000. By the end, I had data on 423 festivals across 90 countries.

TL;DR - Do film festivals pay cash prizes?

Yes, many do. 49% of the festivals I tracked offer some kind of cash prize. Together, they offer an annual prize pool of $8 million ($5.7 million for features and $2.3 million for shorts).

The typical feature prize is small (the median is about $5,800), with only 14 offering $50,000 or more.

The most famous festivals are among the least generous. Cannes pays nothing at all in its official selection, Venice pays for one prize, and Sundance’s jury prizes carry no money.

Show me the money

I counted a prize only if a festival’s own published regulations or awards page says it pays money to the director, the producer, the film or a named creative.

I noted when they offered money to a distributor, prizes in kind (post-production services, equipment, residencies), or other grants tied to a future project, but they weren’t in Ted’s question, so they aren't in my main findings.

The chart below shows some of the most generous festivals. The dark blue bars are prizes that any feature can compete for, and the orange bars are ones with some kind of entry restriction, such as nationality, region, or genre.

The top of the table is not where most people would guess. The single largest pot is the CineCoPro Award at Filmfest München, €100,000 paid to the German co-producer of an international co-production, funded by the Bavarian film fund.

Next is the national competition at Antalya Golden Orange, whose Best Film prize is TRY 5,000,000 (about $103,000) but open only to Turkish productions. T

Then come two prizes of $100,000 each. The Golden Yusr at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah is split between director and producer, but only films by Arab, African or Asian filmmakers qualify.

And Venice’s Lion of the Future, the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a debut film, is donated by Filmauro and ‘divided equally between the director and the producer’. That one is open to any first fiction feature in any of the festival’s competitive sections.

The Bright Horizons Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival pays AUD 140,000 (about $100,000) to the winner of a competition for first and second features, and asks only for an Australian premiere.

Locarno’s Pardo d’Oro (CHF 75,000, shared by director and producer), Gdynia’s Golden Lions (PLN 300,000, for Polish films and co-productions), the new Doha Film Festival’s Best Narrative Award ($75,000) and Edinburgh’s Sean Connery Prize (£50,000 for a feature that world premieres there) round out the top of the chart.

Do the big five festivals pay anything?

You may have spotted that some of the biggest awards (i.e. Palme d’Or, Golden Lion, Golden Bear, Sundance Grand Jury Prize, etc.) are missing. That’s because the most prestigious prizes in world cinema are shiny trophies, not actual cash.

Cannes pays nothing in its official selection. The 2026 regulations list the Palme d’Or, the Grand Prix, the Caméra d’Or and the rest with no money attached. The only cash the festival itself gives is to film school shorts in La Cinef (€15,000, 11,000 and 7,500).

There is some money at Cannes, but it comes from other people. Critics’ Week (which the festival does not run) pays €8,000 for its French Touch Prize and €4,000 for its SACD screenwriting prize, and its Gan Foundation award gives €20,000 to a French distributor. The Golden Eye documentary award, created by the festival with the French authors’ society Scam in 2015, pays €5,000 from Scam to the winner, chosen from the documentaries across all selections.

Venice pays for exactly one prize, the debut award that Ted was on the jury for. The Golden Lion, the Silver Lions, the Volpi Cups and every Orizzonti award state no money in the regulations. The independent sections have a little, such as €10,000 for the Critics’ Week grand prize.

Berlin is the most generous of the three European majors, with €50,000 for the best first feature, €40,000 for the documentary award and €20,000 for the best short. The Golden and Silver Bears carry nothing.

When I looked at who owns each major festival a few weeks ago, I noted how the US festivals sit apart from the European ones because they are not publicly funded. However, in this regard, they follow the same path as Cannes and Venice: the headline award offers no direct financial reward, but pockets of cash appear around the margins.

Sundance‘s Grand Jury Prizes, directing awards and audience awards carry no money. The cash there comes from sponsors with specific interests. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gives $25,000 to a film about science or technology, and Amazon MGM funds two $10,000 producers’ awards. Toronto gives CAD$ 20,000 with its Platform Prize, and its famous People’s Choice Award lists no money at all on the awards page.

So if you have a finished feature and you are counting on prize money, the biggest brands are the wrong place to look. The festival that pays the most cash to feature filmmakers across all its prizes is Locarno, at about $333,000 a year.

When does the money fall?

Ted also asked when most of the money falls in the year. It seems that as the year ramps up, cash flows more heavily. The chart below combines all the 560 feature cash prizes at the 125 festivals that pay them, by the month the festival opens.

Three quarters of the year’s feature prize money is awarded between June and December.

November carries about $1.1 million across 19 festivals, from Tallinn and Cairo to Goa, Doha, Turin and Marrakech. October is close behind at about $1.05 million across 23 festivals (Busan, Warsaw, Tokyo, Antalya, El Gouna, Valladolid). Those two months hold 38% of the year’s feature prize money.

Who gets the money?

I’ve actually been on a bit of this journey myself. Back in 2010, I wrote a short film that performed strongly at awards. We collected £10,000 in cash for winning the Reed Short Film Competition, and £30,000 in future funding by winning the Virgin Media Shorts Award. (We were also nominated for a BIFA and longlisted for a BAFTA, neither of which would have resulted in any money, had we won).

The £10k cash was easy to split up, but the £30,000 funding for the director’s next short was more complicated.

Festivals know things can get fraught, so most are extremely clear about what the money is for and who can receive it:

• More than a quarter of the money is written to be split between the director and the producer, which is the model at Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, Marrakech, Doha, El Gouna and Goa.

• Another 27% goes to the director alone. Producers alone get 13%, mostly in Spain and Turkey, where the rules write the cheque to the production company.

• 18% goes ‘to the film’, which in practice means whoever the festival has on file as the entrant.

• And one dollar in ten goes to a named creative who is not the director, usually an actor, a screenwriter or a cinematographer.

Then there is the money that never reaches the filmmakers at all. Thirty-four prizes at 18 festivals, worth about $540,000, are paid to a distributor, on the condition that the film is released in the festival’s country. San Sebastián is the clearest case. Its Kutxabank New Directors Award is €50,000, but half goes to the Spanish theatrical distributor, and if there is no Spanish distributor, that half ‘will remain vacant’.

Valladolid‘s Espiga de Oro is €70,000, the largest sum any festival in the study attaches to a best film prize, and every Euro of it goes to the Spanish distributor. Sitges states outright that it ‘does not award cash prizes’, then gives €20,000 to the Spanish distributor of its best film.

Do they all demand a premiere?

Actually, no.

This surprised me, as I imagined the festivals were buying exclusivity with their money. The chart below shows the premiere requirements for the 560 feature cash prizes I tracked.

Only 6% of the prizes (10% of the money) require a world premiere. This includes Venice’s debut award, Rotterdam’s Tiger competition, Toronto’s Platform section, Tallinn’s main competition, Edinburgh’s competition, and a handful of others. The orange bars count prizes, and the dark bars count money.

Another 7% (12% of the money) accept an international premiere, meaning a film may have already played at home. That is the rule at Berlin, Locarno, Karlovy Vary and San Sebastián’s New Directors section.

Then comes the bulk. 42% of the prizes, and the same share of the money, only require a national or regional premiere.

• Tokyo asks that the film has not been released in Japan.

• Cairo, Doha, Marrakech and Red Sea ask for a Middle East and North Africa premiere.

• Melbourne and Sydney ask for an Australian premiere.

• Gijón, Seville and Cinema Jove want the Spanish one.

• Goa requires that the film has not screened in India.

How many cash awards could you win with the same film?

Films that do well at festivals tend to do well at more than one festival because, well, the film is excellent! So it stands to reason that if many festivals offer money without requiring premieres, a film could go festival to festival and scoop up money.

Let's make up an extreme case. I’ve assumed that you have just made your first fiction feature, which lasts over 60 minutes, from a country that does not host any festival in the study and is not in Asia, the Arab world, Latin America or Europe (i.e. it doesn’t qualify for those special prizes reserved for a nationality or a region).

You’d world premiere at one of twelve major festivals that demand it, and then travel to every later festival in the same calendar year at which it still meets the published premiere rule for at least one cash prize. Each visit counts as a public screening in that country.

A debut that world premieres in Berlin in February is eligible for cash prizes at 26 further festivals before the year is out, with the largest pots at each adding up to about $361,000.

That counts the €50,000 debut prize in Berlin, then Sydney’s AUD 60,000, Istanbul’s €30,000 Golden Tulip, the $25,000 Andrzej Wajda award at Mastercard OFF CAMERA in Kraków, Locarno’s CHF 30,000 audience prize, Turin’s €20,000 and Tokyo’s JPY 3,000,000

Other routes you may consider include:

• Start in Rotterdam or Sundance in January, and there are 27 festivals and a little less money.

• Start in Venice in September, and there are 15 festivals and about $251,000 left in the year.

• Start in Tokyo or Tallinn, and there are five or six.

Yeah, but does it ever actually happen?

Theory is one thing, but let's see how often films win multiple awards.

I took every feature that won a prize at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, SXSW, Tribeca or the BFI London Film Festival between 2000-25 and looked at whether they also won a prize at another of those eight festivals.

Just 131 of those 3,147 films (i.e 4.2%), won something at two or more of the eight festivals, and only seven won at three. The share has drifted down, from around 5% to 6% in the 2000s to 2% to 4% since 2021.

The most common pairing is Berlin and Sundance (31 films), which makes sense given the calendar. A film premieres at Sundance in January, plays Berlin’s Panorama or Generation section a few weeks later, and picks up an audience or independent jury prize there. Berlin and Tribeca (17) and Cannes and London (15) follow.

The films that managed three are a small club. Beasts of the Southern Wild took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and the Sutherland Award in London in 2012, and All That Breathes did the same route a decade later. Of those six prizes, only one carries money, the €5,000 that comes with the Golden Eye at Cannes.

So the answer to ‘can you win at more than one’ is yes, but the answer to ‘do films win cash at more than one’ is almost never.

What about shorts?

Let’s end by quickly looking at short films.

Short film prizes are more common than feature prizes but much smaller. The 423 festivals list 805 cash prizes for shorts at 172 festivals, worth about $2.3 million in total, with a median of about $1,700. Nearly two-thirds of them pay less than $2,500, and only 35 pay $10,000 or more.

The Louisiana Film Prize pays $50,000, decided by the festival audience, to a short shot in Louisiana, and the full sum only if it was shot in Caddo or Bossier Parish. Among the international festivals, the largest are the Berlinale Shorts CUPRA Filmmaker Award at €20,000, Doha’s best short ($20,000), Edinburgh’s Thelma Schoonmaker Prize (£15,000) and Locarno’s Pardino d’Oro for the best auteur short (CHF 15,000). The dedicated short film festivals pay in the low thousands. Clermont-Ferrand’s Grand Prix is €5,000 and Oberhausen’s is €8,000.

Across all 805 prizes, 45% of the money is written to the director alone.

Notes

I built my festival study list using:

• The 50 festivals accredited by FIAPF (the International Federation of Film Producers Associations).

• 14 festivals a working filmmaker would expect to see and that FIAPF does not list (Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Telluride, New York, BFI London, Rotterdam, Fantasia, IDFA, CPH:DOX, Sheffield DocFest, Red Sea, Marrakech and Doha).

• 123 festivals whose awards qualify a short film for the Academy Awards.

• 190 festivals whose FilmFreeway listing claims a cash prize of $5,000 or more.

• 46 festivals found by searching for large prizes reported in the trade press.

I removed 19 listings that turned out to be award schemes, funds, or contests without a festival. That left 423 festivals in 90 countries.

For each festival, I downloaded the current regulations, or the awards page where the regulations name prizes without amounts, and recorded every prize that includes money or a valued non-cash award.

For the first chart, I converted figures to US dollars at the European Central Bank’s rates around the time of writing, and where a prize is split with a distributor, I show only the filmmakers’ share.

• When Do We Stop Finding New Music?

• Who’s the Greatest Actor in Movie History? A Statistical Analysis

• How Many Episodes Should You Watch Before Quitting a TV Show?

I’m a huge fan, and if you like the kinds of things I write about, then you’ll love his work. So today I’m giving the floor to Daniel, sharing one of his posts on the future of theatrical.

Stat Significant

Data-centric essays about movies, music, TV, and more.

By Daniel Parris

Intro: Project Popcorn

Few decisions have reshaped moviegoing more than the stupidly named “Project Popcorn.” For those unfamiliar with this deeply lame corporate initiative, Project Popcorn was WarnerMedia’s 2021 plan to release every Warner Bros. film on HBO Max the same day it arrived in theaters. It was a short-term decision with one obvious goal: juice streaming numbers.

The experiment began with Wonder Woman 1984, then expanded to an entire year’s worth of releases. Over the next twelve months, Warner Bros. jettisoned its most anticipated projects to streaming: Tom & Jerry, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, The Suicide Squad, Dune, King Richard, The Matrix Resurrections, and many more.

Inspired by Warner’s short-term thinking, other studios pursued similar streaming-first strategies, and the economics of Hollywood subsequently went haywire. Christopher Nolan left Warner Bros. for Universal, where he eventually made Oppenheimer and The Odyssey. Scarlett Johansson sued Disney, alleging that the day-and-date release of Black Widow violated her contract. All across Hollywood, studios were forced to compensate talent for the sudden erosion of once-lucrative back-end deals.

Yet Project Popcorn’s defining legacy was not any single lawsuit or bruised ego. Its real impact was resetting audience expectations about how soon a movie should arrive on streaming. Where there had once been a 5-month window between theatrical release and home viewing, audiences were suddenly told they could get top-shelf entertainment with no waiting period at all.

Studios eventually reversed course, restoring theatrical windows of 45, 60, or even 90 days. By then, however, viewer expectations had already shifted—perhaps forever.

So today, we’ll examine the relationship between theatrical moviegoing and streaming activity, estimate how much money Hollywood is leaving on the table, and explain why theaters remain the smartest way to launch a film.

Why We Stopped Going to the Movies

When VHS and Betamax VCRs arrived in the late 1970s, Hollywood feared audiences would abandon theaters for at-home viewership. Universal and Disney even sued Sony, Betamax’s manufacturer, in an unsuccessful attempt to curb the technology’s adoption. By the mid-1980s, however, the industry had embraced VHS, and home video became a lucrative market worth roughly $10 billion a year.

The late 1990s brought DVDs, which offered enhanced picture quality, greater portability, and interactive bonus features. The format quickly supplanted videotape as the dominant mode of home entertainment, with annual DVD sales peaking at roughly $16 billion in 2005.

This dependable revenue stream enabled studios to take bigger risks. If a film underperformed in theaters, strong DVD sales eventually allowed it to turn a profit.

Based on a handful of case studies from the early 2000s, DVDs generated revenue equivalent to roughly 50% of a film’s international box office.

Crucially, VHS and DVD purchases did not cannibalize ticket sales because studios preserved a theatrical window of at least five months. By the time a film reached home video, it had often faded from public attention, prompting studios to launch an entirely different marketing campaign around its release on physical media. This windowing system trained consumers to treat the two formats as distinct purchases: a theatrical ticket paid for a communal, big-screen experience, while a cassette or disc allowed you to own the movie and rewatch it at home, albeit in lower quality.

That carefully managed distinction would be dismantled by technological disruption and the chaos of a global pandemic.

In January 2007, Netflix launched its streaming service, giving consumers instant access to a vast library of film and television for just $5 a month. Movie watching was no longer bound by physical constraints, and DVD sales plummeted as streaming subscriptions, digital rentals, and digital purchases grew into a market generating roughly $60 billion annually.

In 2020, the pandemic shuttered theaters across the country and forced Hollywood studios to collapse their traditional exclusivity windows, most notoriously through WarnerMedia’s “Project Popcorn.” Instead of waiting 180 days to watch a movie at home, audiences might wait just 14 days—or no time at all—upending decades of consumer expectations.

The dependable revenue once generated by DVD sales gave way first to premium video-on-demand, where viewers could rent or purchase films through platforms such as Amazon and Apple, and later to subscription streaming bundles such as Netflix. Once a movie was folded into a monthly subscription fee, however, its financial return became increasingly abstract.

Although premium video-on-demand is more convenient, data released by Universal suggests it generates only a quarter of the revenue of physical media sales.

A digital rental costs between $3 and $20, with a single transaction covering an entire household—effectively turning four theatrical tickets into one purchase. For many consumers, waiting for a home release is therefore cheaper and logistically simpler. Recent case studies based on online review activity suggest that many—perhaps most—films now find their largest audience after leaving theaters, first through paid digital release and later through subscription streaming. This pattern is not universal, however, and varies considerably from film to film.

That said, across dozens of data points, the broader trend is clear: a sizable cohort of consumers has been trained to wait for streaming. The result is a new rhythm of movie consumption: theatrical releases generate a strong, sustained wave of attention; paid digital releases produce a sharp but fleeting spike in activity; and subscription services deliver a smaller second uptick.

Perhaps most revealing is the first week of premium VOD, when online activity surges—evidence of pent-up demand among viewers who never planned to leave home.

Worse still, consumers appear to prefer this newfound bargain. Online film ratings vary sharply across the three release windows, producing a rather dispiriting finding for anyone who still believes in the magic of da’ movies: the less people pay to watch a film, the more they tend to like it.

One caveat: these findings come from a limited sample of films released over the past six months, so I’ll revisit the analysis as more data accumulates. Still, the broader pattern is intuitive: a mediocre movie can be a rip-off when it’s a $35 trip to the theater, yet feel like a quaint diversion when bundled into an existing Netflix subscription. Price, in other words, may shape not only whether people watch a film, but how generously they judge it.

And if, like me, you still prefer seeing movies in theaters—even when surrounded by legions of tweens scrolling TikTok—take comfort in this: Hollywood still has a financial incentive to preserve the theatrical experience.

When we compare online review activity across distribution models and streaming windows, we find that films originally released in theaters consistently generate more engagement across all viewership periods—throughout their theatrical runs, paid digital releases, and eventual availability on subscription platforms—than movies released exclusively on streaming. This suggests that theatrical exhibition still serves as a signal of quality, giving audiences a reason to seek out the film later.

Perhaps theatrical audiences are not merely customers to be monetized, but early evangelists who will build enthusiasm among a cohort of late adopters who will watch the movie via digital rental. Marketing for theatrical releases may therefore accomplish two things at once: attracting committed moviegoers while seeding demand among hesitant at-home audiences.

Final Thoughts: Time, Money, and Diapers

In entertainment trade reporting, theatrical moviegoing is often framed as a noble pursuit, while those who wait for a home release are portrayed as ungrateful philistines who systematically destroy the arts with every Netflix selection. I never fully subscribed to this belief, but I didn’t exactly reject it either. Every time I went to a movie theater, I would pat myself on the back for doing my part—and reward myself with Cookie Dough Bites. And then I had a kid.

Before my son was born, people would offer unsolicited advice that I’d immediately ignore. They’d say things like, “Nothing can prepare you for how much your life will change,” “Time becomes a luxury,” or “Your world will never be the same.” One person even told me they had missed all seven seasons of The West Wing because they were “too busy having kids.” That’s seven full seasons—22 episodes apiece! I disregarded every warning and well-meaning recollection, thinking to myself: “You don’t know me!” Then I’d move on with my day, convinced that I was somehow above conventional wisdom.

Well, all these people were right, and I am a dingus. There is now a growing catalog of movies that I may miss because I am too busy having kids—or, at the very least, I will not see them in theaters.

There was once a meaningful trade-off between staying home and going to the movies. Theaters offered something you could not replicate in your living room: high-definition video, better sound, and access to a film five months before it reached physical media. That trade-off has largely disappeared. I can now watch Hollywood’s best movies on my above-average television within weeks of their debut, spend less money, and never miss my son’s bedtime. Unfortunately, everybody wins—other than movie studios.

At this stage of my life, moviegoing comes with more friction than it once did—a fact Christopher Nolan chose to ignore when he made The Odyssey three hours long. Three hours! Where exactly am I supposed to find a five-hour block required to get to a theater, watch an adaptation of a book I was forced to read in high school, and make it home again? Of course I will go. Once a film major, always a film major. But I have responsibilities now: a kid to put to bed, charts to make for your entertainment, and diaper trash to empty. This new diaper-trash-oriented existence does not easily accommodate three-hour epics, 30 minutes of trailers, an AMC promo featuring Nicole Kidman, and a post-trailer car insurance commercial.

I don’t entirely understand how someone could miss seven full seasons of The West Wing, but it was also a different time—a time before DVR, before TiVo, before Netflix, and before Project Popcorn. Now people don’t really have to miss anything. All they have to do is wait two to four weeks.

Stat Significant

Data-centric essays about movies, music, TV, and more.

By Daniel Parris

The hospital corridors were teal. The shopping mall was teal. The desert was teal. Then the finale arrived, all molten steel and fire, and the whole thing felt like a film graded last year rather than in 1991. I made a note to check whether I was imagining it

In 2010, Todd Miro published a blog post titled ‘Teal and Orange: Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness’. He singled out Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as the worst offender and pointed out what it does to actors' skin tones.

He ended his polemic with:

Please people, spread the word and fight. Fight against this horrible visual injustice. If nothing is done, we will never see our friends green, or purple, or even red again. Imagine a world without red people! It could be right around the corner.

AAAAAHHHHHHHH I can’t take it any more!

Seriously, I weep for cinema of this dark age. I think twenty years from now people will look at films of this era and say “My God - what were they smoking??!?”

I left Terminator 2 exhilarated by seeing a stunning piece of cinema, but also on a mission to discover the latest on the teal-and-orange phenomenon.

I studied the colour of 12 million frames across 8,135 feature films to discover if ‘teal and orange’ really was, as The Guardian labelled it, Hollywood’s new colour craze. And if so, has it passed?

What is the look, exactly?

Human skin, whatever its shade, sits in the orange part of the colour wheel. Pale skin is a light orange, dark skin is a deep one, and almost nobody’s face is green.

The colour opposite orange on the wheel is a blue-green, which colourists call teal. If you push a film’s shadows and backgrounds towards teal while leaving skin warm, every face in the film stands out from whatever is behind it, as if lit from within.

How do you measure it?

The data covers 12 million shots from colour live-action fiction feature films, one frame per shot. I averaged the scores per movie, weighted by how long each shot stays on screen. More info on my methodology is in the Notes at the end of the article.

I then ask the data two questions:

1. What share of the coloured pixels sits in the orange band of the colour wheel? This includes colours from red-orange through to amber, including skin, wood, lamplight, and sunsets.

2. What share sits in the teal band? This is the blue-green of modern shadows, dispatch rooms and hospital corridors.

I count a film as carrying the look when teal and orange each cover at least a tenth of its coloured picture.

Imagine pouring every coloured pixel from the whole film into one jar. If teal fills at least a tenth of the jar and orange fills at least a tenth, the film carries the look.

This lets us identify when the look is a dominant part of the aesthetic. A film with a single moody teal scene and ninety minutes of daylight would not score highly.

In practice, about nine films in ten clear the orange bar, since nearly every film has skin and/or lamplight in it, so what decides the test is whether the teal is there across the whole running time.

When did the movies go all ‘orange and teal’?

The start of the current century saw a revolution in film grading with the introduction of digital grading tools, allowing more control over colour than ever before. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) was the first Hollywood feature to use the Digital Intermediate process from start to finish, in which the shot footage is scanned, graded shot by shot on a computer, and printed back to film.

By 2005, half of all Hollywood movies were completed this way, and by 2007, seven in ten were. It wasn’t long before consumers also got their hands on tools that could do this, and by the time DaVinci Resolve became a free product in 2011, everyone had the power to make things look orange and teal.

But did they?

Yes. Oh, yes they did.

Across my dataset, the levels of orange and teal in movies had been pretty much static for half a century. But as the digital tools started to creep in, and then take over, the teal floodgates were opened.

From 1965 to 2002, the share of films carrying the look never got above 7%, and mostly under 4%. Then it took off. It was 5% in 2003, 12% in 2006, 20% in 2008 and 25% in 2009.

In six years, the look went from something one film in twenty did to something one film in four did.

This is actually not about orange and teal taking over

So we have confirmed that the look existed and became common. But here’s the interesting thing - it’s not really about ‘orange and teal’.

In fact, the levels of orange in movies fell dramatically over the period in question.

Orange fell from 40% of the coloured frame in the 1990s to 24% in the 2020s. The orange was always there, in skin and tungsten light and wooden furniture, and the 1990s were in fact the warmest decade since the 1950s.

What changed is that the orange now sits against teal, and the frame as a whole got cooler.

Teal made up 1.8% of the frame in the 1990s. It rose to 5.4% in the 2000s, 7.4% in the 2010s and 8.6% in the 2020s, more than four times where it started. In the 1990s, just 3% of films had teal covering more than a tenth of the picture, but in the 2020s it is 32%.

So rather than talking about the introduction of a new ‘Orange and Teal Look,’ we should instead be talking about a ‘Teal Takeover’.

So did it ever go away?

To see the rise and fall more clearly, I use a split score. This is a film’s orange share multiplied by its teal share. It is high only when a film has plenty of both, warm and cool in the same frame, and it tracks the look more finely than the simple in-or-out count above.

The split score peaked in 2009 and 2010, fell back through 2015, and then climbed again from 2016. By 2023 it was close to the first peak, and 2025 sits just below the 2009 high. The share of films carrying the look tells the same story in rounder numbers. It was 25% of films in 2009, 15% in 2015, and 30% in 2025, the highest ever measured.

The retreat is real, and it is not the mix of genres changing. Action, comedy, thriller, drama and crime films each dipped between 2011 and 2016, and each has climbed back since.

And the timing of the retreat lines up with the backlash. Miro’s post went up in March 2010. The Guardian piece ran in August 2010. Wikipedia’s entry on colour grading dates the look’s arrival in the mainstream to that year, naming Hot Tub Time Machine and Iron Man 2, both of which score well above average on my measure.

The colourist Dan Moran wrote in Mixing Light in 2018:

The Teal and Orange look has been declining or should I say evolving over the last few years. I’m not sure what caused this. Overuse of LUTs in Vimeo/Youtube films? Mainstream news picking up on the trend?

For me, the pinnacle of the Teal and Orange era was the movie Battleship. It’s about as teal and orange as you can get!

My best guess is that as it’s such a well-known style of grade that filmmaker’s and studios are starting to ask for something less well known.

He was describing exactly the trough we see in the chart.

So the teal and orange is far from over. In fact, it is the most widespread it has ever been. We’ve all got used to it and stopped noticing.

Let’s have a look at the scores in a little more detail, to see whether the look is:

1. Tied to certain genres

2. Limited to bigger budgets

3. Mainly an American thing

4. And which filmmakers and creatives use it most.

1. Which genres lean into it?

While you might recognise it most from big blockbusters, the orange-and-teal look took over all but one genre after 2000.

The chart below shows the look's level by genre, split into films made before 2000 (grey dots) and those from 2000 onwards (orange dots).

Since 2000, the strongest split is in sport, action, comedy, thriller, sci-fi and crime films. Sci-fi has the most teal in the frame, at about a tenth of the coloured picture, followed by thrillers, action and horror.

The one exception is the western, which went the other way. Westerns were about average before 2000 and are now the least split genre by a distance, having gone warmer and dustier as everything around them cooled down.

2. Is it a big-budget thing?

No. Films made for under $10 million average 6.1% teal, and films between $75 million and $150 million average 6.6%.

Only the very top tier, above $150 million, pulls away, at 8.2%.

A tentpole is more likely to be graded this way than a small film, but not by much, and a $5 million thriller is nearly as likely to be teal and orange as a $100 million one.

The look is not expensive, and it barely ever was. For only a handful of years, Hollywood alone had the tools to grade this way. After that, everyone had access.

3. Is it still a Hollywood thing?

It’s true that Hollywood led the charge to orange and teal, but the rest of the world quickly followed suit.

Among countries with a reasonable number of films since 2010, the split score is highest for films from Germany, India, Spain, Italy and China, all of which score above the United States, while France and South Korea sit at the bottom of the table.

4. Who does it most?

Michael Bay is where you would expect him to be, with 14% of his frames teal and a split score twice the average for the years his films came out. But he shares the top of the table with Adam McKay, Pedro Almodóvar, Edgar Wright, Peter Berg and Alexandre Aja.

The directors with the most teal in the frame (rather than the strongest split) are Jaume Collet-Serra (18% of the coloured picture, across Non-Stop, Unknown and Jungle Cruise), Aja, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski and Bay.

At the other end sit the warm holdouts. Woody Allen has 38 films in the dataset, and just 0.6% of his frames are teal. Quentin Tarantino is 41% orange and 2% teal. Wes Anderson and Scorsese are warm too.

Then there is a small group that's cool without being split. David Fincher has plenty of teal (10% of the frame) and far less orange than most (9% of the frame, against a typical 25%), so his films have one of the lowest split scores of any working director. Denis Villeneuve is similar, and Dune: Part One has the lowest split score of any well-known film of the 2020s, with a teal share which rounds to zero. Christopher Nolan, for what it is worth, is bang on average.

Among cinematographers, the strongest split belongs to Toby Oliver, Jess Hall, Linus Sandgren and Florian Ballhaus, with Dan Mindel, who shot the 2009 Star Trek, close behind. The most teal of all is Jonathan Sela, who shot John Wick and Transformers: The Last Knight.

Roger Deakins, with 40 films in the dataset, has one of the lowest split scores of anyone, and only 3% of his frames are teal. If you wanted a single name to stand for the resistance, it would be his.

Then there are the people who actually turn the dials. IMDb’s credits list a colourist for about nine in ten films released since 2005, which gave me several hundred colourists to compare.

The most prolific of the digital era is Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3, who has 174 films in the dataset, including the Transformers series. His films run at 11% teal, with a split score above the average for their years.

Epilogue

So, is the teal-and-orange look over?

No.

It arrived with digital grading, dipped for five years when people started pointing it out online, and came back when we got bored of pointing it out. Three films in ten released last year carry it across their whole running time, more than at the height of the Transformers era. We just stopped caring.

Which brings me back to Terminator 2. I wasn't imagining it, but I wasn't watching 1991 either.

The anniversary release is StudioCanal’s 2017 restoration, regraded under James Cameron’s supervision for that year's 3D re-release.

I matched 2,256 shots between the theatrical version and the 2017 restoration, and discovered that the teal had been turned up to eleven. The hospital went from almost no teal to 30% of the frame, and the mall and the canal chase went from 4% to 39%.

The version of Terminator 2 audiences saw in 1991 is 1% teal, below the average film of the 1990s. Whereas the version I saw a few weeks ago is 16% teal, nearly twice the average for films from the 2020s.

A film about travelling into the past to change the future has had its past changed from the future.

Notes

The corpus is my database of feature films with one keyframe extracted from every shot, 11.9 million shots in all. For this analysis, I kept films with colour data, removed animation, anime, and documentaries, required at least 20 usable shots, removed black-and-white films, and kept films released between 1930 and 2025. That leaves 8,135 films. Coverage runs from a few dozen films a year in the 1950s to 100 or more in every year since 1990 and 200 or more in most years since 2005. The 1930s and 1940s have too few colour films to chart, so they are not shown.

I have not measured every film ever made, and this is not a random sample. The database leans towards English-language films and towards films people have heard of. But with this many films the year-to-year figures are steady, and a difference of a point or two between neighbouring years is within the noise. The moves described in the article are many times larger than that.

For each frame, we keep pixels with chroma above 8 (that is, with real colour).

• The orange share is the chroma-weighted proportion of those pixels within 30 degrees of hue 30 on the colour wheel, so it runs from red-orange to amber and includes skin, wood and tungsten light.

• The teal share is the same for hue 195, blue-green.

• The split score is orange share times teal share times four, so it is high only when both are present.

Shots are weighted by their screen time, derived from the gap to the next shot, and fades and black frames are excluded. A film ‘carries the look’ when its orange share and its teal share are both at least 10%. The threshold is just my guess at an appropriate level. Lowering it to 8% raises every decade’s share (35% of 2020s films vs 3% of 1990s films) without changing the curve's shape.

I detected faces with the InsightFace model on every keyframe, and determined shot scale with a four-class classifier. Face-free shots are those with no detection at 0.5 confidence or above. A film contributes to a subset only if it has at least 60 seconds of screen time.

One thing I checked was whether this is really a story about faces. Skin is orange, and modern films have more close-ups, so the orange half of the measure is partly faces.

My research last year showed that the way filmmakers frame human faces has changed. So I re-ran the teal share on shots with no faces, and on wide shots only, and the rise is the same across all shot types.

Production budgets come from The Numbers via OpusData for 3,268 films released from 2000, converted to 2024 dollars.

Colourists are any credit containing colourist, digital intermediate colourist or colour timer, excluding assistants, dailies colourists, producers and technicians. Directors and cinematographers needed at least eight colour films in the dataset to be ranked; colourists, at least six; and the charts show only people with at least one film from 2005 so the lab era is not ranked against the digital one. Every named figure is the plain average of that person’s films, and the era-adjusted comparisons in the text subtract the corpus average for each film’s year.

Some things this cannot see. It measures pixels, so it cannot tell a grade from a lighting choice or a set painted teal, though the face-free and wide-shot checks make a deliberate grade the only plausible explanation for the trend. Old films are measured from whatever transfer I have, and a restoration could in principle have been regraded, though the fact that pre-2000 films show almost no teal argues that they were not.

Others have measured the look before, mostly in trailers and posters. Edmund Helmer’s 2013 analysis of 312 trailers and Vijay Pandurangan’s study of poster colours both found orange and blue dominant, and a University of Waterloo team clustered the palettes of 29,000 trailers from 1960 to 2019 after removing skin tones. As far as I know, this is the first measurement across every shot of a large body of complete films, and the first to test whether the trend survives with faces removed.

Further reading

If you want to continue this colour journey into the world of movies, then you may enjoy my research last year into the colours of movie posters.

I am uploading new video essays every couple of weeks, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).

https://www.youtube.com/@TheFilmDataScientist

And to help explain the channel, I also created a short channel trailer:

A number of folk have asked me for my views on what it was like, and what the future may hold for this newcomer. The most common question I have been asked is if I see it becoming a major part of the film calendar in the years to come.

My current feeling is - yes, but not for the reasons you think.

Here are my seven reasons I think the industry should expect to see TIFF: The Market as a long-term fixture on the film calendar, along with my observations from walking the halls, and what challenges it may face in the coming years.

1. There was always a market in Toronto

Part of the reason TIFF felt so confident launching a new official market at scale is that the TIFF festival has had an unofficial marketplace for years. The festival has long drawn producers, sales agents and distributors, and it screens so many new films that informal market negotiations were already happening in cinemas, cafes and hotels at TIFF.

One seller told Deadline:

We were already treating Toronto like a market

Cinando, the industry database run by the Cannes market, lists the companies attending TIFF's industry programme back to 2009. The numbers have doubled between 2009 and 2015, were flat until the pandemic, and have grown again in the past few years.

Cinando lists 3,377 companies as attending the 2026 Market as of opening day, 63% more than it lists for 2025.

Of the companies that came to TIFF’s old industry programme most years, 63% came to the Market this year, meaning that its formal status didn't scare off the crowd already there.

And of the companies that go to the other markets most years, a meaningful minority came too. 32% were AFM regulars, 22% were Berlin regulars, and 17% were Cannes regulars.

Of the 57 sales companies that TIFF announced as participating, 72% have had a presence at the other big markets.

So to some extent, the first TIFF: The Market was just business as usual - just with free coffee. Which brings me to my next reasons I think TIFF’s a long-term prospect…

2. It looks well run

The feedback I heard from talking to people on the market floor was that the market was competently run. There were certainly a few hiccups, but everyone seems to be accepting that this was year one, so lessons are being learned.

The biggest issue was a severe delay in printing some market badges (mine wasn’t ready until my fourth day on the ground), but the TIFF digital badge system made it easy to overcome. I could use my badge in my Apple Wallet for access to everything, so I never needed the physical badge.

(This also meant I couldn’t leave it behind in the hotel room, and I was free of the lanyard that told locals I was an interloper. I do hope all markets and festivals follow TIFF’s example of a fully digital accreditation system).

But beyond the badges, things seem to run smoothly. The layout is very people-centric, with the market’s hub a free coffee booth surrounded by ample seating, from tables to armchairs to beanbags for truly relaxed business negotiations. (Which is just as well as the bar at the main InterContinental hotel has a cover charge of C$150 for a table of four!).

Cannes’ Marché and Berlin’s EFM are stuck with the buildings they have and the ways of working that grew up in them. Toronto got to think about what a market should look like in 2026 and build that. The festival’s staff and infrastructure were already friendly and well organised, so the Market fitted in smoothly.

There’s no doubt that the market was quieter than TIFF will want it to be in the future. Barry Hertz of the Globe noted:

The Market revealed some growing pains on its first day, with many delegates reporting surprisingly long lines to pick up their accreditation badges, if the passes had been printed by staff at all. Combine that technical snafu with the sparse level of activity on the convention floor – a space that is taken up by a conspicuously large food-court area, whereas you’d expect more company pavilions – and it wasn’t the best first impression for the Market.

3. It sits on top of a festival that works

TIFF has long been a much-loved, large festival, attracting new and established names. It is the unofficial kick-off for the Oscars race and consequently attracts big-name stars and creatives.

Most new markets have to build an audience and infrastructure, whereas TIFF did not. TIFF’s revenue has grown from C$11m to C$46m since 2002, and TIFF has stated that its industry crowd was around 5,000 before the Market existed.

A standalone market has to build everything from scratch, including the brand, staff, accreditation system, ticketing, promotion, and press office. By contrast, TIFF already had all of that in place, and most of the people who run the festival can run the market too.

This mirrors how the Cannes Marché du Film operates. A private company wholly owned by the festival, called SOGOFIF, runs the market and reported €11.1m in revenue, €1.8m in net profit and a staff of 23. That's right - the world’s biggest film market officially only employs 23 people, as it can operate on top of the festival’s existing infrastructure. This puts the AFM at a distinct disadvantage when compared to Toronto, Cannes, and Berlin.

It even extends to the non-physical aspect. TIFF: The Market launched with a ready-made hero story. At last year’s TIFF festival, Focus Features bought Curry Barker’s Obsession, budgeted at $750,000, for a reported $15m, and it has since taken more than $513m worldwide. I heard it was referenced a lot over the weekend and provided the perfect aspirational story for every filmmaker, funder and distributor at the market.

4. It is North America without being America

Buyers from Europe and Asia need a film market in North America, but right now at least, many are nervous about the United States.

Mark Gooder of Cornerstone Films told The Hollywood Reporter last year that he:

…would be much happier with a trip to Toronto than with dealing with Homeland Security.

Anita Lee, TIFF’s chief programming officer, called the political situation:

…a little bit of a silver lining.

And a Quebec producer told CBC on opening day:

The U.S. is done. It’s Canada’s turn now.

When we look at where attendees are travelling from, we learn that last year’s AFM was nearly two-thirds American. Toronto is a fifth American and half Canadian.

5. It is public money and a point of national pride

Some of the most sustainable aspects of the film industry are those backed by government money, and where the funded activities serve a political narrative.

Read more

Talking about a film his company had just made in Manchester, he told the festival audience:

It’s got very expensive to shoot in London. Manchester is a much more film-friendly place to be. It is tricky to make films in the city now… [It] was primarily a studio picture; the streets on the whole were in Hull.

This is notable in part because Bevan’s company, Working Title, is behind movies which are basically tourist commercials for London, such as Notting Hill and Love Actually, so for them to build their London streets in Hull and on a stage, something must have changed.

I teamed up with Matt Gallagher from The Callsheet (who also runs an industry Substack) to see if London is really losing the battle for filmmakers, and together we asked a number of top location managers what's behind it.

How much location filming does London host?

Film London is the capital’s screen agency, a charity funded by the Mayor of London, the National Lottery and the BFI, that liaises with and supports all the council, bodies, and agencies you might need to engage with if you want to film on London’s streets.

They don’t publish neat annual figures for the volume of location filmmaking in London, but they do occasionally announce the odd figure. (In this case a ‘filming day’ is one crew filming in one London borough on one day).

I tracked as many of their public figures as I could, drawing on a London Assembly answer, a trade news story, Film London’s evidence to a House of Lords committee, and, most obscure of the lot, trustees’ reports Film London files with the Charity Commission.

These figures show that the high point for location filming in London was around 2012 to 2013, and it has since roughly halved.

A word on the peak, because Film London’s own Impact page can give a different impression. It says that in 2022 “there were 11,966 filming days in London, with TV drama filming days at the highest levels ever seen in the capital.” That record is for TV drama alone. The total for 2022, on the same page, is 11,966, a third below the 17,604 the Mayor’s office announced for 2012 as “the busiest year for filming since we started collecting stats”.

Over this same period, the BFI reports that filmmaking in the UK has boomed. Film and high-end TV spend in the UK was £2.2 billion in 2014, rising to £7.8 billion in 2022, and falling to £6.8 billion last year (the BFI’s first count for 2025, which it expects to revise upward).

To make this difference easier to see, here are the two series set to 100% in 2012.

So over a period in which filmmaking in the UK more than tripled in cash terms (from 2014, and roughly six times since 2012; allowing for inflation of 39% between 2012 and 2024, it roughly quadrupled), why did location filmmaking in London fall by half?

What happened to London’s location filming?

We are specifically talking about crews shooting on London’s streets, in its parks and inside its buildings, not on its sound stages. Studio space in and around London has grown over the same period, and some work that used to be done on location is now done indoors.

Also, it’s worth noting that every major production centre had a rough 2023 and 2024. The US strikes and the commissioning slowdown cut UK spend by more than a third in 2023, and the BFI’s first-half figures for 2026 show the recovery has stalled again.

The question is not whether London had a bad couple of years. Everyone did. The question is why London’s location days were already lower before the pandemic, and have kept falling since, while spend across the UK as a whole has grown.

Most of the reasons Film London’s trustees cite for the reduction in London location filmmaking are not really about filmmaking on location, nor are they London-specific - i.e. the pandemic, streamer commissioning changes, and industry strikes.

They do note that more films are choosing to build sets rather than go on location:

2022 also saw a tail-off of location filming in London as the need to make up for shutdown post pandemic slowed down. This resulted in fewer HETV productions filming on location in London as well as a shift for more filming to be limited to the studio.

But overall they don’t address whether London is losing out to other UK cities. In fact, they seem to end the topic on a cheerful note, such as in their most recent report:

This also affected our locations partners across London whose activity and income dipped again with only 8,592 filming days on location recorded in 2024 (calendar year), down by 7% on 2023. However, we began to see an uplift in TV drama production again (up by 11% on 2023) as streamers started to make their way back to the capital.

If we’re not going to discover the reason for London's decline from Film London, Matt and I felt it was time to go directly to the people who book and manage these shoots.

What do the people who book locations say?

We contacted several top-end location professionals and asked what was going on. (We’re very grateful to FilmFixer and BECTU Locations Branch for helping us get the word out to the right people).

In the end, we canvassed the views of 57 location professionals, 50 of whom have filmed in London in the past three years.

The answer came through loud and clear. It’s the money. Not the cost of London in general, but the fees attached to filming in it.

We asked them to rate their worry about six different types of costs, from 1 (not concerned) to 4 (critically concerned). Unit bases (the car park or yard where the trucks, catering and dressing rooms live for the day) scored 3.35, and 40 of the 46 people who answered were very or critically concerned about them. Local authority fees scored 3.22 and location fees 3.17.

The three least worrying costs are general ones about London and modern life. Those matter less to them (though the cost of living in London still scored 2.73). The real concern is the fees attached to filming in London.

One production executive put the situation bluntly. A senior executive who works in HETV Drama, told Matt:

Budgets are getting tighter. You take your show up to Manchester and you save a million off your budget straight away. You might then have to take your Heads of Department and accommodate them, which costs a lot, but it’s hard to shoot a Band 2 drama [one budgeted at £1.25m to £3m an hour] in London.

How have the costs changed?

In January 2012, Film London compiled the admin fees and location fees of every London borough. According to the ONS consumer price index, prices in general have since risen by 51%.

A crew of three, or five in some boroughs, with handheld kit can film on a public street without asking anyone. These fees start once the film office gets involved. Let’s start by looking at the smallest charge: the admin or application fee a small crew pays a borough just to shoot in the street.

In the chart below, blue is the 2012 price, orange is the most recent price, and the little black lines show where prices would be if they had kept pace with inflation.

In most boroughs, the entry fee has not kept up with inflation. Tower Hamlets and Islington went from £65 an hour to a flat £95. Greenwich and Haringey from £75 to £84. Ealing charged £100 an hour in 2012 and today charges a small crew £100 to film in the street, with no separate admin fee. The exception is Westminster, where a simple application went from £50 to £180, or £370 if your company turns over more than £1m, plus £185 an hour of officer time.

Huh. This isn't the story we expected. What gives?

That's because this isn't the type of filmmaking that is being charged the most, or leaving London in significant numbers.

The survey revealed that the costs people worried about most are the kinds of things only larger productions really have to factor in, and those are the productions that employ the most crew and hire the most facilities.

A cleaner way to see this is to compare against 2012. For a dozen London boroughs we have the official rate card for every year from 2021/22 to 2026/27, all issued in the same format by the same film office operator (more on them later).

The chart below tracks two lines from those cards: the smallest admin fee a crew of one to five pays, and the highest full-day location fee printed for a crew of 50 or more.

The small-crew admin fee in the seven cheapest boroughs went from £140 to £179 over five years, a rise of 28%, which is exactly what inflation did over the same period.

However, the high end is another matter. For three years the top full-day fee for a very large crew sat at £7,500 in the outer boroughs, £10,000 in Haringey and Hounslow and £12,000 in Camden, Islington and Southwark. In 2024/25 it jumped to £20,000 in almost every one of these boroughs at once, and by 2026/27 all of them print £22,000 and up, as the top of a range that starts between £2,720 and £4,460 depending on the borough.

The pattern is plain: the smallest shoots have had their prices protected, while the biggest have seen the top of their range nearly triple.

The chart below shows what it currently costs to suspend one parking bay for one day. Large productions might need dozens of such suspensions for each day of filming.

Some London boroughs charge more than three times what other UK cities charge.

In 2013, Camden charged £38, whereas the current rate is £104.63 for the first day. Manchester currently charges £30. A production taking 30 bays on a Camden street pays about £3,100 a day for the kerb before anyone has filmed anything, and that is before other admin and location fees.

What does a unit base cost, anyhow?

For anyone who hasn't stood in one at 5am, a unit base is the travelling circus of vehicles that forms the operational centre of a production, set up as close to the filming location as possible. It holds the honeywagon (the toilets), the three-way (one trailer split into three small dressing rooms), the artists’ trailers, the make-up and costume trucks, the production office, the catering vehicles and dining bus, the generators and the crew’s cars, with minibuses shuttling to and from the set.

Because each production does things differently, hiring from a whole range of companies that negotiate rates on every job, I can’t give you such neat figures for unit base costs. However, I have done my best to collect some sample costs to give you a sense of what we’re talking about.

In the crudest terms, you need two things - land and vehicles. As well as council-owned property, there are other options for productions to rent land:

• Westway Trust, which lets the space under the A40 flyover to productions, describes its site as ‘one of the few remaining large unit base facilities in central London’.

• The Royal Parks charge from £3,950 plus VAT a day for North Carriage Drive in Hyde Park, plus traffic management.

• Hackney’s Victoria Park lists its lido car park at £2,500 a day for 15 to 20 facilities vehicles, plus a returnable deposit of up to £1,000 a day and an admin fee of £215 to £405.

Then you have to hire the vehicles. Public price lists are rarer here, because the facilities companies quote job by job. So Mars Proctor of Movie Makers, one of the facilities companies London productions hire their trailers from, kindly put together guide day rates for a full unit base. This isn't his rate card, it's the top and bottom of what a production is likely to pay, and the bottom sits about a quarter below the top.

• Movie Makers’ guide rates put a honeywagon, make-up trailer, costume trailer, production office or dining bus £170 to £225 at a day each, artist trailers at £160 to £250, a generator at £185 to £245 (£310 to £415 for a hybrid with a battery pack), each 18-tonne truck for camera, grip, props or construction at £145 to £195, and the four crew who run the base and drive the trucks at £325 to £390 a day each with overtime bought out. The seventeen vehicles on his list, plus the people, come to roughly £4,200 to £5,300 a day.

• Dickies Location Facilities in Surrey charges £375 for a honeywagon for ten hours on a weekday, £475 on a Sunday, £55 an hour overtime, £9 an hour for the generator and £1.50 a mile to get it there.

• A minibus in London starts at about £120 a day, before the £18 Congestion Charge.

And that’s before fuel, and before you’ve moved any of it anywhere. Moving it is where London bites. Most productions move base regularly during a shoot, and a lot of London’s unit bases have curfews.

Mars gave us this fictional example:

You wrap in Wembley at 7pm and tomorrow’s base is Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which shuts at 10pm. Normally the unit would go in two runs, some tonight and the rest first thing in the morning. With a curfew, everything has to arrive in one go, which he calls a one hit move, and it costs twice as much because you need twice the swing drivers.

For a base of 16 vehicles, he puts a double run at £2,840 and a one hit move at £5,680. A drama filming in London for 18 weeks and moving three times a week is therefore looking at somewhere between £153,000 and £307,000 in moves alone, plus fuel and overtime. None of that appears on any council’s rate card.

For the ground itself, the councils publish list prices. Reading the current rate cards of ten London boroughs, a council unit base starts at £1,000 to £1,950 a day and runs to nearly £5,000. Bristol’s run from £600 to £820. So London’s starting prices are roughly two to three times Bristol’s, and its top prices four to six times.

They have experienced the same price inflation we saw in the parking bay suspensions. Haringey’s was £750 in 2012 and now starts at £1,640. Camden’s was £800 in 2013 and starts at £1,500.

London’s location monopoly board

An interesting quirk of how London boroughs run their film offices is that many subcontract them to save money and, in some cases, to increase revenue.

And almost all of those subcontracted boroughs are run by the same private company. FilmFixer runs the location filmmaking operations of 17 London boroughs, giving it a near monopoly on the outsourced borough side of London filming.

Is this a good or bad thing? I can’t provide a view as (a) I am not at the sharp end; and (b) I know people on both sides of the debate, so I am not really an unconnected witness. What I can do is provide the case for each side:

• The benefits of having a single company managing multiple boroughs’ location filmmaking operations are that they know what they’re doing. Over the years, they have built up a detailed knowledge of what both productions and boroughs need. They can also introduce efficiencies, such as a single application system, a single set of terms, a single phone number, and long-term relationships. Finally, the councils don’t agree to endless terms with FilmFixer, so other companies can submit bids when tenders come up for renewal.

• On the other hand, detractors might point out that monopolies are inherently bad. The lack of market forces on prices could help explain why costs have risen so much in recent years, driving production to other cities. The rate cards above show what a single operator can do. In 2024/25, the top fee for a very large shoot jumped to £20,000 in almost every FilmFixer borough, and a year later to £22,000 and up, while Kensington and Chelsea, whose card is priced separately, moved up by a few per cent a year. Whether that is a monopoly at work or a portfolio catching up with what the market will bear, a location manager cannot shop around. To film in those 17 boroughs, you deal with one company, and you will need to deal with them again next month, so few are in a position to argue. Several respondents said as much, unprompted. One location manager wrote that FilmFixer “should not be allowed to monopolise the application industry”. An assistant location manager put it in six words: “FilmFixer has a monopoly which isn’t healthy.” A supervising location manager wrote: “FilmFixer is running 2/3 of the boroughs, and it is impossible to get hold of them sometimes”. Then there’s the argument that one company with a suite of borough operations is in a position to secure future contracts.

We asked our location professionals to rate each borough they had worked in over the past three years, from very difficult to very film-friendly. The average for FilmFixer boroughs was +0.29, compared with +0.68 for the rest.

The lowest-rated boroughs (Hillingdon and Kensington and Chelsea) are all FilmFixer clients. But so are Barnet, Southwark and Camden near the top, and Westminster, which runs its own office, is fourth from the bottom on 49 raters.

Greenwich, the worst-rated borough of all, stopped its in-house film unit in November 2024, and the borough ran no filming service at all. FilmFixer was appointed in February 2026, so it’s fair to assume that that score is not a reflection of FilmFixer’s work. Excluding the Greenwich data boosts the FilmFixer average score to +0.37 vs +0.68 for the non-FilmFixer boroughs.

What else can be done?

While cost was the main concern, it’s not the only factor that affects where a production chooses to shoot.

We then asked what causes the most friction and, separately, what makes a location viable in the first place. Each person could pick up to three.

Speed comes first on both lists. Slow response times are the top source of friction (chosen by 73%), and speed of approvals is the top thing that makes a location viable (69%).

Cost unpredictability and cost transparency also feature. These folks need to budget and report to the Line Producer and Producer, and they can’t do this if costs are vague. One location manager put it like this:

There are a lot of positives with the hard working teams and we do appreciate them but having no idea [what the final cost will be] until the invoice process, [and] how it affects your budget, is such a pain.

Another asked for

Quicker responses, even if it’s to say no this isn’t possible.

Asked what single change would most improve London’s readiness for production, the top answers were consistent lead times for road closures, a consistent and transparent fee structure, standard terms across boroughs, and a guaranteed response to enquiries within 24 hours.

One respondent said the single most useful thing a film office could offer was ‘mobile numbers for film officers’.

Six in ten said the filming process is inconsistent or very inconsistent between boroughs. Nobody chose ‘very consistent’. Two thirds of the people we spoke with would value more standardisation.

The push from Whitehall

For the past century, London was the preeminent city for film and TV productions, but this started to shift with the passing of the Communications Act in 2003. It required public service broadcasters’ network programmes be made outside the M25, and charged Ofcom with setting the quotas. Today the BBC must make at least half of its network hours and spend outside London, ITV and Channel 4 35%, and Channel 5 10%. (A programme counts as made outside London if it passes two of three tests: a production base outside the M25, 70% of the production spend outside the M25, and half the off-screen crew usually employed outside it).

Initially, some production companies found workarounds by plonking their productions in places like Amersham, a few hundred yards beyond the motorway. Sneaky stuff, but Ofcom tightened the tests in 2019, and over time the UK’s regional hubs have grown into stable and thriving centres that face the same headwinds (strikes, downturns and the rest) as every other hub.

The quotas may initially sound like a compelling explanation for the fall in London location filming. There’s no doubt they have played a role, but there are two problems with this being the main driver:

• The quotas have barely moved since 2012, and the broadcasters are beating them by a wide margin. Channel 4 promised in 2018 to lift its nations and regions spend from 35% to 50% of main-channel commissions by 2023 and to put commissioners in Leeds, Bristol and Glasgow. By 2021 it was taking 66% of its main-channel hours and 55% of its spend from outside London, and its chief content officer Ian Katz said they had “helped break London’s longstanding dominance of the TV industry”. The BBC’s Across the UK plan is doing the same job: 54% of its qualifying network TV spend was outside London in 2021, 58% in 2022 and 60% in 2023, against a quota of 50%. Across all public service broadcasters, Ofcom puts the share of spend outside London at 48% in 2019 and 56% in 2023.

• They only apply to public service broadcasters. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney and Paramount all face no quotas and yet they too are leaving London.

Where is the work going?

Many productions were always going to shoot outside the M25, and some simply wouldn't work in London. Supervising location manager Robbie Boake and location manager Naomi Liston scouted places across Northern Ireland that could become Westeros, and Game of Thrones would not have worked as well based in Croydon. His Dark Materials couldn't have been made anywhere but Wales. The same goes for Rivals in Bristol and the Cotswolds, and Peaky Blinders is back in its rightful home in Birmingham. Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow regularly double for New York, London and Gotham. As well as showcase their own wide range of locations that attract lots of productions

But for the shows that could have been based in London and went elsewhere in the UK, or abroad, the people we surveyed point to one cause above all: the costs attached to filming there.

Film London’s own explanation is partly that production has moved indoors. But some of it has moved out of London altogether, and the cities that have taken it are not shy about saying so.

No other UK city publishes a run of location filming days I can set against London’s, so the evidence for where the work went is patchier: spend shares, the cities’ own reports and Matt’s tracking.

• Between 2017 and 2019, according to the BFI’s Screen Business study, about a third of high-end TV spend and a fifth of film spend already happened outside the wider London area.

• Pact’s census found that in 2023, for the first time, more than half of UK TV production spend was outside London.

• Bristol’s film office reported a 55% rise in the economic impact of filming in 2024/25.

• And just today I received a press release from Bristol’s Bottle Yard Studios stating that the value of location filming in Bristol “rose from £11.1 million in 2022-23 to a record £23.8 million in 2024-25”.

In addition, most screen agencies and regional governments now offer their own money on top of the cost savings.

• Greater Manchester launched a £10.5m production fund in March 2026, offering recoupable investment to productions shooting in the city region.

• Liverpool City Region’s fund, launched in 2019 as a first for a combined authority, now stands at £2.8m and puts up to £500,000 into a single production.

• Screen Yorkshire’s Yorkshire Content Fund also invests up to £500,000 and has backed more than 60 productions.

• Screen Scotland’s Production Growth Fund has £2m a year to hand out in £200,000 to £500,000 lumps.

• The West Midlands is committing £2m a year from 2025.

• Creative Wales awarded £23.7m to 45 productions between 2020 and 2025.

• The North East’s £11.4m partnership with the BBC funds a production fund that is currently supporting an ITV drama about the infected blood scandal filming in Newcastle, according to Production Radar.

• The West of England’s mayor launches a fund this autumn.

London has nothing like this. Film London only facilitates and cannot invest or financially support productions.

The rise in costs hits certain budgets hardest. Under the Pact and BECTU agreement that sets crew terms, high-end TV dramas are graded by their budget per hour of finished television:

• Band 1 up to £1.25m

• Band 2 from £1.25m to £3m

• Band 3 from £3m to £8m

• Band 4 above £8m.

Matt’s reading of the productions he tracks is that it is now increasingly rare for independent films, Band 1 TV, or Band 2 TV dramas to shoot inside the M25, and that lower Band 3 productions may not be far behind.

2026 has been very quiet for commissions everywhere. The BFI’s first-half figures show UK spend down on the same period last year, with high-end TV falling from £2.1 billion to £1.7 billion. Matt’s tracking suggests the rest of the UK is picking up as the year goes on, with a stronger end to the year and a positive outlook for 2027. Production Radar reports production activity has recently increased after a lean year for many crew and companies.

• In the North West of England alone: Army of Shadows (Channel 4), Dirty (Amazon), House of Guinness (Netflix), Daddy Issues (BBC), Dragon Slayers (BBC), Twist of Fate (Netflix), The Woods (Netflix), You Are Here (BBC), Hercule (BBC/BritBox) and This City Is Ours 2 (BBC) have been filming or are about to shoot soon. Legacy of Spies (BBC/MGM+) shot a few days of exteriors in Liverpool after months of filming in Prague.

• Multiple productions have been in Cardiff, including Industry 5 (HBO), The Lords’ Day (Netflix), Prisoner 2 (Sky), The Other Bennet Sister (BBC), and a returning ITV drama in the works.

• In Belfast next year, two very large-scale productions are due to start filming for Netflix and Amazon, on top of returning HETV series.

• And many productions that might have been based in the UK are finding better tax incentives elsewhere. The UK's credit is worth 25.5% of qualifying spend. Ireland pays 32%. Hungary pays 30%, and up to 37.5% once allowable foreign spend is counted. Czechia raised its rebate from 20% to 25% in January 2025. Malta offers up to 40%. And the Canary Islands pay 50% on the first €1m and 45% after that, which is why Gran Canaria and Tenerife keep turning up on British call sheets.

What’s to be done?

Film London convened borough film services, private operators, and location managers to a meeting last month to discuss this situation. (I shared an advance copy of our survey results with them ahead of the meeting).

I look forward to hearing publicly what was learned and decided in that meeting.

It remains to be seen how aware the London boroughs are of the scale the situation is becoming, especially when they review their ever-expanding ratecards.

Notes

Matt and I gathered location managers' thoughts in May and June 2026. We’re very grateful to FilmFixer and BECTU Locations Branch for helping connect us with location professionals. We also want to thank all the people who spoke with us off the record.

Frustratingly, a layout issue with how the questions were shown meant one batch of London boroughs wasn't shown to everyone, so we don’t have complete rating data for Tower Hamlets, Richmond, Wandsworth, Waltham Forest, and Redbridge. The borough ratings therefore cover 28 of the 33 boroughs, and some busy filming boroughs are among the missing five. That’s my mistake rather than anything deliberate, so apologies to anyone who that quite rightly annoys!

Filming-day figures come from Film London, quoted by a range of bodies.

• The 2004 figure is from a London Assembly answer of May 2005, which gives a borough-by-borough table (Westminster alone recorded 1,937 days that year).

• The 2005 figure is from a Cineuropa report of 2 February 2006 quoting Film London, which gives 2004 as 10,683, eight days different from the Assembly table.

• The 2008 figure is from Film London’s written evidence to the House of Lords Communications Committee in the 2009 to 2010 session.

• The 2012 figure is from the Mayor of London’s press release of 4 April 2013.

• The 2013 figure is the phrase ‘around 18,000’ in a government release of October 2014.

• The 2018 figure is the phrase ‘more than 15,000’ in a consultants’ report to the City of London Corporation.

• The 2021 figure is ‘more than 12,700’ in Film London’s trustees’ report for the year to 31 March 2022.

• The 2022 figure is from Film London’s Impact page, with the trustees’ report for that year saying ‘approximately 12,000’.

• The 2023 and 2024 counts are on page five of the trustees’ reports for the years to 31 March 2024 and 2025, all filed with the Charity Commission.

Film London’s definition is one crew using locations in one borough on one day. I could not find a published figure for 2006, 2007, 2009 to 2011, 2014 to 2017, 2019, 2020 or 2025.

UK production figures are the BFI’s official statistics on film and high-end television production, counted by the year principal photography started and measured as UK spend. For each year, I have taken the most recent BFI publication that covers it, because the BFI revises earlier years upward as late-reported productions arrive, and the revisions can be large. The 2025 figures are as first reported in the full year 2025 release of 5 February 2026.

High-end television has been counted separately since its tax relief began in April 2013, and the series starts in 2014. Films with budgets under £500,000 were only included from 2009, and co-productions are missing from the film counts before 2002, so the earlier film figures are understated.

Fee comparisons use Film London’s Borough Film Services fee compilations, created on 24 January 2012, against the fee sheets each borough or its operator publishes for 2025/26 or 2026/27. Where the 2012 figure was an hourly rate it is compared as one hour. Fee sheets show minimum published charges before VAT. Admin fees are usually described as per hour of officer time and ‘may be multiplied’, and location fees are ranges. Real invoices can be higher, and this article compares list prices only.

The parking figures are the published charge per bay for the first day of a suspension, before VAT and any per-street admin or bagging fee. The unit base figures are the printed ranges on ten boroughs’ current rate cards, except Camden’s, which is from its 2019 sheet, the latest it has published.

The vehicle, crew and move figures are guide day rates supplied by Movie Makers at our request. They are not a published rate card, so there is nothing to link to. The lower figures are 25% below the higher ones and are rounded to the nearest £5.

The Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham figures are from those cities’ film office fee sheets for 2025/26 or 2026/27.

Inflation for the 2012 comparison is the ONS consumer price index from January 2012 to July 2026, and for the comparison of production spend with 2012 the annual averages of the same index for 2012 and 2024.

The year-by-year rate-card series uses 84 ‘Fees and Lead in Times’ cards for 2021/22 to 2026/27, supplied by FilmFixer, covering 18 boroughs; the lines on the chart use the 12 boroughs present in every year plus Kensington and Chelsea from 2023/24, and ‘£22,000+’ rates are charted at the printed figure. Inflation for that comparison is the ONS index from the 2021 annual average to July 2026, a rise of 28%.

Matt Gallagher and I are building a paid resource for councils and public bodies that handle filming, the Film Office Toolkit, and this article uses the survey and public data gathered for it. Matt runs The Callsheet and its Production Radar tracker. FilmFixer circulated one of the two survey links and supplied its historical rate cards. We both know people at Film London, FilmFixer and BECTU, and we showed a draft to each of them for factual comment before publication, and their responses are printed below where they gave one. Nobody has paid for anything or got us to publish anything we don’t agree with.

Quota levels are from Ofcom's regional production guidance and its 2017 review of that guidance. Channel 4's figures are from its press releases of 31 October 2018 and 15 March 2022. The BBC's are from Ofcom's annual report on the BBC for 2023/24, and the all-broadcaster figures from Ofcom's Review of Public Service Media 2019 to 2023. Regional fund sizes are as published by each fund in September 2026, or as reported by Screen Daily on 18 June 2026. Foreign incentive rates are the headline rates each scheme publishes for an incoming production, before caps and conditions. The Pact figure is from its 2024 census release of 11 September 2024, which covers 2023.

Finally, while researching this topic, I heard more than once that one particular borough is pricing high on purpose to keep filming away after resident complaints. Nobody would say so on the record, and I cannot verify it, so treat it as gossip. But if it is true, it is working.

Extra thoughts

I reached out to various people with an early draft of this piece.

Film London sent this statement:

Film London has spent the last two decades working to transform London from a city no-one was willing to film in, to one of the world’s most film-friendly cities.

We’re acutely aware of the recent challenges facing different parts of the industry, both public and private sector. Core to our remit is ensuring the competing concerns and demands of filmmakers, residents and businesses alike are carefully balanced. We are in constant talks with studios, producers, location managers, local authorities, politicians and private sector providers to ensure London remains film-friendly and competitive. For example, as well as facilitating a wide range of film and TV productions we have, over the last six months, focused efforts on unpicking how charges and services might be harmonised across London’s 33 boroughs, raised concerns about parking charges, lobbied for greater access to sustainable power sources and discussed ways in which the system can better serve lower budget productions taking advantage of the new indie film tax credit.

However, a critical point this report neglects to mention is that the time period focused on corresponds to both the absolute peak years for filming in London, and two of the worst troughs for the global industry. Everyone involved in making film and TV is keenly aware of the current commissioning slowdown and rising costs (energy; cost of living, etc.) over which no one has control, and which are global challenges.

But both sides of the equation are under pressure to do ‘more with less’. It is up to all of us to help balance this delicate ecosystem to ensure our city remains a highly-competitive production centre for domestic and international film and TV production. Film London, through the behind-the-scenes work of our Locations team and our Executive Task Force, are committed to resolving the challenges and supporting and championing the sector.

Andrew Pavord, Founder and Chairman of FilmFixer, said:

Thank you, Stephen and Matt, for this valuable work. We are very happy to have helped you reach the Location Managers who work so hard in this incredible city. Like everyone, I am concerned that productions feel priced out of London. It’s good to see proof that Borough admin fees have (on the whole) remained close to the rate of inflation. Location and Unit Base fees on the other hand have risen, and I feel this is due to simple supply and demand. London is special and unique, and owners of prime locations and their representing agencies are very aware of their true value.

I am very concerned that some Location Managers feel contacting FilmFixer is difficult. Our Film Service Managers publish their mobile phone numbers and offer scheduled meetings in their email signatures. Knowing my own mobile number is on speed dial for all senior Location Managers, I find that criticism hard to take.

There is a reason why 17 London Boroughs have chosen FilmFixer as their service provider. We have to go through regular procurement processes, and the competition is fierce. We will always keep improving the service we offer; helpful, constructive feedback is always welcome.

On the per-borough rating, FilmFixer makes the same point about the other two boroughs at the bottom of the table. Its contract with Kensington and Chelsea began in May 2025 and Hillingdon's in November 2025, so most of the three years our respondents rated fall under the councils' previous arrangements. The company says both boroughs are about to post much improved figures for July to September, that it has introduced film parking permits in Kensington and Chelsea, and that lead-in times have come down in both.

George Couch is the Chair of the Bectu Locations Branch, and he said:

The Locations Branch, welcomes the research published by Stephen Follows and Matt Gallagher. For some time, members have raised concerns about the slowdown in London, rising costs and the increasing difficulty of location filming within a variety of production budgets. The article reflects many of the experiences shared with us.

Improving members’ working conditions and supporting a sustainable industry remain central to our work. We have raised these issues constructively with Film London, film offices, service providers and other industry stakeholders and we welcome everyone’s engagement. We understand that these concerns have been acknowledged.

We also recognise and appreciate the important work carried out by FilmFixer, The Film Office, London’s boroughs and in-house film offices in managing often complex relationships between productions, councils, residents, landowners and other stakeholders. Continued dialogue with all parties will be essential to identifying practical improvements and keeping London attractive to production.

Whilst the reduction in London location filming deserves serious attention, it is encouraging to see production activity growing elsewhere in the UK. The regions offer competitive costs, excellent facilities, diverse locations and highly skilled crews. Although the Branch sits within the London Production Division, we will continue to advocate for location professionals across all regions while working with relevant stakeholders to help London remain competitive, accessible and welcoming to productions.

Warner Bros had told Oz that he needed at least 55% of the audience to select ‘recommend’. After the screening, the movie scored 13%. A follow-up screening in Los Angeles gave it 16%. Frank Oz described it like this:

For every musical number there was applause, they loved it, it was just fantastic... until we killed our two leads. And then the theater became a refrigerator, an ice box.

So he decided to reshoot the ending in which both leads live. A test screening of the new version got 50% ‘recommend’, and the movie became the version we have today.

That was forty years ago. And yet if you listen to film Twitter (or to my friends), you would think the happy ending has since died. Everything seems to be ‘Prestige gloom’, with bleak endings or, at best, ambiguity everywhere.

So I went looking for it, in the plots of 7,384 films and on the faces of the actors in their final minutes.

Would you like a happy ending?

The traditional happy ending is, in fact, two things:

1. It is what happens (the couple reunites, the hero survives, the villain loses).

2. It is also how the last minutes feel.

Those can disagree. For example, the hero of Gladiator dies at the end, but we are left feeling sated, and that justice has been meted out.

So I measured both. For what happens, I rated the plots of 7,384 movies on a six-point scale from happy to sad, depending on whether the protagonist survives and gets what they wanted, whether the couple ends up together, whether the villain wins.

For how it feels, I ran a facial-expression model over 1.57 million close-ups of 10,421 named performers and compared each film’s final 10% with its 65% to 85% stretch (where the darkest hour traditionally lives). A positive ‘ending lift’ means the ending reads warmer on the actors’ faces than the third act.

Two further checks, the music of the finale and the ending tags that humans apply in public databases, tell the same story, and all four are described in the Notes.

Did the happy ending die?

In a word, no.

Across the 6,509 films whose plot text describes the ending, half end happily, one in three ends bittersweet, and only one in six ends sad. The protagonist dies in one film in ten, and the villain wins in fewer than one in eleven.

For all the talk of prestige gloom, the plainly sad ending is no more common now than it was in the 1980s, and it is rarer than it was in the 2000s. The gloomiest patch on that chart is the 1970s, when only a third of films ended happily and three in ten ended sad.

But what has changed is the rise of the bittersweet ending (that’s the orange line on the chart above).

Bittersweet endings have climbed from about a quarter of films in the 1980s to more than a third today.

So it’s not that we’ve had more tragedy, more successful villains, and no rise in dead protagonists (that has been flat for thirty years). Just fewer endings that are only happy, and more that mix the win with a loss.

Endings have just become… complicated.

Which movies went bittersweet?

When I first noticed this, I figured the real cause might be the shift in genre production over the years. But the data tells a different story. The drift isn’t because Hollywood makes more films that fit traditional sad genres, but because one of the happiest genres is changing its identity.

Action films used to have the most reliable happy endings in mainstream cinema. In the 1980s and 1990s, three-quarters of them ended happily. Since 2010 it is 56%, with the bittersweet share rising from a fifth to more than a third.

That single shift accounts for around half of the entire decline in happy endings. So the heroes are still winning, but it’s costing them a whole lot more.

The other genres have moved far less, if at all. Comedy has stayed as sunny as it was forty years ago. Crime and drama softened a little. And one genre went the other way entirely, because biopics are happier than they used to be.

Is this just an American thing?

Half of films ending happily is a worldwide average, and the cliché says the happy ending is an American habit.

The phrase ‘Hollywood ending’ first appeared in mainstream newspapers in 1927, and was being sneered at even then. Ten years prior, a Photoplay editorial had already set out the theory:

American art, to reach the hearts of Americans, must be happy art. Good must triumph over evil. Love must find a way.

Irving Thalberg was less romantic about it. When MGM adapted Anna Karenina as Love in 1927, they shot two endings. They played the tragic version in New York, and screened the happier reunion version in rural areas. Thalberg’s explanation was that audiences in small towns:

…require a happy ending that they can understand or an unhappy ending that they can understand.

The small towns, he reckoned, had not understood the unhappy one.

Europe took the opposite view and has held it for a century. Douglas Sirk, who directed some of the most famous happy endings in American melodrama, said “All my endings, even the happy ones, are pessimistic“. Michael Haneke is blunter: “If you like to go home feeling reassured, you have to watch mainstream films.“

So does the data back the cliché that Hollywood wants to stick on a happy ending? Mostly.

American films end happily 55% of the time and sad 12%. French films are nearly twice as likely as American ones to end sad, which will surprise nobody who has been to the cinema in Paris.

But India has the happiest endings, at 59% happy and 8% sad.

Does a bittersweet ending still feel happy?

That is what happens in the plots. The other half of a happy ending is how the last minutes feel, and here the story is different.

The faces still deliver a rise in six films out of ten, exactly as they did when the plots were sunnier. The modern bittersweet ending is built to feel like a happy one used to. A good example is About Time, which is bittersweet (a final goodbye to a dying father, then a family breakfast) but whose finale the faces read through tears.

Hollywood has learned to make bittersweet feel like happy. How do you make a mixed ending feel like a rise? This is where we need to consider the story's shape.

As a graduate student in anthropology, Kurt Vonnegut argued that stories have shapes you can draw on graph paper. The University of Chicago rejected his thesis, and later gave him the degree anyway on the strength of Cat’s Cradle. His favourite shape he called Man in Hole:

Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.

In 2016, a team at the University of Vermont tested the idea on 1,327 novels and found six recurring shapes. I did the same thing with faces. Clustering the emotional arcs of the 3,146 films with enough close-ups spread across their whole running time produces five.

The two I want to focus on are ‘Late rescue’ and ‘Late peak’.

• Late rescue is Vonnegut’s Man in Hole with the volume turned up to 11. Everything collapses in the third act and then the finale soars. It is the classic happy ending, and it is the most common shape in the data.

• Late peak might look like a happy ending from a distance, but actually isn’t one. The film surges to its emotional high at the three-quarter mark and then deflates all the way to the credits. It is the victory lap that runs out of road.

The classic happy-ending shape did not go anywhere. Late rescue accounted for 22% of films in the 1990s and 23% in the 2020s, and it hit its highest share on record in 2016 to 2019.

The shape that did die was the late peak, which halved from 17% to 10%. Films have kept the darkest-hour-then-rise template while dropping the ending that fades out after its high.

Which ending do audiences rate highest?

Hollywood may have misstepped here, since the template they’ve been killing off is also the best-rated one.

Films with a Late peak arc average 6.66 on IMDb, the highest of the five. The classic crowd-pleaser, Late Rescue, is the lowest at 6.45.

A 2021 study of 6,174 film scripts found the same split from the other direction. Man in a Hole films took the highest box office and scored significantly lower with IMDb users.

So Hollywood makes the shape raters reward least, and stopped making the one they reward most.

It turns out Hollywood isn’t deciding to change its mind… it’s us.

When did we stop rewarding misery?

For most of my lifetime, a sad ending earned a film a higher rating. We collectively decided that misery was a shorthand for seriousness.

In the 1980s and 1990s, films whose plots end sadly were rated nearly half a star lower than films whose plots end happily.

In the 2000s, the premium was still a third of a star, and since 2013 it is one hundredth of a star. The faces version of the same calculation tells the same story, with the deepest valley in the 2000s.

The 2000s were peak misery-chic, as shown by how establishment film critics described the movies they reviewed.

• Manohla Dargis called Children of Men “the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters“.

• Roger Ebert’s verdict on Revolutionary Road was “This film is so good it is devastating“.

• When the 2008 Oscar nominations came out, the Christian Science Monitor noted that the leading films “were marked by merciless, unsentimental endings“, and film scholar Christopher Sharrett told the paper that “their critical reception... is really dependent on the public mood”.

But at some point, the consensus shifted.

• In 2018 David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the new wave a name, ‘nicecore’, arguing that “kindness can be a transformative force unto itself“ and crowning Paddington 2 “pretty much the ‘Citizen Kane’ of nicecore”.

• By 2020 Vulture’s television critic wrote that “TV that makes us sad is not inherently better“ and called it a death knell for prestige.

• That same year Americans streamed 57 billion minutes of The Office, a show that had ended seven years earlier.

• And when YouGov asked British adults in 2024 whether they preferred a happy or a sad ending in a romance, 72% said happy and 5% said sad.

What do opening-night audiences say?

This pattern also shows up elsewhere. CinemaScore has been polling opening-night audiences since the late 1970s, handing people a card as they leave and asking for a grade from A+ to F.

I gathered its grades for 4,735 films, of which 1,514 are also in my faces dataset, and the two measures line up neatly. Overall, films that earned an A-range grade delivered a rise into the finale 72% of the time. At B-, that falls to 57%. (The C-or-worse tier ticks back up slightly, which is mostly bad comedies ending merrily, whatever the audience thought of them.)

Looking at the results over time, we can spot the same trend we saw earlier.

Opening-night audiences have always graded a rising ending a shade higher, by about a third of a notch, through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Since 2013, that gap has doubled to two-thirds of a notch, and for the first time it is large enough to be statistically solid.

A rising-ending film now takes an A-range grade 40% of the time. A falling-ending film, 27%.

So both the rating that once paid a premium for misery no longer does, and the exit poll that always leaned happy now punishes the alternative harder than at any point since polling began.

Whichever measure you use, comfort has started to take precedence.

So is the happy ending dead?

On a positive note, half of films still end happily. Plus the classic ‘darkest-hour-then-rescue’ shape is as common as it was thirty years ago.

But we’ve changed. Audiences no longer treat a sad ending as proof of seriousness and the half-star ratings premium that misery earned in the 1980s and 1990s is gone. Opening-night crowds now punish a downbeat ending harder than at any time on record.

Things have become more complicated. A third of films now end bittersweet, up from a quarter, and the endings that used to be only happy learned to carry a loss, while still, on the actors’ faces, delivering the rise we came for.

So as the credits roll on this article, we’re left conflicted but we’ve learned something along the way.

The last word belongs to W. Stephen Bush, an editor at Moving Picture World, who wrote this in November 1915, when the movies were barely twenty years old and the argument was already going:

“Yes, we do strain things a bit to get the happy ending. We all know that the happy ending is not always true to the life we are supposed to reflect on the screen... Just the same the audiences will have the happy ending.”

A hundred and ten years later, they still will. They just take it with a tear in it now.

Notes

The plot readings come from a language model that reads each film’s synopsis and records a fixed rubric, validated against the ending tags that humans apply in public databases. The face data scores 1.57 million close-ups for emotional positivity, with face recognition matching actor identities. It reads faces, not plots, so tears of joy register as sadness, and single-film numbers should be handled with tongs. Everything here compares groups measured the same way, and it is correlation. The data can reveal trends but not the reasons behind them.

The data I’m drawing from is:

1. Synopsis shows story signals. I rated the emotional register of the plots of 7,384 movies on a six-point scale from happy to sad, depending on whether the protagonist survives and gets what they wanted, whether the couple ends up together, whether the villain wins. A language model scored the reading using each film’s synopsis against a fixed rubric, and 6,509 films had plot text describing the ending. The decade, genre and country charts all rest on this measure.

2. Faces for final feelings. I ran a facial-expression model over 1,571,000 close-ups of 10,421 named performers, with face recognition matching each face to an actor, scoring every face for how positive it reads. For each film, I compared the final 10% with the 65% to 85% stretch (where the darkest hour traditionally lives) to get the ‘ending lift’. A positive lift means the ending reads warmer on the actors’ faces than the third act. The five story shapes come from clustering the emotional arcs of the 3,146 films with enough close-ups spread across their whole running time. The model reads faces, not plots, so tears of joy register as sadness, and single-film numbers should be handled carefully.

3. Music means major/minor moments. From 30-second windows across 4,248 films’ soundtracks, I measured whether the score in the final minutes leans major or minor.

4. Tags tell trajectories. Finally, I used human-provided labels from keywords and tags in public databases for 2,011 films on ending-related tropes.

None of these work on their own, but their blind spots are different, and when I line them up, they combine to tell the same story. Happy plots come with rising faces, major keys and matching tags. Sad plots come with all three reversed.

Everything here compares groups measured the same way, and it is correlation. The data can reveal trends but not the reasons behind them

I know you will be gutted to not be able to book a five-star room today. Especially when you consider that during the 2024 festival, a room at the Carlton cost €1,708 for a night, the Mondrian was charging €1,680, and a 75 m² suite at the Majestic was €7,524. For one night.

So what if you are willing to slum it and stay in lower-than-five-star digs? Surely the cost won’t be too astronomically high?

Hhmm... about that.

Today I am looking at the cost of Cannes hotels. Or, more precisely, the markup applied during the festival dates.

This is a topic that bothers me every time I sort out my Cannes accommodation, but rather than just being outraged, I thought this year I’d be outraged with data. So I investigated the cost of a hotel night throughout the year at 224 different hotels (97 in Cannes itself and 127 within commuting distance).

Multi-pack of Cannes

Although most of Cannes’ conference infrastructure was initially created for the film festival, it’s used by more than just cinephiles. Cannes hosts a number of major conferences throughout the year, including:

• MIPCOM, the world’s biggest television market, 12 to 15 October 2026

• ILTM, the luxury travel industry’s annual market, 30 November to 3 December 2026

• The Festival International des Jeux, the French-speaking world’s biggest games festival, 26 to 28 February 2027

• MIPIM, the property industry’s giant annual market, 15 to 19 March 2027

• Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s festival, 21 to 25 June 2027

• The Cannes Yachting Festival, Europe’s biggest boat show, each September

Here is what a night in a Cannes hotel costs for every single night of the year ahead, all priced on the same day through Booking.com. It’s clear where each event is, and how much pressure it exerts on the Cannes hotel price system.

A conference-less night in Cannes will cost you roughly €100 to €140. By contrast, during the festival, it rises to €390 to €500. Only MIPIM week spikes higher, and that €806 peak reflects the eleven expensive hotels still selling, not the whole town.

Cost of a hotel per night at the Cannes Film Festival

On Sunday 9 May 2027, a median room in Cannes (which can be booked as of the time of writing) costs €160.

A few days later, the Cannes Film Festival opens, and the median rises to €472.

Three days after the closing ceremony, the median is back to €194, and the town reopens.

If you did want to stay in the days just before the festival, you could currently pick from a third of the hotels Cannes has on offer. But opening-night availability drops to just one in eight.

So, all the data combined, it seems that the average Cannes festival markup is 3.8 times. (Calculated by comparing the first Wednesday during the festival with the median of seven other spring Wednesdays when no event is planned).

Below are some examples:

(Note: I’m not looking to single out these establishments as either good or bad, just ones for which good data is available right now).

What would the whole festival cost?

I noticed that some of the hotels were not providing prices for a single day but would take enquiries about longer stays. They have learned that they can demand minimum-night bookings and deal with fewer people checking in and out.

So I also looked at the total cost of staying for the full twelve-day festival.

• The cheapest full-festival bed in town is €2,019 at a B&B hotel four kilometres from the Palais.

• A central three-star ibis wants €6,264.

• The one five-star selling the full stay, the Belle Plage, wants €12,710.

• And the Hôtel Le Canberra, a four-star, wants €17,760, which is €1,615 a night for eleven nights.

Is it already too late?

We may be eight months away from the festival, but availability is already tightening.

This can be hard to measure as hotels sometimes hold rooms back from certain customers or publish rooms in waves when they are confident they can command a higher price. So we can’t say “the hotel is fully booked”, but we can say “the hotel is not taking any more bookings”.

Unsurprisingly, the major Cannes events create troughs in availability, as shown below.

Distance matters

Where can a weary filmmaker lay their head without having to break the bank? The further from the Palais, the better the odds. Every hotel's coordinates let us measure its straight-line distance from the red carpet, and availability follows the pavement.

Within 500 metres of the Palais, one hotel in thirteen will still sell festival week. Past two kilometres, nearly half will.

The same pattern holds beyond the town line, only more sharply. Pricing hotels in eight towns within a bus or train ride of Cannes for the same festival and control dates, and matched hotel for hotel, shows the markup is mostly limited to Cannes itself.

Cannes marks up 3.8 times, but Mandelieu-la-Napoule shows zero markup, a town just eight minutes away by train.

• Antibes, eleven minutes away, manages 1.2 times.

• Nice, thirty-eight minutes down the line with 56 matched hotels, manages 1.3.

• The only towns above that are Mougins and Grasse, at 1.6 and 1.3, and Mougins is where the villa crowd goes anyway.

Which means the festival premium is less about the Riviera in May and more about filmmakers wanting to run down the Croisette in a tux.

Notes

Every Cannes price is a Booking.com quote for the same fixed basket of 97 hotels and aparthotels, collected in early September 2026, one night, two adults, headline rate before extras.

A hotel shown as unavailable may be sold out, closed, holding rooms back, or not yet selling that date, so every unavailability figure is a floor, measured through one shop window. Booking.com carries most but not all of the town's roughly 120 hotels.

The commuter-town comparison prices each town's hotels for the festival Wednesday and three spring control dates, matched hotel to hotel within each town, with between 3 (Grasse) and 56 (Nice) matched hotels per town.

And the five-star prices in the opening are Nice-Matin's reported figures for the 2024 festival, not my own collection.

Epilogue

Everything in this article is my own primary research, but I wanted to briefly share an outside check.

The Cannes hoteliers' trade body publishes a monthly barometer, compiled by MKG for the Palais des Festivals, recording what guests actually paid across a panel of around 34 hotels.

I haven't leaned on it for the main findings because it averages a great deal into each number. Whole months, so festival nights blend with quiet ones. Every room type, from singles to suites. And every kind of hotel, from seafront palaces to backstreet two-stars. Their luxury segment is defined by a price threshold (four- and five-star hotels averaging above €400 a night) rather than a named list, so I can't see exactly which hotels sit inside it.

I don't dispute their figures. If anything, they're the best evidence that mine are in the right territory, because their festival Mays come out at roughly three times their ordinary spring months, measured by a completely different method.

I thought it was time to update my collection of tips for people travelling to Toronto for either event. I reached out to previous TIFF attendees and quizzed them on all manner of things to do with attending, getting the most out of the trip and what pitfalls to avoid.

In total, 271 producers, sales agents, distributors, buyers, programmers, funders and filmmakers have shared their collective 2,114 years of attendance.

TIFF TL;DR

Toronto takes place over eleven days in mid-September and is the industry's big autumn event.

If you had to sum it up in one word, it would be “audience”. There are many screenings, with high public attendance, and its audience award is a major bellwether for future success. Past winners have included American Beauty, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave and La La Land. In fact, nine of the last ten winners have gone on to receive a Best Picture nomination, so it’s a big part of the starting gun to the Oscar 2027 race and resultant punditry.

It’s also widely acknowledged as perhaps the friendliest of the major festivals, and it’s certainly been one I’ve enjoyed a lot. I will be in Toronto this year, speaking in the Perspectives strand of the Market Summit. If you are there, come and say hello.

This article is the result of a big survey I ran of past participants and research I’ve done based on available information. Each time a festival runs, they change a few things, so don't rely on it alone - if something is important, then check it out for yourself.

Time to tackle the TIFF tips!

Starting out

1. It is a good festival to be new at.

Many people described TIFF as far less intimidating than the average major film festival. Toronto is not Cannes (and no one cares what shoes you’re wearing).

“The festival has always been, in my opinion, very beginner friendly. Venues are easy to get in to, staff is nice and helpful, and the amount of sellers is very manageable.”

“Revel in a truly people’s festival where not just industry colleagues and filmmakers but people who enjoy cinema from the general public truly explore and enjoy cinema.”

2. Everybody is winging it (and even more so in 2026).

When I asked what people wish they’d known ahead of their first trip to TIFF, my favourite answer was:

“Try not to be overwhelmed. Everybody’s winging it.”

This is true of all festivals, given the high churn rate of industry participants, but even more so this year as it’s the first year of the new TIFF: The Market. No one will have attended before, and no one will quite know how it all works. Revel in that shared ignorance discovery.

3. Pick two or three goals and let the rest go.

A frequent refrain was about the need for focus. The people who seemed to know how to do TIFF well often mentioned that having a narrow goal was key.

“Focus on realistic 2-3 goals.”

“Carefully evaluate your goals well in advance, then identify the best ways to achieve them.”

“Pace yourself. Attend as much as possible if you have the energy, otherwise conserve it. There’s a lot to do.”

4. Talk to the person next to you in the queue.

This is advice I give everyone attending any film festival but is doubly true for TIFF. It was also the most repeated advice in my survey, given independently by respondent after respondent.

Everyone there has spent a lot of time and money to be in the same spot as you. They are likely to share many interests and passions as you, and may well prove to be an important ally in future endeavours. You’ll pick up free tips, warnings, recommendations, and suggestions. Plus, you know, humans are fun.

“The best networking comes from spontaneous moments of human interaction. Talk to the people standing next to you.”

“Talk to other people in the line-up, as you’ll never know who you can meet.”

“Networking is number one. Striking up a conversation with other film-lovers in line for a screening is a great way to make new connections.”

Queue Time is not dead time - it might even be the most productive part of the day (and it costs nothing).

Booking and money

5. Check the current pass tiers.

The accreditation structure was rebuilt this year around the market, so anything you remember (or read on a blog) about Industry, Premium and Buyer passes is out of date. There are now four tiers. Prices, eligibility and what each one lets you into are all on TIFF’s Market pages, and it is worth ten minutes because the tiers do genuinely different things.

• Market. This is the pass I think most people will get. $590 early bird (to 19 June), $695 regular (to 28 August), $800 late or on site (from 8 September). Includes Press & Market screenings and market screenings on a first-come basis, plus rush tickets for public screenings.

• Market+. $760 early bird, $895 regular, $1,030 late. Everything in Market, plus an advance ticket package of up to eight public Festival screenings, same-day tickets to public screenings, the networking business lounges and digital catch-up screenings.

• Market+ Buyer. Same prices as Market+ ($760, $895, $1,030), but for verified buyers only. Everything in Market+, plus priority access to selected Press & Market screenings, up to sixteen advance tickets, and invitations to buyer-only events.

• Market+ Access Canada Summit. $999 early bird, $1,250 regular and on-site. Everything in Market+, plus the Access Canada Summit day: main and second stage talks, workshops, a pitch market and roundtable meetings. Access Canada is The Hollywood Reporter’s Canadian industry summit.

One warning before you set your heart on a tier - when I checked with TIFF staff on a draft of this article, they confirmed that the Market+ and Market+ Access Canada Summit passes have already sold out for this year.

Speaking of… if you are registering late, on-site registration and pass pick-up opens on 8 September on the main floor of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

6. Ask your national body before you buy direct.

This is the most useful money tip here, and yet few people do it. Member organisations negotiate discounts directly with TIFF. For example, the Canadian Media Producers Association offer members 30% off, and Screen Ireland and WIFT do the same. If you belong to a producers’ association, a guild or a national funder, email them first.

7. There are discounts for under-25s and students.

From a producer with twelve years of festivals behind them, filed under things they wish they had known sooner:

“There are great badge discounts for people under the age of 25, or those attending school.”

8. It’s not going to be cheap

Depending on where you’re coming from, no film festival is easy on the wallet. Toronto helps because it's a major city, so it avoids the monopolistic pricing associated with single-focus towns such as Cannes.

From the people I spoke to, the most common answer was between US$2,500 and US$5,000, and more than half of respondents came in under $5,000.

For context, that puts Toronto at the cheaper end of the major markets, in my estimation.

9. Book accommodation absurdly early, and stay close.

TIFF has historically opened its hotel bookings in May for a September festival. One respondent's advice was four words long:

“Stay as close as possible.”

10. Economise on food, not on days.

If you’re on a budget, the first things to consider are cheaper accommodation and eating frugally, rather than shortening your trip. The flights and pass are fixed costs, so a shorter trip only makes it more expensive when amortised to a ‘per day’ basis.

11. If you need a visa, register first.

TIFF will write letters of support for visa applications, but only for people who have already registered, and biometrics add time. Do it in that order.

As a UK citizen, I had to apply for an ETA. I received my approval within 30 minutes of applying, but a colleague was unlucky enough to have waited well over a week. Don’t leave this to the last minute!

The market nobody has been to

12. Walk the floor.

As TIFF: The Market is brand new; everyone will need to go through the same discovery process upon arriving. So allocate yourself enough time to wander the halls and really check out every corner. You’ll kick yourself if you end up missing some booth or freebie you didn’t take the time to find early on.

(This is true of all festivals and I have seen many a sad filmmaker discover the free Nespresso coffee stand at Cannes on their last day!).

This matters more than just free cups of coffee. Part of the reason to attend these events is to connect with the industry as it is right now. Taking the time to visit every stand, and maybe even chat with the people behind them, will do wonders for your industry knowledge, contacts, and confidence.

As a few people put it:

“Spend time at the Convention Centre so you can see the industry at work, look at the different pavilions and see what the different countries are presenting along with the film commissions. You’ll be able to learn a lot about trends, locations and other data, and meet lots of people that way.”

“If you bought an accreditation for the Market, visit the different pavilions and ask questions to the host and hostess.”

TIFF says the 2026 edition will be attended by more than 150 international sales, promotion, and distribution companies, around 230 exhibiting organisations (film bodies, sales companies and more) across 120+ exhibition spaces and hotel suites, and more than 430 market screenings (248 Press & Market screenings and 190 market screenings). The delegate target is 6,000 people from more than 80 countries.

TIFF has launched a Market App for delegates this year, and downloading it before you land is the quickest way to get your bearings.

13. It’s about the people.

As the initial panic of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic calmed down, many in the industry openly questioned the need for in-person events. The cost, hassle, and carbon footprint of such events all count against attending.

However, attendance figures since then at events such as Cannes and Berlin have proved that live events are here to stay. And in large part that's because there is something irreplaceable about being in the same room as other people. So remember that as you’re making your plans before and at TIFF. What has this opportunity provided for you that you can’t get on Zoom?

Some of my respondents put it like this:

“Honestly, I feel like markets are proof of life. You need to be seen IN PERSON by folks to remind them, especially after COVID, that you are still around and active.”

“New film contacts. But I’m not expecting to make deals. Make connections.”

“Meetings and connections that I can develop into relationships over time.”

14. The market is seven days inside an eleven-day festival.

The market finishes on the 16th September, but the festival carries on to the 20th. If you are coming for business, the back half is quiet, and if you are coming for films, the business crowd will have gone home. Worth deciding which festival you are attending before you book flights.

This matches the general rhythm of film festivals more widely. The first weekend is where all the business folks head, no matter how long the event officially goes on.

15. The centre of gravity has moved south.

For years everything orbited the Industry Centre at the Hyatt Regency on King Street West. The market hub is now the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, with sales suites at the InterContinental and the Ritz-Carlton, and a new 1,200-seat theatre inside the convention centre itself. TIFF says everything sits within a twelve-minute walk.

The evenings have not moved, though. Respondents still name the restaurants and bars along King Street West as where the unofficial business gets done and where you actually bump into people.

16. Find your national stand on day one.

Whoever you are, somebody is there to represent where you are from, and being useful to you is literally their job that week.

In 2016 TIFF had national agency stands representing 38 countries. By last year that had shrunk to about 13 stands. This year the market relaunch has brought them back with interest. I count 92 national and regional film bodies with a confirmed presence, from around 40 countries, which is roughly half of what the Cannes market’s Village International offers and not bad for a first edition.

Being useful to you is literally their job that week, but check what kind of body you have. A national film institute or export agency (Unifrance, KOFIC, Screen Australia, Cinema do Brasil, the Swedish Film Institute) exists to help its filmmakers sell, and will introduce you to buyers, share who else from home is in town and often lend you a meeting table.

Films and screenings

17. See films. Be able to talk about them.

This came up more than anything except the queue advice, and one respondent, who programmed at TIFF for twenty years before moving into producing, framed it as a social rule rather than a cultural one.

“See a movie, don’t just do the market and events. If I am talking to someone and they can’t talk about a movie they’ve seen at TIFF, I tend to judge.”

Others put it more warmly:

“Take some time to watch some films. This is why we’re in this industry and always a great conversation starter.”

And, from a funding body:

“See as many films as you can between the meetings.”

18. Go to the public screenings too.

Toronto audiences are famously engaged and enthusiastic. So while you may feel the desire to hide away at Press & Market screenings, you’ll be robbing yourself of one of the best bits of TIFF.

Watching a film with 1,800 civilians who chose to be there is a different experience from watching it with six bored sales agents deciding not to buy it.

A TIFF veteran put it like this to me:

“Go to as many of the public screenings as you can, it’s so much more alive than Press and Market screenings.”

19. Press and Market screenings still reward turning up early.

(Quick note: What veterans call “P&I”, the old press and industry screenings, are now officially Press & Market screenings, so that is the label you will see in the programme).

Last year TIFF changed the rules around public screenings and now has assigned seating. So you may hear advice to show up as early as possible. While that would give you some lovely Queue Time, it won’t be as productive as it used to be.

However, Press and Market screenings are still first-come, first-served, so arriving early buys you everything. TIFF’s own house rule has long been fifteen minutes but the experienced delegates I spoke to suggested considerably more.

The number of films at TIFF has been slightly reducing in recent years, adding to the pressure to secure a screening room seat.

It is a squeeze from both ends, because while the festival programmes fewer films, it accredits more journalists.

One person put it like this:

“With less and less P&I screenings, plan on lining up way early for the bigger titles.”

They are right that there is less to go round. The festival programmes fewer films than it used to.

20. Your pass is not a ticket.

For public and combined screenings you need an actual ticket, which is collected against your pass. The long-standing rule is that the box office stops issuing them an hour before the screening starts, so don’t leave it too late.

21. Never accept ‘sold out’.

Rush lines work, returns appear, and pass holders can rush public screenings or pick up same-day tickets at a venue box office. Delegates also recommended TIFFR, a third-party scheduling tool, for spotting tickets that come back into circulation.

22. Book what you care about early.

A few delegates warned that the popular screenings fill well in advance and get pricier as they do. If you already know the three films you must see, buy those now and stay flexible on the rest.

23. Go to the odd ones.

Discovery and Midnight Madness came up repeatedly, and Midnight Madness in particular has a following that borders on the devotional.

“Make sure to check out the Midnight Madness films. The whole event is an amazing experience with a crowd like no other.”

“Watch films in the Discovery and Midnight Madness sections. Watch films that may not find distribution and could be great gems of world cinema.”

24. It is fine to walk out.

Cinephiles - please don’t come after me for this tip! I know that some hold fast to the opinion that you must stay until all the final credits crawl has confirmed no animals were harmed, but in speaking with attendees, a few brought up the idea that you need to prioritise your own time, and therefore leaving before the film finishes is acceptable. These are the folks trying to see four or five films a day and see an early exit as an acceptable, if undesirable, reality.

I’m not going to take a view on this (albeit I will note that this is absolutely not ok at any premiere or place you think the filmmakers are in the room!).

25. Look for the free screening on the last Sunday.

The audience award winner has traditionally re-screened free at Roy Thomson Hall on the final day, with tickets handed out at no charge a couple of hours beforehand. If you are still in town, the film the entire festival just voted for costs nothing.

The people part

26. Prepare more than feels reasonable, then leave gaps on purpose.

Almost everyone I spoke to suggested that you should prepare obsessively. They also said that the best things happen by accident. The way to have both is to build a schedule with holes in it.

“Start preparing a month before, research the people you want to meet with and be specific. What films did they work on, and why that matters for your own project. Don’t try to just meet for the sake of it. We’re all busy and appreciate it when you do 5 mins on google, rather than cold, blanket emails.”

A producer suggested to me the following system:

“Allow 30 minutes in your diary for your 20 minute meetings, to allow for previous meetings running late, or you yourself running late.”

27. Know what an ‘event’ actually is.

One veteran pointed out that it’s important to get context to what you’re going to.

“An event is not a party with free drinks for everyone who wants to party. It costs a lot of money, is a networking event, for those the hosts consider important for the purpose of the event.”

Somebody else put a similar thought a little more bluntly:

“If the guest list is open to the public, the party’s not worth going to.”

28. The film agencies throw the best parties.

I asked which organisations run the best events, expecting studios and streamers. Almost everyone named the funding bodies instead. The Canadian regional agencies came up repeatedly (”they know how to celebrate and profile their talent”), along with Ontario Creates, Telefilm, the Indigenous Screen Office, the British film organisations, Unifrance and the CMPA.

Such events are becoming rarer and rarer in the film industry, as everyone focuses on short, more focused festival experiences. So if you get a chance to attend one - go for it!

29. Dress one notch up from whatever you were planning.

Here is a tip I would never follow. Personally, I prioritise comfort and feeling at ease, but I can’t deny the logic of the following advice from a TIFF veteran:

“Dress for business. If you going to wear a t-shirt, put a jacket over it. It just a fact that folks are going to judge on first visual impressions, so don’t wear a Lucio Fulci Gates of Hell t-shirt... And act like you belong in the space you are in.”

30. On business cards.

For years, this was the most repeated advice at every festival: bring many business cards. TIFF stopped including this as official advice to attendees in 2018, and many fewer people brought it up in my 2026 research than in my 2016 survey.

That said, it’s not totally dead yet, and there are situations where a well-timed business card will increase your chances of building a long-term connection.

(Personally, I don’t bring them, but I do appreciate being handed a card. I photograph it and hand it straight back. The photo is searchable, and it does not fill my pockets with film festival flotsam.

If you are on a serious networking run, then there is no harm in carrying them. Just do not assume everyone wants one.

31. Follow the programmer, not the film.

This was new to me, and I think it is the cleverest tip in the survey.

“Regular TIFF participants follow their ‘own’ programmers and the films they invite. So for newcomers, pay attention to the programmer of a film you like and follow that programmer.”

32. If you have a film in the festival, it is more work than you think.

This is a rather niche tip as the vast majority of TIFF attendees are there to network or watch films, rather than promote one. That said, if this relates to you - firstly, congratulations, and secondly, make sure you do all you can to get the most out of this rare experience. It may be a while before it happens again, if ever - don’t let it pass you by.

As one experienced film professional put it:

“If you have a film in the festival, it takes a LOT longer to liaise with the festival and prepare materials needed and organise attendees than you realise, and when you are there as a Producer you need to wrangle them and press more than you thought. Also, enjoy how you too will be celebrated as a world class creative talent, in addition to Directors and Writers. It feels very special.”

Toronto, and staying upright

33. The city is welcoming and so is the festival.

Worth stating plainly, because it is what most distinguishes Toronto from its rivals, and why this is a good first festival.

“It’s much more relaxed then Cannes or EFM. Unusually for a festival or market, meetings can overrun.”

One respondent brought up the old industry adage that:

You flirt in Berlin, you kiss in Cannes, and you make it official in Toronto.

34. Be kind to the volunteers, and know why it matters more now.

TIFF runs on volunteers, and they are frequently cited as a highlight of the festival. I have found them keen, joyful, and great to chat with.

That said, there are about half as many as there used to be. Roughly 3,300 people volunteered in 2016, but by 2024 it was 1,619. The hours fell further still, from 106,610 to 43,410, so the ones who stayed are working shorter shifts as well. All of that, while the festival accredits more press than ever and has a brand-new market bolted onto it.

I have experienced this at the festival in the past and even in 2026. When sorting out my pass, I had a technical issue. I emailed the help address, expecting to have a long, drawn-out nightmare, but instead got a quick email back from someone offering to jump on a Zoom call with me and sort it. True to their word, a brief, friendly video call was all it took to solve my issue and brighten my day.

35. Pack for both, but not for the reason everyone gives.

There is a persistent belief among TIFF regulars that it turns cold after the first weekend. It does not, particularly, but September itself cools as it goes on; according to Environment Canada data:

Toronto does cool as September goes on, by about 1.6 degrees between the start of the month and the middle. Bring layers because September in Toronto is variable. And bring something warm for indoors, which several people raised:

“Bringing a warm sweater for screenings as the cinemas can be rather cold. And so are the restaurants due to the aircon.”

I have spent the summer in London’s stifling heatwaves, with jaunts to industry events at the even hotter Munich and Locarno, so this is music to my sweaty ears.

36. Assume the internet will be awkward.

Festival wifi is a lottery, and it is genuinely hard to predict from year to year. It has certainly improved since 2016, but most film markets struggle when several thousand people arrive in one building with three devices each, and delegates still report problems.

If being reliably online matters to you, sort your own connection before you fly, such as a local eSIM.

37. Feet, water, snacks, sleep.

You will need:

• Flat shoes, because you will walk much further than you think.

• A water bottle.

• Something edible in your bag, because you will otherwise skip lunch to make a screening.

• And sleep beforehand, because you won't get much during.

38. Relax, and then follow up.

The best closing advice came from a producer of twelve years, and it is really a two-part instruction that most people only do the first half of.

“Relax. Enjoy it. Let it wash over you and let encounters happen. Go home and follow up with anyone you met. Then use what you learned to make 2027 really work for you.”

You cannot see everything, meet everyone or attend it all. Make your peace with that on the plane.

Notes

The survey. 271 industry delegates in total, carrying 2,114 collective years of attendance at the Toronto International Film Festival. I asked how long they had been going, which days they would be in Toronto, what advice they would give a first-timer, what they wished they had known, which organisations run the best events, and what the trip costs them.

People who fill in surveys about film festivals are people who like film festivals, and my newsletter readers are not a cross-section of the industry. I also ran a version of this exercise ten years ago, and it’s reassuring how much of the advice came back unchanged. I spot-checked all the tips to see if changes in how TIFF is run invalidated any of them.

Festival scale, volunteer and financial figures come from TIFF’s own annual reports and fact sheets, and from its charity returns to the Canada Revenue Agency. Where TIFF’s published presentation and its statutory filings disagree, I have used the filings. Weather data is Environment Canada daily records for the Toronto City station, 2000 to 2025. The historic delegate guidance comes from TIFF’s own Press and Industry Guide and its Guides for Industry Professionals, which it published up to 2019 and then stopped.

My research is independent of TIFF, but for full disclosure, I am speaking at TIFF this year (they have contributed toward the cost of my flights and given me a hotel room). I also ran the draft article past a few TIFF staff to ensure the tips still apply in 2026.

The standard route to market has barely changed. A film's producer signs with a single sales agent, who gains the exclusive right to represent the film at film markets (such as Cannes, Berlin or AFM). They sell the exploitation rights to distributors, aiming to secure a distributor in every territory and format (from cinema screens through to long-term TV deals).

While it’s true that perhaps 20 years ago there were fewer films and more pre-sales (i.e. deals done before the film has been shot), the core mechanics are the same. A single sales agent, a physical attendance at one of a handful of film markets, in return for a slice off the top of all earned revenue.

Signing with a sales agent has historically been seen as a vital step for any professional independent production, in part because agents only take on films they believe they can sell. The deal is the first sign the industry sees commercial value in the production.

Although no money changes hands at the point of the deal, the sales agent needs to invest significant time, resources, and money up front to fly to Cannes et al and show off their posters and iPad trailers. If the film makes money, they will be reimbursed, but if it doesn’t, they won’t (well, not from that film😉). So sales agents are understandably cautious about signing new projects.

Given the barrier they face in securing a sales agent, not all films achieve this rite of passage.

IMDb lists 14,345 fiction feature films as made in 2024. In the same year, by my count, 356 professional sales companies took on at least one of them. That means there are roughly forty times as many film productions as sales agencies. While we know that sales agents take on multiple projects each year (and I calculate the average later in the article), it still seems unlikely that many films secure a sales agent.

So I dug into the data and, in a research project that got way out of hand, worked out the numbers behind feature film sales agents.

How far films get

I started with every fiction feature film that IMDb says was made between 2000 and 2024, excluding documentaries, adult titles, and anything IMDb itself marks as still in development or post-production. That is 224,914 films. I then looked for evidence that anyone ever tried to sell or release it, across a number of public and industry sources (details at the end of the article).

The chart below gives you the headline findings. Read it from top to bottom, showing how the pool of films narrows as we add ever firmer criteria.

95.3% of films have some kind of sale, release or screening recorded, although that drops to 89.4% for a release beyond just a festival screening. 58.0% have a distributor of some kind named somewhere in the world, even if that is a single television sale in a single territory.

48.3% have a distributor (i.e. an established company separate from the production company).

And at the next step, we have our headline finding: 12.7% of fiction feature films made 2000-24 carry a sales agent credit.

We can go one step narrower if we only accept sales agents that are genuinely in the business of selling films (more on that shortly). That brings the number to 23,943 films, or 10.6%.

So about one fiction feature in ten made this century had a professional company selling it. Half found a distributor that was a real, separate company. Nineteen in twenty reached some kind of audience. And one in twenty was made and then never released in any form that anyone, anywhere, recorded.

Has it always been one in ten?

No. Over the past quarter century, the rate of sales agency representation shows a clear rise and fall.

For films produced in 2000, just 6.4% secured a professional sales agent. The share climbs steadily through the decade to a peak of 14.2% for films from 2009. Then it slides: 11.7% for 2015 films, 9.9% for 2021, and 8.9% for 2024 (a figure that will still tick up a little, since the newest films are still signing).

Over this period, the cost and complexity of making a feature film fell dramatically, leading to a boom in feature film production. So if we focus on the number of represented films, we see a steep rise from 264 films in 2000 to 1,088 in 2009, and a peak of 1,480 in 2019.

It has since levelled off, at around 1,250 to 1,400 films a year.

The peak years of sales agency representation are no mystery to anyone who worked through them. The late 2000s were the high-water mark of the international rights business. DVD money was everywhere, television buyers were still hungry, and pre-sales could still finance a mid-budget picture. Agents could afford to take on more films because they could sell more films.

Around the pandemic, the market hit saturation, but production has continued to climb. There were 4,097 fiction features produced in 2000, compared with 14,345 in 2024. This means that a smaller percentage of films secure a sales agent in recent years.

Who are these sales agents?

If 28,519 films this century carry a sales credit, who are the sales agents who are representing them?

This is where “sales agent” becomes a complicated label. IMDb lets anyone submit a company credit, and “sales representative” is a box that gets ticked for all sorts of reasons. I opted not to rely on IMDb data, as spot-checking it showed it varies in integrity (such as listing Jaguar Land Rover as the sole sales agent for Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw).

I investigated all 3,891 companies that hold sales credits on these films across other industry sources, such as Cinando, Cineuropa, and others.

I quickly figured out that a key test of whether it was a “real” sales agent was how many films they represented that they did not produce. It’s not unusual for a sales agent to put in some money and/or get a producer credit, but across their entire slate we would not expect most dedicated sales agents to also be one of the core producing entities.

77 of the 3,891 turned out to be plain data errors, credited as sellers by mistake, and I excluded them.

After researching the companies, I split the remaining 3,814 into four groups:

1. Professional sales agents are companies listed in the market directories or confirmed by research as independent sales operations. I identified 1,693 of them.

2. Producer sales agents are companies that only ever sell their own productions, plus the small sellers with one or two credits and no traceable web presence, which in practice are the same thing. There are 1,394 of them.

3. Studios and distributors are companies whose main business is releasing films, credited as sellers of their own slates. There are 429 different such companies operating since 2000.

4. Other covers national film bodies that act as agents for their country's cinema, rights catalogues that hold old libraries, talent and management firms that appear in no market directory, and a handful of companies that sell other people's films but appear in no directory. There are 298.

The 1,693 companies I classed as “Professional Sales Agents” only account for 44.4% of the companies but hold 81.6% of the credits.

Read more

I am uploading new video essays every couple of weeks, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).

https://www.youtube.com/@TheFilmDataScientist

And to help explain the channel, I also created a short channel trailer:

“So what?” you might think, “Why would annoying a politician be any concern of a film festival?”.

Well, that’s because the festival is controlled by the German government. In fact, it’s owned by the German Government. The company that runs the Berlin Film Festival has exactly one shareholder (the Federal Republic, holding the entire €25,000 of share capital) and its supervisory board is chaired by the federal culture minister.

Almost all film festivals sell themselves as temples of artistic independence, but they all have an eventual owner to whom they answer.

I was curious who owns these institutions, who appoints their bosses and who pays the bills, so I dug through official records for the 20 biggest festivals in the world

Five ways to own a film festival

Nine of the twenty were founded by a public body of some kind, from Mussolini’s Biennale in 1932 to Shanghai’s city government in 1993. The other eleven began as private initiatives, whether local merchants in San Sebastián, film critics in Busan or Robert De Niro in post-9/11 New York.

But the founding arrangement isn’t always the one in place today. Locarno and San Sebastián started privately and are now substantially public, while Sundance began as a Utah state film commission project and is now a private charity, so the story of who owns a festival is really the story of who took it over.

After looking up their current ownership structure, I found I could group the festivals into one of five groups:

1. Owned or run by the state

2. Technically private but state-controlled

3. Publicly funded nonprofits

4. Private nonprofits

5. Privately owned companies

Let’s look at each in turn.

1. Owned or run by the state

The purest case is the Berlinale. Its operating company (Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH, or KBB, a legacy of the festival’s origins as a Cold War project in occupied Berlin) is 100% federally owned. Every time the festival's leadership has changed, a single government resolution has enacted it, signed by an official at the federal culture ministry.

San Sebastián is the same idea, albeit with more shareholders. The festival is a company owned 25% each by the Spanish state’s film institute, the Basque Government, the province of Gipuzkoa and the city council. When the festival needed a new director for 2027, its first change in 16 years, the four governments had to agree.

Shanghai is run by the municipal state apparatus. Mar del Plata, Latin America’s only A-list festival, is run directly by INCAA, Argentina’s national film institute, which is why President Milei’s cuts to INCAA hit the festival directly.

And the BFI London Film Festival belongs in this group as it’s run by the British Film Institute, a Royal Charter body funded by the culture ministry and the National Lottery, whose accounts are laid before Parliament.

2. Technically private but state-controlled

Cannes and Venice both present as private institutions, but under the hood the state controls both.

Cannes is run by a French association (the festival itself began life in 1939 as a government project) whose statutes require government approval to change. Its board includes twelve public-institution seats out of 28, and its vice-presidency belongs by right to the CNC, the national film agency.

Venice’s festival is run by La Biennale, legally a private foundation. That doesn’t initially sound like a state entity, but its president is appointed by ministerial decree, the mayor of Venice and the president of the Veneto region sit on the board by law, and the state auditor reviews it annually. Italian law does offer private funders a route to a Biennale board seat, but they would need to put up 20% of the endowment, and none has ever used it.

3. Publicly funded nonprofits

Busan, Toronto, Rotterdam, Locarno, Sydney, Tokyo and Hong Kong are all independent organisations on paper, but which rely on public money.

• Busan is the most dependent on public money. The city of Busan paid 49.8% of the festival’s costs in 2025, with national money from the Korean Film Council adding another 4.1%, its lowest share ever. The festival’s organising committee was chaired by the city’s mayor himself until governance reforms in 2016, so for its first two decades the principal funder also chaired the board.

• Toronto is a registered charity that pulls in more than any other festival on this list, some C$45.6m in 2024. Government grants were 15% of that, split three ways between Ottawa (C$3.7m), Ontario (C$1.8m) and the City of Toronto (C$1.3m). TIFF’s new market is the result of increased public funding, with Ottawa committing C$23m over three years.

• Rotterdam is a Dutch foundation, and its audited accounts show 51% of income coming from public sources, chiefly a structural grant from the national culture ministry (€2.1m) and one from the city (€1.4m).

• Locarno is a Swiss association funded by all three levels of Swiss government: the federal culture office, the canton of Ticino (which has just renewed its CHF 3.4m a year through 2030) and the town itself. Public money is about 38% of Locarno’s budget, and falling as sponsorship grows.

• Sydney is a company limited by guarantee, funded by Screen Australia, the New South Wales government and the City of Sydney.

• Tokyo is run by UNIJAPAN, a film-industry association, with backing from two ministries: the trade ministry METI and the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

• Hong Kong’s festival is run by a charitable society subsidised by the government’s Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency.

So while technically none of these seven is owned by the state, if the public money dried up it’s hard to see how they could carry on.

4. Private nonprofits

The American trio of Sundance, Telluride and New York are genuinely private charities. Their boards appoint themselves, as American nonprofit boards do, and there are no state seats, ministerial appointments or public shareholders.

Every US charity has to file an annual tax return (the Form 990), which is public, so we know more about these three than about most of the festivals above.

• The Sundance Institute took in $46.4m last year, roughly two-thirds of it from donations rather than ticket sales, and the festival is only one of the things it does (the Institute also runs its year-round labs for filmmakers).

• Telluride is run by a charity called the National Film Preserve, registered in Berkeley, California, several hundred miles from the festival, with a small board of insiders that includes Ken Burns and Alexander Payne.

• Film at Lincoln Center, founded in 1969 as the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs the New York Film Festival as its flagship programme rather than as a separate organisation.

These organisations pay no income tax, and their donors get deductions, so that is kinda like a state subsidy, just not “public money” in the way we typically think of it.

5. Privately owned companies

Now for the most complicated type - commercial companies.

Tribeca has been majority-owned since 2019 by James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems, with Attention Capital, Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal all having undisclosed stakes.

SXSW has been 51% controlled by Jay Penske’s media group since 2023. It was founder-owned for over three decades until the pandemic cancelled the 2020 edition and nearly sank the company. Penske's joint venture bought a 50% stake in 2021 to keep it afloat, then took a further 1% from a private investor in 2023. The owner of the remaining 49% has never been disclosed. The London edition, launched in 2025, isn't run by the Austin company at all but under licence by a separate British company whose controlling shareholder is a Penske Media director.

Karlovy Vary, which many assume is a state festival, is actually owned by KVIFF Group, an investment vehicle whose majority owner is Rockaway Arts, a private Czech investment group. The Czech register records KVIFF Group as sole shareholder of the festival company, though the exact stakes behind it are not publicly disclosed.

How much public money are we talking about?

Venice opens next week and also tops my chart of reliance on public money.

La Biennale takes about €32.6M a year in public contributions, around 57% of its income, and Venice’s film festival has its own earmarked line of €13.5M a year from the culture ministry’s cinema directorate.

Other interesting tidbits I gleaned from the documents were:

• The city of Busan covered 49.8% of the Busan Film Festival’s costs in 2025, with national money adding 4.1%.

• Rotterdam’s annual report shows 51% public income.

• The Berlinale runs on roughly 40% public money.

• Locarno is 38%.

• Even privately owned Karlovy Vary draws about 30% of its budget from public sources, by its own executive director’s account, including a record CZK 47M a year from the Czech culture ministry.

• Toronto sits at 15% per its audited 2024 figures, though a new C$23M federal commitment to launch TIFF’s official content market will push that back up.

• Sundance took $2.2M in government grants last year, about 5% of its income, per its tax filings.

• Telluride and Film at Lincoln Center (which runs the New York Film Festival) have figures of $27,750 and $52,439, respectively.

Cannes is a little bit more complicated. I have emailed them to ask but as of the moment of writing, I can’t work it out. The Festival de Cannes publishes no accounts, so the €35M budget you see quoted everywhere is just what the festival told franceinfo in 2024. The festival has been claiming that half its budget is public money since at least 2009, across every stated budget figure from €20M to €35M. This could well be true but feels woolly, and I couldn’t verify it.

When I added up every public subsidy that can actually be documented: the CNC’s grant of around €2.25–2.5m (per the Cour des comptes’ audit of the CNC), the city of Cannes’s €1.9m cash grant (locked in until 2035) plus in-kind support the city itself values at about €4.1m (per the regional audit chamber’s report on the commune), €500,000 from the region and €150,000 from the département.

It comes to roughly €9m, or 26% of the budget (if it were half the stated €35m budget as claimed, then it would need to add up to €17.5m).

I’m sure I will get to the bottom of this at some point, but as for right now it’s a bit of a mystery. Ironically, the commercial market is more transparent than the parent charity! The Marché du Film is run by a company called SOGOFIF, wholly owned by the festival’s association, and its filings show €11.1M of revenue at a 16% net profit margin in its most recently published accounts (the year to September 2022).

What does that come to per festival-goer?

To put this in scale, Venice costs Italian taxpayers WAY more per festival attendee than the other festivals cost their respective constituents. The state pays about €143 for every ticket sold at the Venice film festival (94,703 of them in 2024, against the Mostra’s €13.5M earmarked state line).

Germany pays about €43 per Berlinale ticket (340,000 sold in 2025). At the other end, Telluride's public subsidy works out around $6 per attendee, and Toronto's roughly C$10 for each of its 700,000 attendees. Sundance, the supposed free-market case, actually gets about $26 of government money per in-person attendee, more than privately owned Karlovy Vary's €18.

I should point out that the counting basis differs by festival (tickets sold, admissions, unique attendees; each bar says which, and the Notes give the detail), so treat this as a pattern rather than a like-for-like league table.

How much do festival CEOs get paid?

One last set of nuggets before I finish up. While going through all these records, I picked up a lot of data points on CEO salaries.

I’ve done my best to normalise it and put it in US dollars. That said, each job is different: some only run the festival, while others also run the wider organisation or other events. Some also offer better benefits, such as generous pension provision, travel, etc.

The best paid are the heads of the three American non-profits.

The three American charity bosses cluster at $450k to $485k. The state-festival bosses cluster at $150k to $260k. Alberto Barbera runs Venice, the world’s oldest festival, for €140,000 a year, about 30 cents on the dollar of what Telluride pays its executive director to run a festival a fraction of the size.

Tricia Tuttle’s Berlinale rate works out around €204,000, published individually in the German finance ministry’s annual shareholdings report. Ben Roberts runs the entire BFI (including the London Film Festival) for £163,000, per its annual report.

Thierry Frémaux’s pay at Cannes has never been officially disclosed but Mediapart reported in June 2024 that it was €350,000, covering both of his jobs (Cannes and the Institut Lumière in Lyon).

It should be noted that due to the reporting requirements of US charities, we have the best figures for these three. The German and British public bodies publish their bosses' pay too.

Notes

I picked the 20 festivals based on industry weight (FIAPF A-list status, market size, press accreditation and premiere power) rather than just attendance alone. The list was Cannes, Berlinale, Venice, Toronto, Sundance, BFI London, Busan, Rotterdam, Locarno, San Sebastián, Karlovy Vary, Tokyo, Tribeca, SXSW, Telluride, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney and Mar del Plata. Attendance-based rankings would produce a different list.

Ownership and governance facts come from primary records wherever possible, including from the German Handelsregister and the federal Beteiligungsbericht for the Berlinale; the Czech obchodní rejstřík for Karlovy Vary; UK Companies House for SXSW London; IRS Form 990 filings (via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer) for Sundance, Telluride and Film at Lincoln Center; TIFF’s audited FY2024 statements and CRA filings; the BFI’s 2024/25 annual report; La Biennale’s transparency pages and accounts; San Sebastián’s transparency portal; Busan’s audited 2025 settlement as reported by Nocut News and Yonhap; and the Colorado and Utah legislatures’ own bill texts.

The Cannes financial picture comes from the Cour des comptes’ audit of the CNC, the Chambre régionale des comptes’ audit of the city of Cannes, the city’s published subsidy register, and SOGOFIF’s company filings; the €35m budget and 50/50 claim are the festival’s own statements to franceinfo and Le Figaro.

Public-money percentages are not perfectly comparable. Venice’s 57% covers the whole Biennale (which also runs the art and architecture exhibitions), Busan’s 54% is the festival proper per its 2025 settlement, Rotterdam’s and Locarno’s cover the festival organisations, the Berlinale’s ~40% is the festival itself, Karlovy Vary’s ~30% is the company’s own stated share of its 2025 budget, Toronto’s 15% is the whole charity, and the US figures are the government-grants line of each charity’s operations. Cannes’s 26% is a documented floor, not a measured share as it’s the sum of every public subsidy traceable to a primary document, set against the festival’s own stated budget. The festival says the true figure is 50%.

The per-festival-goer chart divides each festival’s public funding by its attendance, but festivals count different things: tickets sold (Venice 94,703 in 2024; Berlinale 340,000 in 2025; Karlovy Vary 127,325 in 2024), admissions (Busan 175,889 cinema admissions in 2025; Rotterdam ~286,000 visits in 2026), unique in-person attendees (Sundance 85,472 in 2025, per its own attendance report; Telluride ~5,000, estimated), or a loose “attendees annually” claim (Toronto’s 700,000). Rotterdam’s figure uses structural subsidies only, so it understates. Currency conversions are approximate. Treat the chart as a pattern, not a precision ranking. The same goes for the pay chart, which mixes audited disclosures, a Canadian band floor and one press-reported figure across different years and pension treatments.

But just because journalists can sell a piece about it doesn’t make it true. I dug into the numbers to see just how “Un-American” American movies are when it comes to casting.

I crunched the numbers on roughly 16,000 American-made feature films released in US cinemas, pulled out every actor flagged as a lead, and matched them to their recorded birthplaces. That gave me 5,408 leading actors and 17,867 lead performances between 1990 and 2024.

How American are the leads of American films?

At the risk of sounding like I should be wearing a red baseball cap, movies are a lot less American than they used to be.

The American-born share of leads has fallen from 82% in the 1990s to 64% in the 2020s. This nearly twenty-point fall has occurred consistently over three decades.

The single biggest beneficiary is the UK, whose share of American-made leads has climbed from about 6% in the mid-1990s to 15% in 2024, and unlike the others, it is still rising.

Canada holds steady at 3 to 4% across the whole period, which will surprise nobody who has noticed that a large chunk of Hollywood comedy is secretly Canadian.

Australia, Ireland, Mexico, Germany and France split most of the remainder, each holding somewhere between 0.5% and 3%.

So what about the “invasions”?

The Australian invasion was real. Australian-born actors went from under 1% of American-made leads in the mid-1990s to a peak of 3.6% around 2017, the high-water mark of the Hemsworth and Robbie era, and have eased back a little since.

The Irish wave is a different story. Measured against American-made films, Ireland’s share today is about 1.1%, which is no higher than it was in 2004, when Colin Farrell was single-handedly carrying the flag. The current generation of Irish talent is real and very visible, but much of its work is Irish and British productions rather than Hollywood ones.

Mexico and New Zealand both show slow builds to around 1%, and Canada barely moves. For all the talk of waves, the only country that has produced a genuine boom-and-ebb pattern in Hollywood casting is Australia.

But where did they learn the job?

The data thus far has focused on birth country, but that’s not the only way to measure today’s topic. Nicole Kidman was born in Honolulu, which makes her American by birth, yet her career is about as Australian as it can be.

So I built a second measure, the home industry. This is the national film industry that developed an actor before Hollywood came calling. To track this, for each lead, I took the first three feature films in which they had a substantial role (defined as billed in the top ten of the cast) as an adult, outside of animated movies. If at least two of those three films were made in the same country with no US involvement, that country’s industry gets the credit for developing them.

This revealed that the foreign-developed share of new American-made leads has more than doubled, from 9% of debuts in the 1990s to 23% in the 2020s. Hollywood is importing more ready-made actors than it used to.

Also interesting is the gap between the bars. In every decade, somewhere between two-fifths and a half of the foreign-born leads were developed by a foreign film industry. The rest went straight into American productions from the start.

This means that the “foreign invasion” is actually two different migrations. The first is actors poached after another country’s industry trained them, and the second is actors born elsewhere who built their careers in Hollywood from day one.

When we split it this way, we see differences between countries. Among French-born leads, 72% made French films before they made American ones, and among Swedish-born leads, the figure is the same. France and Sweden develop, then export.

But only 29% of Canadian-born leads and 38% of British-born leads started in their own national industry. The Anglosphere mostly exports people rather than films. (The British figure is probably an undercount, since so much British production has American money attached, and any US involvement disqualifies a film from the count.)

Money buys foreigners

Two last tidbits before I go.

The first is that budget size is heavily correlated with the chances that the film will be led by a non-American.

The other is that, when you account for each country's size, the UK (very slightly) outproduces America in creating Hollywood leads, producing four Hollywood leads per million people.

What have we learned?

I took four things away after conducting this research:

1. There has been a generational shift. The American-born share of leads in American-made films has fallen from 87% to around 64% over three decades. That is slow enough to be invisible year on year, but large enough to have changed the face of American movies.

2. The invasion is top-heavy. Foreign-born actors are over-represented in the films with the biggest budgets, the biggest box office and the biggest cultural footprint.

3. Almost all of it comes from three countries. The UK, Canada and Australia supply the overwhelming majority of foreign-born Hollywood leads, and the British share is still climbing while the others have levelled off.

4. The real effect is actually two migrations. Nearly half of the foreign-born leads were developed by another country’s film industry before Hollywood hired them. The rest were born elsewhere but made in America.

Notes

This research examined 17,867 lead performances by 5,408 distinct actors with a known birth country in American-made feature films from 1990 to 2024, drawn from OpusData’s tracking of US cinema releases.

‘American-made’ means the United States appears among the film’s production countries, so international co-productions count, while films that played in US cinemas but were made without any US involvement are outside the study.

At the heart of this research is a seemingly easy question (where an actor is “from”), but one for which there is often no single definitive answer. It’s not uncommon for actors to hold multiple passports, either through family or because they have worked in America long enough that it makes sense to apply for American citizenship. Therefore, we cannot rely purely on “passports held”. Tracking country of birth is nicely singular and seemingly definitive, but fails in isolated cases (Emma Watson was born in Paris and Saoirse Ronan in the Bronx). I used birth country as the headline measure because it is the most consistently recorded fact across 5,408 people, and because these edge cases are rare enough not to move the big numbers.

Production-country data exists for 93% of the database overall, but only about three-quarters of films from the 1990s and 2000s, and films without it are excluded.

‘Lead’ uses the database’s Leading and Lead Ensemble Member flags, which means large ensemble films credit several leads each. Coverage skews towards better-known actors.

Birth country data came from Wikipedia, Wikidata, IMDb and other public sources. I applied standard normalisations such as UK home nations to the United Kingdom, USSR to Russia, the divided Germanies to Germany, and so on.

Budgets are known for 53% of the 2010-24 American-made lead performances, skewed towards bigger films, so the budget chart describes the half of the slate where budgets are public.

Distinct actors whose first American-made lead came between 2015 and 2024, divided by current population, countries with at least five such debuts. Population figures are 2024.

Home industry was classified from each actor’s first three substantial feature roles: billed in the cast’s top ten (films with no billing data are allowed through), aged 16 or over, animated films excluded. A country counts as the home industry when at least two of those three films were made there with no US involvement. Actors whose early films involve the US stay unclassified, since debuting in American films says nothing about origin. Restricted to actors with at least five features. Production countries are known for 93% of these early credits. I tested if loosening the billing rule shifts the decade shares, and it does, but only by about a percentage point, so the trend does not depend on the threshold.

We should remember that television careers were not studied, so an actor developed by Australian TV who went straight into American films stays unclassified. In addition, production country follows the financing, so an American-shot film with British money counts as British, which occasionally files a Los Angeles character actor under the UK.

What percentage of first-time feature filmmakers made a second film within five years?

A damn fine question. Is it talent? Connections? Money? Luck? A famous parent and a good haircut?

So I turned to the data. I took every person whose first feature film was released between 1990 and 2018 (146,603 directors worldwide) and followed what happened next. For each of them, I gathered a pile of possible clues about the debut, such as:

• Who produced it

• What genre it was

• Whether it won anything

• Whether anyone actually watched it

• What the director had made beforehand

• and more.

Then I measured which clues went with a second film and which did not.

In the end, the biggest clue turned out to be one almost nobody talks about.

How rare is a second film?

Let’s start with the base rate. Of the 146,603 debut directors, 25.3% directed a second feature within five years. I’ll call this the ‘Comeback Rate’ (the share of debut directors who direct another feature within five years), and it’s the measure running through all of today’s research.

The chart below follows directors year by year after their debut (limited to people who debuted by 2013, so everyone has a full ten years of runway).

The climb is steep at first and then flattens. By year three, 18% were back. By year five, 27%. After that, each extra year adds less and less, and even a decade out, only 38% had directed a second feature. In short, comebacks tend to happen quickly or not at all. Of the directors who returned within ten years, seven in ten had done so by year five.

It’s also getting harder. Directors who debuted in 1990 came back 32% of the time. For the class of 2018, that was down to 22%.

Part of what’s going on here is how crowded the starting line has become. In 1990, about 1,350 people directed a first feature. In 2018, over 10,600 did. Nearly eight times as many debuts, chasing an industry that did not get eight times bigger.

Digital cameras made the first film much easier. They did nothing for the second one.

The clues, all in one place

Now that we have an idea of who’s directing and what the average Comeback Rate is, we can start to separate the results by different factors. I’m going to refer to these as ‘Clues’ because I don’t want to imply that this is deterministic or highly predictable - these are soft factors that often correlate, rather than hard milestones you must meet.

For each clue, I compared directors whose debut had it with directors whose debut did not, and adjusted for the era of the debut so that older, gentler decades don’t flatter any group. A value of 1.5x means directors with that clue came back 1.5 times as often as those without it.

Below is a summary of all the clues, and then I’m going to pick out a few to go into more detail.

There’s a lot going on in there, so let’s take it a section at a time.

Being seen beats being good

A major factor is whether anyone actually watched it.

A debut with no IMDb rating at all (i.e. so few viewers that not one of them logged a score) led to a second film 20% of the time. A debut with 1,000 or more votes converted at 45%. That is more than double, and the gradient stays smooth all the way up.

I also flagged debuts with a top-decile IMDb rating, i.e. the best-reviewed tenth of all rated debuts. On their own, those brilliant debuts did not come back more often.

Quality that nobody sees converts to nothing.

Once a film has found an audience, quality starts to pay dividends. Among debuts with at least 1,000 votes, the top-rated tenth converted at 53% against 43% for the rest. The tiny group that managed both a top-decile rating and a real audience (201 directors out of 146,603) came back at 52%.

The industry does not reward the best first film - it rewards the best first film it actually watched.

The strongest clue is recognition

I checked every debut against whether the film received any kind of nomination at eleven major festivals and awards bodies (the Oscars, BAFTA, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, the Independent Spirits, the Golden Globes, and the DGA, SAG, and PGA awards).

A nomination roughly doubled a director’s chances, and winning helped even more. Nominees who lost converted at 42%, winners at 52%.

We would like to believe this is the meritocratic route, and to some extent it is. But getting a film in front of those juries is itself a question of access, submission fees and programmer attention. It’s also a fairly small club, so great if you get there but not a realistic expectation for most directors.

The producer effect

Next up, I checked whether each debut had at least one producer who had produced features before, and how many.

It’s a neat pattern whereby if the debut director’s film doesn’t have an experienced producer, their comeback rate is 23%. Compare that with 35% for directors with a producer who has twenty or more features behind them. Each step up in producer experience buys the director a little more persistence.

Previous form counts

I keep using the phrase “debut director”, but that doesn’t mean they have never stepped behind the lens before. As you might expect, the more experienced the director was in other fields (making short films and/or television), the better their chances of achieving a second movie.

I like this one because it’s something you can take action on (well, you can choose to make shorts, albeit you can’t ‘choose to make television’).

The question then becomes whether the shorts cause the persistence or simply reveal the people who were always going to persist. The issue of correlation and causation runs through all of this research.

Does genre matter?

Romance, action and horror debuts sit at the top, converting around 30%. Dramas are mid-table. And documentaries sit firmly at the bottom on 22%, which matters because documentaries are 36% of all debuts in the dataset. A large share of first-time directors are working in the genre with the weakest route to a second film.

The person, not the film

Two clues have nothing to do with the debut film.

The first is age. Birth years are public for only about a quarter of these directors (skewed toward the better-known ones), so treat this as a picture of the visible end of the industry. Within that, we see a clearer story: people in their early thirties have the greatest chance of a second shot.

The second is gender. Whatever combination of financing, gatekeeping and family-load timing sits behind it, the second-film hurdle is measurably higher for women, and has been for the whole thirty years I can see.

I wrote about this recently in much more detail in an article entitled Hollywood gives men second chances it doesn’t give women. The Hollywood Gadfly also wrote a long piece about it, taking a different reading of my data in a piece called Bomb Shelter.

Which effects stand alone?

So far, I’ve been measuring each clue on its own. But films can fall into multiple buckets, meaning that the clues overlap. For example, films with established producers tend to get seen more, films that get seen win more nominations, etc.

To separate them, I ran all the clues together in a single model (a logistic regression, i.e. a way of asking what each clue adds once you hold all the others steady), which showed that most of the clues we’ve seen so far survived on their own.

But one did not. Once you account for whether the debut got seen, the producer’s independent effect disappears.

You can see it visually on the chart below. The comeback rate is 25% for everyone. It rises to 45% for films with at least 1,000 IMDb votes. But then it is basically unchanged when we add the criteria of an experienced producer, only jumping again when we add the clue of receiving a major nomination (up to 52%).

And when we pit the two clues against each other, it’s not even close.

A debut with an established producer but no nomination converted at 31%. A debut with a nomination but no established producer converted at 43%.

So the producer’s real contribution is the work. Producers are how debuts get seen, and being seen is what helps the director’s career.

What this means if you’ve made one film

Reading this as a first-time (or soon-to-be first-time) director, the data points somewhere fairly clear.

1. If you’re going to get to make a second film, it’s probably going to happen within five years of your first.

2. The best thing you can do to help your first feature not also be your last is to make shorts or television before your first feature.

3. Find an experienced producer, as the work they can do for your film will really help get it seen and recognised.

4. You need to ensure your film gets watched, as an ignored film is the strongest clue you’ll be part of the one-and-done club.

None of this is to say that talent doesn’t matter. Among films that got seen, quality predicts strongly. The tragedy in the data is the films that were good and invisible, because for career purposes, invisible and mediocre are the same thing.

Notes

The cohort is every person whose first feature-film directing credit was released between 1990 and 2018, which comes to 146,603 directors worldwide. “Second film” means a further feature directing credit released strictly after the debut year and within five years of it, unless a chart says otherwise. Same-year second films do not count. The year-by-year chart uses debuts up to 2013 so everyone has ten full years of follow-up in the data, which runs to 2023.

Producer experience counts distinct feature producing credits (including executive and co-producers) released before the debut year. The recognition flag covers nominations at the Oscars, BAFTA, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Golden Globes, the DGA, SAG and PGA awards. Festival sidebar coverage is incomplete, so it is a conservative flag. Visibility uses IMDb vote counts, and those accumulate after release, so some of the visibility effect runs backwards (a director who keeps working draws late votes to their old debut). I’ve been careful to describe it as a clue rather than a cause. Ages come from public birth years, available for 26% of the cohort and skewed to better-known names.

Everything here is correlation. Producers, festivals and audiences all select, so every clue partly measures the people who were always going to keep going. The data sees feature directing credits only, which means a director who moved into television, shorts, commercials or another crew role counts as not returning even though they kept working. Career-tracking work I’ve done elsewhere suggests figures like these overstate true career endings, so read every rate as “did not direct another feature”, never as “left the industry”.

Correlation does not equal causation. In fact, 100% of people who think it does, die.

On the one hand, it’s great to see so many people get the recognition they deserve for working on such a big endeavour. On the other hand, I just wanted to get home.

But it reminded me of some research I conducted earlier in the year that I haven’t yet published. I built a system to detect when the end credits begin in a movie and tracked the data for over 6,500 movies over the past 105 years of cinema.

How long are end credits these days?

Across all 6,515 films, the median end credits sequence runs 4 minutes 26 seconds. Half of all films sit between three and six minutes.

If this feels unusually short to you, that’s because it’s changing.

Have end credits got longer?

In a word, yes. Spectacularly.

For most of cinema’s first seventy years, the end of a film was exactly that - it ended. A typical film of the 1930s, 40s or 50s ended with a cast reprise or a simple “The End” card (’Fin’ if you were fancy). The median credits length didn’t shift much over forty years, going from 25 seconds in the 1930s to just 34 seconds by the 1960s.

Long-time readers will spot my familiar refrain that “Something weird happened to cinema in the 1970s” and today we see yet another example. End credits changed dramatically, more than doubling in length within the decade, and then doubling again over the 1980s.

By the 1990s, end credits were 4 minutes long, and they've kept climbing ever since, reaching 5:43 for films released in the 2020s.

Current movie credits are almost thirteen times longer than those of the 1950s.

Which films have the longest credits?

The films with the biggest budgets, unsurprisingly, have the longest credits.

Of everything I tested, production budget is the strongest predictor of credit length, at least for films made this century. This makes sense, as that's what they're spending all that money on - people, companies, vendors, etc

This is a fairly new correlation. We can use the Pearson correlation coefficient to give us a single number for how connected two sets of data are, with zero meaning no correlation and plus one meaning perfect positive correlation.

There was no connection between credit length and production budgets in the middle of the last century (1960s = 0.08, 1970s = 0.07), but as credits got longer, the connection grew (1990s = 0.33, 2000s = 0.39) until the modern era, where it’s up to 0.5.

The same is true of the number of people involved. How many crew a film credits explains its credit length far better than how many actors it has (0.44 versus 0.18), and once you account for the crew, cast size tells you nothing at all.

Animations have the longest credits, with documentary credits having the shortest - just a third of their animated cousins.

And when we drill deeper into the types of movies, we see an even clearer culprit - Marvel et al. Superhero films run a median of 7:09, compared with 5:08 for everything else.

Why are credits getting longer?

The data can’t give us a definitive reason this is happening, but I think the four most likely causes are:

1. Freelancers need credits

2. The credits moved

3. The VFX boom

4. Nobody is in charge

1. Freelancers need credits

Under the old studio system, most film workers were salaried staff and simply weren’t named on screen. The Wizard of Oz (1939) ended with on-screen titles listing eleven names, and one of those was a dog.

The Paramount Decree of 1948 broke up the studios’ vertically integrated empires and the studios fired many of their permanent staff. Filmmaking shifted to a freelance, project-by-project business, meaning a screen credit became more important in securing the next job.

2. The credits moved

As more people angled for an on-screen credit, the main roller had to move from before the film to after it. Until the late 1960s, credits mostly ran at the start of the film, where the audience had no choice but to sit through them, so they stayed short.

Films like Around the World in 80 Days (1956), West Side Story (1961) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) pioneered pushing them to the end, and by the 1980s the modern pattern was standard.

Once the names moved to the end, where nobody had to watch them, there was no longer any pressure to keep the list short.

Industry guilds had a role in this. When The Empire Strikes Back (1980) opened without traditional front credits, the Directors Guild objected (their rules required the director’s name up front if anyone’s was there), and the guilds fined George Lucas a quarter of a million dollars. He paid up but called it extortion, and resigned from both the DGA and the WGA.

The current rules that survive today mandate surprisingly little about end credits, other than the actors’ agreement, which requires that at least 50 cast members be listed in the end titles. Almost everything else in the crawl (the technicians, the drivers, the caterers, the accountants) is there by custom rather than by contract.

3. The VFX boom

The department that has seen the biggest growth in recent decades is that of visual effects. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) credited 5,109 people and over half of them (2,659) were in the visual effects department. Modern tentpoles farm work out to 13 or 14 VFX companies at once, each of which submits its list of names.

Across all movies the numbers are far smaller, but the shape is the same. VFX went from under half a percent of all crew credits in the 1970s to around 12% today, or roughly one crew credit in eight.

The bitter irony is that even fifteen-minute credit rolls leave people out. Studios cap how many names each VFX vendor may submit (insiders told me around 40 names is a common maximum, no matter how many people actually did the work, and ILM’s John Knoll has publicly opposed the practice).

In my earlier study of 4,113 films, 7.5% of crew credits went officially uncredited, with stunts (25%) and VFX among the worst affected.

4. Nobody is in charge

The WGA limits how many writers can share a writing credit and the Academy caps how many producers can collect the Best Picture Oscar. But no body anywhere caps the total length of end credits. Without a countervailing force, inflation naturally set in.

Some of this credit-grabbing is down to the increasingly complex way films are funded. Many film tax incentives legally require an on-screen thank-you: Georgia’s famous programme grants an extra 10% tax credit in exchange for embedding a five-second state logo in the finished film, and New Mexico, Louisiana, New York and California all have their own statutory versions.

We see the same pattern in almost every unregulated issue involving credits. In previous research I’ve shown how the average number of executive producers per film has more than doubled since 2000.

And then there's a general sense of freedom to play with the credits. Pixar began listing “production babies” (children born to crew during production) with Toy Story in 1995, and WALL-E (2008) credited 58 of them.

But the all-time GOAT of credits has to be Hot Shots (1991), which included a recipe for a brownie topping.

Marvel has changed public attitudes to end credits

And as an appropriate post-script, I wanted to briefly talk about the post-credits scene, which is likely older than you might think.

Possibly the first proper post-credits sequence was at the end of the 1966 Dean Martin spy comedy The Silencers. Twenty years later, Ferris Bueller implored audiences to “Go home!”. But Marvel industrialised the practice, starting with Iron Man in 2008.

This has slowly changed public views on watching all the credits, dividing along generational lines. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 93% of over-65s consider leaving before the credits finish perfectly acceptable behaviour, compared with 69% of 18- to 29-year-olds.

At the same time, the battle is going the other way with home viewing. Streaming services have decided that credits are a problem to be engineered away. Netflix say that their Skip Intro button is pressed 136 million times a day, and autoplay countdowns routinely squeeze the credits into a corner before the first name has scrolled past. Filmmakers have pushed back with limited success. The credits took fifty years to conquer the end of the film, and the technology companies un-conquered them in about five.

Notes

The dataset covers 6,515 feature films released between 1920 and 2025. Credits length here means the time from the first frame of end credits to the end of the entire film. That means anything else sitting in the file after the credits start (mid-credits scenes, post-credits stingers, bonus material) is counted too, so franchise films with stingers will read slightly long. My research skews towards well-known, English-language films, and the early decades are thin (19 films from the 1920s, rising to several hundred per decade from the 1970s). Cast and crew counts come from IMDb, which lists people who never appeared in the on-screen crawl, so I've used them as a measure of production scale rather than a literal count of scrolling names.

We learned that getting your script on the annual Black List or winning the Nicholl Fellowship can turn heads, but that few other competitions or laurels help.

So let’s say you’re not one of the lucky few who have achieved those rare accolades - how else can you get an agent to read your script?

Today I’m sharing the advice these same people gave to aspiring screenwriters.

Overall, the sentiment was not warm towards cold approaches. One put it like this:

I pretty much delete all cold emails automatically unless I’m bored, which is rare.

Yikes. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, if we look at the numbers another way, we can see that, like Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber, I’m saying there is a chance.

So what can you do in your cold approach to be one of the select few? In my interactions with these gatekeepers, a number of actionable steps emerged.

1. Personalise, because they can tell

2. Do your homework

3. Never use AI

4. Hook ‘em fast

5. Do not oversell - they check

6. Make it short, professional, and polite

7. Tell YOUR story

Let’s look at each in a little more detail.

Rule one: Personalise, because they can tell

The most common theme by a distance was personalisation, or the lack of it. A cold query that could have been sent to anyone gets deleted on sight.

Immediate pass if there is zero customization to me personally, ie I can tell someone has sent the exact same query to myriad reps and they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

And they really can tell. The mechanics of the mass-blast betray the sender in ways writers may not realise:

Please don’t copy and paste the same email to every manager... we can absolutely tell (especially when our names and companies are in different fonts than the rest of the email).

Some described wanting a genuine point of connection, a mutual professor, the same festivals, a shared former colleague, and added a detail that should give any name-dropper pause. If a writer claims to know one of their clients, they will sometimes text the client to check.

Rule two: Do your homework

Know who the company is and what it does, include the logline, a short synopsis and the practical details, and be clear about what you are actually asking for.

They need to do research about what we do.

One assistant even offered a workaround for companies that officially take no cold queries at all:

If the person put the work in to find my personal email address NOT JUST LINKEDIN I will at least read a logline and go from there.

Several also said the smartest queries arrive with more than a bare script. As one expert put it:

You always love to see a short sizzle or something extra, before I just commit myself to 120 pages of a stranger’s script... at the minimum showing that there’s more of a vision beyond the pages usually helps.

Rule three: Never use AI

I would hope this one was obvious, but just for the avoidance of doubt - don’t use AI. Anywhere, ever.

I’m not anti-AI, but if you’re saying you’re a professional writer, then even a whiff of generative AI in “your” writing or emails is a killer. (And the suspicion of AI use can even lose you a $2 million book deal, as we saw last week).

As one person put it:

And never ever use AI to write your cover note. One can pick that a mile off.

Rule four: Hook ‘em fast

Even a perfect email only buys you a few pages of attention. We already learned that just 8% read the whole script. 13% have decided by page five, and two-thirds have decided by the end of page ten.

So the opening pages have to do what your email did and earn the next minute of their time. One agent with more than ten years in the business went further than any page count:

I read the first line. Not so good is lots of description to start the script. Less is more!

And a junior exec made the same point about the query itself:

I rarely respond to cold queries, if at all. If anything an undeniable logline can get me interested.

It’s a layered approach - the logline earns the click, the first line earns the first page, and the first ten pages earn the rest. You’re fighting uphill at each stage.

Rule five: Do not oversell - they check

Inflating a minor credential reads as naivety, the opposite of what the writer intended.

Bigging up more low key prizes, or interest from irrelevant producers, too much... it shows a naivety or lack of industry understanding.

And the checking is not hypothetical. One manager described their own diligence:

What turns me off is if the query says they’re “in development” on a number of projects and easy research shows those projects are, at most, optioned.

Rule six: Make it short, professional, and polite

This is a lesson we should all apply in our everyday lives, but it applies even more when cold-calling industry gatekeepers with your script. As one put it:

A long, verbose, cryptic query letter is an immediate pass. Concise and professional, and material-forward!

Long emails with typos, loglines that strain to be funny, flowery begging, all named as instant passes.

One exec boiled the ideal email down to a formula:

Short and concise is good. Pitch the hook, why this project is UNIQUE, relevant attachments and background, and a very short reason the writer is compelling as well.

This etiquette does not stop at the first email. One agent, a generous reader who gets through whole scripts and advanced three cold writers last year, drew a single hard line:

I will immediately pass if I get a rude chase up.

There was even a warning for writers who do have representation and query anyway. More than one reader said an already-repped writer reaching out alone is a red flag rather than a plus. As one agent put it, the first question in their head is simply:

Why doesn’t their rep reach out?

And several respondents added that their company will not read genuinely cold queries at all, often for legal reasons, and route everything in through a referral instead.

Rule seven: Tell YOUR story

Many of the respondents said that the query needs to tell them where you are going, not just what you have written. One said they wanted writers who have:

…achieved momentum on their own and know why they’d now want an agent.

That word momentum came up in different forms across the answers. It does not have to mean much. One manager with over a decade in the business set the bar at:

I will read if they’ve been recommended by a producer or have produced something (even if only a short film, taster, etc)

Another put the same idea in the past tense:

My default is to pass immediately - the few I have responded to were because they had some level of success already with produced credits or competition wins.

This matches the numbers from my previous article, where a produced credit was the second-strongest signal of all, behind only a referral. A short film, a taster, a staged reading, a web series: anything.

The headline here is that the writers who get read arrive mid-journey, whereas the ones who get deleted arrive asking someone else to start the journey for them.

Other tidbits

One of the POVs I personally file as “unfair-and-wrong-but-also-I-kinda-get-it” was:

Do not send a feature script longer than 110 pages.

I have previously shown that length of screenplay is not a good measure of the final movie. (see Does one page of a screenplay really equal one minute of screen time?). That said, if the perception is shared by whoever the gatekeeper will later have to share the script with, maybe it has merit.

Not all the advice was depressing. One said :

The only thing that could ever get me to read a cold query is an amazing log line.

Epilogue

At the end of the day, as dispiriting as it can be to have to write cold emails that are endlessly ignored or rejected, remember that the people at the other end are passionate industry professionals like you.

They are dealing with a deluge of hopeful strangers who are swamping their inboxes, and making it hard to tell who’s good and who’s not.

But if you have the right talent and work ethic, these people DO want to hear from you. They DO want to champion good writing and to build a career alongside you.

You just need to work extra hard at the start to show that you exist and that you stand out.

Good luck!

To prepare, I gathered the biographies of the 6,921 people who wrote, directed, or starred in the 100 top-grossing films of each year since 2000 (2,600 films in total). I then looked at who had a family member already in the entertainment industry before they joined.

I was excited to share the results, although I wasn’t quite ready for the reaction. As the Hollywood Reporter put it “the surprise, or shock, of the audience was audible”. I thought it was fairly well known just how nepotistic the top of Hollywood is, but it seems that most people were not expecting the scale the data revealed.

So let’s dig into the findings.

What counts as a ‘nepo baby’?

The word ‘nepotism’ entered English in 1669 via a scandalous book called Il nepotismo di Roma, about the popes’ habit of making cardinals of their ‘nephews’ (itself just a polite word for their bastards). The insult ‘nepotism baby’ has been in print since at least 1915, when a Missouri newspaper used it to attack a state governor for stuffing the payroll with relatives.

The earliest traceable use of its newer form, ‘nepo baby’, is a December 2020 tweet about Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, and Urban Dictionary had an entry by July 2021. In December 2022, New York Magazine put a gaggle of famous actors’ faces on babies’ bodies and declared it ‘The Year of the Nepo Baby’.

While the term ‘nepo baby’ is fun and evocative, it’s a little imprecise for the data research, so instead I am going to refer to people who have family ties within the industry.

I counted someone as having family ties if a parent or close blood relative (i.e. a sibling, grandparent, uncle, aunt or cousin) worked in film or television before that person’s own entry into the industry.

I excluded spouses and partners as it takes most people years to get into the industry, so a partner who works in film is far more likely to be a consequence of being in the industry than the way in. Secondly, I also excluded relatives who joined up after our subject did. There’s more detail in the Notes at the end of this article.

How commonplace is it for film folk to have family ties in the industry?

Of the people I studied, roughly a quarter had a family member already in the film or TV industry before they joined.

Top-billed actors lead on 28%. Directors are close behind on 26%. Writers come out lower, on 18%, though they are also by far the least written-about group, so there’s a greater margin of error.

All this means that when Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, declared herself ‘an OG Nepo Baby’ and wrote ‘I am not alone. There are many of us’, she was spot on. There are many of them - about one in four.

How many films have connected creatives?

As well as helping the individuals themselves, a film project can really benefit from having an industry veteran rooting for it.

So let’s flip from people to films. For each of the 2,600 films, I counted how many people with family ties sat in its core creative team, i.e. the director, the credited writers and the top three billed actors.

30% of top films have no nepo baby anywhere in their core team. 36% carry exactly one, 23% carry two, and 11% have three or more.

Put the other way round, seven in ten of the biggest films of the past 25 years had at least one person with industry family at the heart of their creative team. This was the headline stat that shocked the folks in Locarno.

Is it getting better?

While the term ‘nepo baby’ might be new, nepotism in Hollywood most certainly is not. Universal founder Carl Laemmle reportedly kept more than 70 relatives on the payroll (including making his son head of production as a 21st birthday present), and the Barrymore acting dynasty was on its third generation even before talkies arrived.

The rate of already-connected directors has not wavered for two and a half decades. The most recent period I looked at (2020-24) saw a slight dip, but not because things improved but because the composition of ‘top-grossing movies’ changed due to the pandemic. Bigger movies were held back, and more indie movies cracked the ‘Top 100’.

Does it help in the longer-term?

Having a leg up at the start of your career is not the same as having a career-long advantage. When you listen to actual nepo babies talk about their experience, they tend to reflect the same idea: that it’s only an advantage of breaking in. Lily-Rose Depp told Elle magazine:

Maybe you get your foot in the door, but you still just have your foot in the door. There's a lot of work that comes after that.

Gwyneth Paltrow said much the same:

you get access other people don't have, so the playing field is not level in that way. However... once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good.

So I tested if the data supports this idea. And it does.

Films directed by industry-family directors have a median adjusted domestic gross of $84m, compared with $87m for films directed by everyone else.

The films were also not any better, according to IMDb audience ratings.

So what does a famous surname actually buy?

I narrowed in on the 1,804 directors whose debut feature since 2000 attracted a meaningful audience, whether or not their career went anywhere afterwards.

Connected directors get their first film made younger (a median age of 33 against 35), and those who eventually reached the top 100 climbed faster (a median of 8 years from first feature against 10).

Most of all, they get more chances. 72% went on to a second feature against 66% of everyone else, and their median career is three features against two.

Family ties get you a modest start earlier, keep you in the game longer, and buy you another roll of the dice when a film disappoints. The surname is more of a safety net than some kind of accelerator or guarantee.

Talent, it turns out, is not hereditary. Access is.

Director Jason Reitman, son of Ivan, put it rather pithily when telling NPR about the reception of his first film:

People presumed that nepotism would pave the road for my career. And nepotism let me down, frankly.

Epilogue

The point of today’s research is not to imply that having family ties is inherently a bad thing, or that the people who benefit from them are villains. If you grow up around the industry, you absorb it. You get a chance to learn how sets work, how deals get made, and talk with experienced folk who can advise you on your own journey.

The data is highlighting what those advantages buy. I.e a higher chance of being ‘lucky’ enough to get a shot at showing what you can do, and another shot when the first one misses.

The real question is not about the individuals. It is about fairness for everyone else, and what kind of industry we want. One where talent finds its way in, or one where the door opens fastest for those born nearest to it.

Notes

The film panel is the 2,600 top-grossing films released domestically from 2000 to 2025 inclusive, i.e. roughly the top 100 per year, with box office measured as domestic (US and Canada) gross adjusted for ticket-price inflation. So this is not strictly a study of Hollywood; it is a study of the films that topped the North American box office, wherever they were made. The underlying film, credit and people data draws on Wikipedia, IMDb, OMDb, TMDb and The Numbers. ‘Stars’ means the top three billed actors per film.

Background data came from public web sources, producing a structured record with cited sources for every person. Every claim of industry family was rechecked by a separate verification pass using fresh searches; claims that failed that check were excluded. Family background could be established for 87% of directors, 76% of stars and 37% of writers, and the percentages in this article are shares of those people. Writers are the least publicly documented group by a distance, which is why their number carries the least weight.

The debut-director group is every director whose first feature film was released between 2000 and 2024 and has at least 10,000 IMDb ratings, a floor chosen so the group is documented well enough to study. That yields 1,804 directors, of whom 566 also appear in the main panel. Career outcomes (second features, later top-100 films, ages) come from public filmographies. Film quality is measured by IMDb audience ratings, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and the quality-adjusted box office comparisons split films into equal thirds by rating and compare medians within each third.

Survivorship matters. Everyone in this data already succeeded, so these figures measure how common industry family is among people who made it, not how much a connection improves your odds of making it. The debut group softens this but does not remove it: its members all got a noticed first film made. The box office comparisons are between films that all reached the top of the market.

For example, there is only one reliable source for the average age of Oscar voters. In 2012, the Los Angeles Times conducted an investigation and concluded that Oscar voters had a median age of 62, with just 14% being aged under 50.

Fourteen years have passed since then - #OscarsSoWhite, a membership overhaul, and roughly 6,000 new members, recruited in part to make the voting body look less like its “male, pale, stale” stereotype.

Did it work?

So I set about finding out by researching the age of the 11,200 people who vote on Hollywood’s top awards. There’s more detail on my methodology at the end in the Notes section.

The average ages of Oscar voters

Let’s start with the headline figure. The median Oscar voter is 64 years old, with two-thirds being between 50 and 79 years old.

The youngest members are found in the Short Film and Animation branches, with a median age of 50 and 60 years old, respectively.

Another way of looking at it is to ask what percentage of each branch is over 70. If you’re printing handouts for members, then the Sound and Production Design branches might need the largest font, given that both have a plurality of people older than 70.

Wait, why hasn’t the average age changed?

We’ve just seen that the Oscars voters are largely the same median age as they were when the LA Times reported in 2012. This might seem strange, for a couple of reasons:

1. Shouldn’t they be older? People remain members of the Academy until death, and so those same folks who were there in 2012 should be fourteen years older.

2. But didn’t they just invite a load of younger folks? In the decade, the Academy has made a big deal about inviting a broader spectrum of people to refresh its membership.

Interestingly, the answer to both questions is yes.

It is true to say that there has not been a disproportionate number of people leaving, given that the Academy has not faced the kind of membership exodus the Golden Globes did in 2021.

This means that Academy members are indeed ageing in real time (despite the best efforts of their plastic surgeons and what their publicists will tell you).

But it’s also true that an unusually large number of people have been invited to join in recent years, with the express goal of changing the composition of the voting body.

When we narrow into the new entrants, we can see that their median age is a spritly 49 years old.

The youngest member I can verify is Quvenzhané Wallis, who is currently 23 but was invited at 14 after her Best Actress nomination for Beasts of the Southern Wild. Her 2018 class also included the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, then 86, a 72-year spread inside a single year's intake.

But this isn’t some radical new act - the new entrants to the Academy since 2016 have had a median age of between 48 and 51, with the middle half of each intake sitting in the same band, roughly 40 to 57.

The passage of time and the flurry of new entrants have pushed against each other in order to keep the median age of voters fairly stable since 2012.

Mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke (both 100), Eva Marie Saint (102) and Jacqueline White (103) pull so hard on the average that the Academy would need to invite ten typical new members just to cancel them out.

Age is a sensitive topic in the film business

Each year, the Academy announces each new class with stats on the gender, ethnicity and background of the new entrants… but not age. Age is the one demographic it does not publish stats on, nor set any targets for.

To some degree, I can see why. Every other dimension of the diversity drive can be fixed by invitation. But because the Academy’s own membership rules manufacture an old-skewing body (i.e. you need to have had a long career to get in, and then you’re offered a lifetime membership), it can’t quickly affect the age of its constituency.

In 2016, as part of the post-#OscarsSoWhite reforms, the Academy began moving long-inactive members to non-voting emeritus status. The backlash was immediate. A 91-year-old screenwriter named Robert Bassing, a member since 1958 whose last credit came in 1977, threatened to sue for age discrimination rather than give up his ballot.

The purge, in the end, was tiny. The Academy’s CEO, Dawn Hudson, said:

It was fewer than 1% of members that were asked to move to this status, and most of them willingly did.

This is, after all, an industry that has litigated the question of whether your age should even be public. In 2011 the actress Junie Hoang sued IMDb for more than $1m for publishing her real birth date, arguing it branded her over the hill; a jury sided with IMDb. California then passed a law in 2016, backed by SAG-AFTRA, forcing IMDb to delete ages on request. The courts struck it down as unconstitutional, and the ages stayed up.

In the end, I was left surprised that the Academy wasn’t older. And there is something fun about an electorate with an 80-year age gap trying to agree on their favourite movie.

Further reading

If you want to read more about the Oscars, you may enjoy:

• Was Harvey Weinstein thanked more often than God at the Oscars?

• How do women fare in gender-neutral Oscar categories?

• Can media coverage predict who wins an Oscar?

• How “popular” are Oscar-nominated movies?

• What do Oscar-winning short films have in common?

• How much do Oscar nominations help films in theatres?

• How much do Hollywood campaigns for an Oscar cost?

Notes

The member list comes from the Academy’s 2026 member directory (11,200 members). I matched 92% of members to credit-database identities, then took birth years from IMDb, TMDb, OMDb and Wikidata. After excluding members with recorded deaths, that gives 5,367 living members with a verifiable birth year, 48% of the membership.

Coverage is not uniform, as actors and other prominent members are more likely to have public birth years than, say, publicists. The least-documented members skew towards recently recruited and to younger branches, so the true median age is likely to be slightly lower than I can calculate.

The age-at-invitation figure covers the 2,350 members of the 2016 to 2026 classes with known birth years. The LA Times figures cited are from its February 2012 study (median 62, 14% under 50, 86% over 50, identities confirmed for 5,112 of 5,765 voting members). Their study covered voting members; mine covers all listed members, roughly 91% of whom hold voting status per the Academy’s most recent announcement.

Morbius had died at the box office in April 2022, opening to $39.1m and then dropping 74% in its second weekend. But over the following weeks, a meme playing on the film’s dreadful dialogue (’It’s Morbin’ time’) had taken off.

Sony read this massive increase in engagement as demand for the movie and decided to re-release it theatrically on 3 June. It did not do well. The re-release took roughly $300,000 across 1,037 cinemas, which works out as a per-screen average of $300, or 30 tickets over three days. Yikes.

And this is not an isolated experience. A number of movies have thrived and failed to capitalise on internet meme fame. And yet, some of the biggest moments for cinema in the past few years have been driven by memes and outsized online interest.

So how can we separate the memes that mean money from the fads that fuel failure?

I have isolated 24 movie meme moments, from Barbie to Cats, and looked for patterns in the wins and losses. After all that, there are some pretty clear lessons for studios and movie marketers.

I’m going to go through examples of both virality working and failing, talk about how studios try to manufacture these moments, and end with tips for how to know when a meme means money.

Viral moments which did not drive Box Office

Let's start with an example in which a film's inclusion in a popular meme did not translate into box-office sales.

Cats (2019) is one of the biggest examples. When the first proper trailer dropped, the movie’s ‘digital fur technology’ sparked no end of online conversation and became a global punchline weeks before release. Then the film opened to $6.5m against tracking that had once hoped for $14m to $17m.

The internet’s reaction to Cats’ fur somewhat mirrored the film press corps’ reaction to the full version of Megalopolis (2024). Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed opus cost $120m to make but opened to just $4m domestically.

When PostTrak asked buyers why they had chosen to see the movie, 61% said ‘because of Coppola’, and only 9% said they had ‘heard it was good’. Megalopolis sold on morbid curiosity to a tiny audience of people who wanted to witness the car crash in person.

Snow White (2025) probably had the longest and loudest run of pre-release bad headlines than any movie in recent history. So on the one hand, there was high awareness and a strong viral conversation, but on the other it was almost entirely negative. It opened to $42.2m on a reported $336m budget and fell 66% in weekend two. Being talked about constantly is not the same as being wanted.

These three examples all have one thing in common - the joke was that the movie was bad. But that’s not the main common thread in the memes which don’t convert to tickets.

Saltburn (2023), because it went viral in a big way, with Saltburn-themed videos racking up nearly 4 billion views on TikTok, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ shooting back up the charts. Despite this, the film’s global Box Office takings were the same as its reported budget ($21.1 million vs $20 million).

The memes that could

Now let's look at some viral moments that did seem to drive success on the big screen.

Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) is the model. The ‘#GentleMinions’ trend had teenagers turning up to screenings in suits, filming themselves treating a kids’ cartoon like a black-tie event.

Illumination was expecting their movie to take $70m to $80m over the four-day opening. It ended up taking over $125m. A key part of those extra audience members was, unusually for a Minions movie, 13-to-17-year-olds, who accounted for 34% of the opening audience, compared with just 8% for the previous film in the series.

A Minecraft Movie (2025) also tracked at $70m to $80m but opened even bigger than The Rise of Gru, at $163m. The ‘chicken jockey’ meme, in which audiences shout and throw popcorn at a specific line, erupted soon after its release, extending the film’s life on the big screen. Warner Bros leaned in, formalising it with official rowdy ‘Block Party’ screenings that gave people a fresh reason to go back.

Read more

Some competitions directly provide top scripts to influential industry people during or just after the competition runs. Beyond that, the implication is that having placed well in their competition will be a mark of quality you can use to get people to notice you.

Final Draft’s Big Break says:

Enter the contest that has been launching screenwriting careers for over 20 years.

Winners and finalists have signed with agents and managers, sold and optioned scripts, and been staffed in TV writers’ rooms.

Is this the year for YOUR Big Break?

The PAGE International Screenwriting Awards say:

many dozens of our past winners have secured representation, landed paid writing assignments, signed option agreements on their work, and many now have movies and television shows in production, on the air, and in theaters.

The BlueCat Screenplay Competition puts it like this:

we’ve consistently introduced our winners and finalists to the industry, launching numerous successful careers in film and television.

BlueCat has a long and distinguished history of discovering unknown screenwriters, introducing them to the industry and launching their careers.

I wanted to test the utility of winning or placing highly in these competitions, so I reached out to a number of top Hollywood agents, assistants, and junior execs who handle the first read. In the end, 38 shared their thoughts.

I’m going to split the results over two articles, as there were a lot of great nuggets that came out of it.

So what actually gets a script read?

I asked each person how a given thing mentioned in a cold query would affect their likelihood of actually reading the script. I have converted those answers into a score ranging from -2 to +2, where 0 indicates no difference.

In the chart below, the dark blue bars represent what I think of as industry pre-validation, and the orange bars represent competitions open to all.

Nothing beats a referral from a trusted contact. And the second most important signal was also an indicator that the industry has pre-validated you - namely, that you had already had a script produced.

Real work, and a warm introduction, beat every competition by a long way.

To help get a sense of this perspective, it’s worth listening to UTA literary agent Peter Dodd in a 2016 interview on the Scriptnotes podcast. He described himself as ‘a recommendation-based engine’ and when asked whether a single client had ever come to him through a query letter, he replied:

Never happens.

The annual Black List was the highest-ranked “competition,” although it’s not quite the same as the others. To get on it, your script needs to have already been read by well-placed people in the industry, so while it’s technically open to all, it also fits the model of industry pre-validation.

By far and away the most useful competition to win if you’re a true industry outsider is the Nicholl Fellowship. This is from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the folks handing out Oscars), and it awards up to five winners $35,000 each to spend a year writing.

(Minor note, but it is arguable if the Nicholl Fellowship really is “open to all” any more. Last year they changed their rules to only accept submissions through partner universities, labs, and the Black List website or the Writers Guild Foundation).

Even a high placement at Austin, a win in another contest, or being a Nicholl semifinalist barely have any effect. A handful of the experts said it actually makes them less likely to read:

I want to know WHY I should look at something. Compel me. I don’t care which competition (that usually no longer exists) gave the script a high score.

The Nicholl cliff

While winning the Nicholl Fellowship is a clear advantage, the drop-off to later placements is steep.

Winning was worth +1.1 (on my five-point scale from -2 to +2), but being a finalist drops to +0.7, which was the same as having a rep attached. A semifinal place falls to +0.3, which is almost nothing.

Which screenwriting contest does the industry respect?

As a follow-up, I also asked everyone, “Which of these actually carry weight in the industry?” and listed some of the biggest screenwriting competitions.

This is obviously a highly subjective question, so all we’re measuring is everyone’s opinion.

Here again we see the annual Black List top the poll, in an exact tie with Sundance’s programmes (i.e., its Labs: Screenwriters, Episodic and the rest) and with the Nicholl Fellowship a distant third.

Outside of those top three, it’s slim pickings. This is a rather stark answer as they could pick as many as they wanted. So it’s not a case of the top ones crowding out the others; rather, they really don’t think the others matter.

Underneath those three, everything drops off a cliff. The Austin Film Festival, the biggest name in the next tier, gets just 18% of the votes. The paid contests that market themselves hardest to writers sit at the very bottom. BlueCat and Stage 32 were picked by nobody at all.

One agent, asked what gets them to read a cold query, said:

There are a handful of writing competitions like the Black List, Nicholl Fellowship, Channel 4 Screenwriting, BBC Writersroom competitions that if you win or are a finalist, they pique some interest, but I would say the absolute BEST way of getting your work read is through reputable recommendation... Sadly the old tale of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” plays a big role in getting your material read.

The Black List and its website are not the same

The annual Black List (the year-end list of the most-liked unproduced scripts) and the Black List website (the paid script-hosting and evaluation site) are treated very differently by the people I canvassed.

The annual list is named as carrying weight by four out of five, and scores +1.2 on read-likelihood. The website is named by just 21%, and scores +0.6, with three people saying a high website score makes them less likely to read.

How much of a script do they read?

I also asked how much of a script they read before they know it is a pass.

The most common answer, from more than half of respondents (53%), was ten pages. A further 13% said they only need five. Put those together and roughly two in three gatekeepers have decided your script’s fate before the end of page ten.

The more patient 26% hold out until page thirty, which is roughly the end of the first act. And just 8% said they read the whole script before passing.

So, do contests get your script read?

For two of them, sometimes, yes. Being on the annual Black List or winning the Nicholl puts a writer just below a produced credit, and both clearly help.

For almost everything else with an entry fee, the honest answer from the people reading the scripts is - not really, and occasionally the reverse.

But the thing that beats every contest, every time, is a person the reader already trusts saying ‘read this’.

However, I don’t wish to imply that that is the only proposed benefit of entering a competition. Entering a script competition provides something every writer wants (i.e., a deadline), and many also provide what writers need (i.e., feedback).

In addition, the moment a script wins, it is likely to catch the eye of many industry watchers. Many competitions have distinguished industry names on the judging panel, and some even offer mentorship and connections as the core prize.

Break the rules

To end on a more hopeful note, I wanted to point out that this is what people told me, not what they always do. There are instances where a cold email with a less-than-top-tier placing in a competition can lead to glory.

In August 2020, unknown writer Sophie Dawson sent literary manager John Zaozirny a cold query that led with a Nicholl quarterfinal placement. The whole email, as later published, read:

Hi John! My dark comedy just made the quarterfinals of the 2020 Academy Nicholl Fellowships competition! Would you be interested in taking a look?

Four months later her script Headhunter was the number one script on the 2020 Black List.

As Zaozirny tells it:

Sophie was someone I found off of a query letter in August and four months later she was the number one writer on The Black List.

So don’t let anyone tell you to stop trying - least of all me.