By Sunday, Deadline estimated the film’s loss at around $150m. They noted that:

De Luca and Abdy, we hear, ran Digger through their analytical comps system. The combo of Cruise and Iñárritu justified a $125M production greenligiht.

Three weeks before Digger opened, De Luca told an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival what he thought of studio data, as reported by Screen:

The hedge against the unknown is embrace the unknowns; embrace what’s original, because algorithmic bullshit and predictive research and data analytics, which we all use, cannot look backwards [...] Half the time the audience doesn’t know they want it until they see it.

So which is it?

Very few people actually get to see the Studios’ greenlight models, but a decade ago Sony was hacked and many of its internal documents were leaked. Among them were 35 greenlight models, and the accompanying email chains around them,

This is a rare chance to see how things work from the inside, so I set out to understand what they reveal about Hollywood’s greenlight processes.

The main thing I learned was that they’re often wrong (only 7 of the 35 landed within 20% of the figure) and that the people using the model knew full well it wasn’t a reliable system.

Let’s start at the beginning…

What is a greenlight model?

Before a studio agrees to make a film, its finance team builds a ten-year profit-and-loss estimate covering all the money the film will earn (cinemas, home video, pay TV, free TV, etc). Sony called this lifetime estimate the “ultimate”.

The whole thing is based on how much the film will make at the theatrical box office. Ben Fritz described the process in his 2018 book The Big Picture like this:

Such projections are based on comparisons to similar movies with similar budgets released at similar times of the year, and they always include some level of subjectivity. (Is the remake of Ghostbusters most similar to other Melissa McCarthy comedies? To buddy comedies? To generic summer action films? To the first two Ghostbusters films in the 1980s?)

The comps also put a price on the people attached to a film. When Sony was creating their greenlight memo in 2014 for the movie Steve Jobs they ran the same script three ways.

• With Christian Bale starring and David Fincher directing, it was worth $75m in the US.

• With Leonardo DiCaprio and Danny Boyle it went up to $80m (and $120m overseas).

• With Bale and Boyle it fell to $60m.

So when we think about what might have happened in the greenlighting of Digger, we can see the “Cruise plus Iñárritu equals $125m” logic at play. The world’s biggest movie star directed by one of only three directors to ever have won the Academy Award for Best Director two years in a row (Birdman in 2014, and The Revenant the year after).

With the projected income in place, the films’ profitability hurdle is calculated, which Sony called the “return threshold”. In April 2014 Andrew Gumpert, who ran business affairs at Columbia Pictures, explained to Sony’s film chair, Amy Pascal, how that year’s hurdle was set:

... 58% is the exact math. 610m slate profit target divided by 1.057.6B of budgeted production spend....

In other words, for every dollar Sony spent making films that year, it wanted $0.58 back in profit. A film whose model showed less than that failed the test on paper, no matter how much people liked the script.

How close did Sony’s greenlight figures get?

After reviewing the Sony files, I found that films came in short of what the greenlight models predicted. 24 of the 35 grossed less than their greenlight figure, and the median film took 74%. Added together, the 35 films were greenlit on $2.95bn and took $2.39bn.

The typical miss, in either direction, was 43% of the greenlight figure. For comparison, when I looked at the opening-weekend forecasts the trade press publishes shortly before release, the typical miss was about 20%. A greenlight number is set a year or two earlier, with no trailer, no test screening and often no finished cast, so it is a much harder call.

But the bigger problem is how far they missed in both directions. Only seven landed within 20% of their figure, and only four within 10%. Nine took less than half (The Brothers Grimsby was greenlit on $75m and took $6.9m). Six beat their figure by more than 50% (American Hustle was greenlit on $65m and took $150m).

The misses also depended on size. Of the ten films greenlit on less than $50m, five fell short, which is a coin toss, but of the 25 greenlit on $50m or more, 19 fell short. The bigger the bet, the more optimistic the number.

Did the films earn what they needed to?

A greenlight figure can miss, and the film can still make money. So the more useful test is whether each film reached the box office total its own model said it needed to break even.

Sony calculated two levels for each film:

1. The worldwide gross needed to break even.

2. The gross needed to clear the return threshold.

Of the 25 greenlit films with these levels recorded, eight reached the box office needed to clear the threshold. Eighteen made enough to break even on Sony’s own numbers.

This means that most of these films weren’t disasters - they just didn’t do what they had been approved to do.

We also get a glimpse at the profit they expected. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was greenlit expecting $123m of profit over its lifetime. By September 2014, with the film forecast to take $695m worldwide, the estimate had fallen to $15m. Sex Tape went from $33m to $2m, and Deliver Us from Evil from $19m to a small loss.

Sony’s finance team knew this. In November 2013 one of its executives, Stefan Litt, sent Pascal an analysis of the films from its 2009 to 2014 financial years, prepared in case investors asked about it:

It compares greenlight estimates to actual results and highlights that while box office has been higher than the GL estimate, the profit is significantly lower.

It also mentions the next James Bond film at the time, Spectre. It wasn’t far enough along for a full greenlight model at the point of the hack, but they did say that it needed to gross $1.55bn worldwide to clear the threshold (it took $879m).

Did anyone believe the numbers?

Not really!

Some of the clearest evidence comes from Amy Pascal, in an exchange with Michael De Luca, who had joined Sony as Columbia’s president of production in December 2013. In April 2014 they were going back and forth over whether to commit to a sequel to Pineapple Express, and she spelt out what a greenlight needed:

I can’t make it work as a green light if the numbers don’t pencil out I need to be making money on paper to green light which of course has [nothing] to fucking do with reality Let’s look and see what numbers we need to put in to make it work

In the email, she put “Kolgin”, which I’ve read as a typo for “nothing”.

The sequel was never made because the filmmakers held out for a $50m budget, which De Luca warned killed the model at the $45m Sony had run it at, and by mid-May he told Pascal he couldn’t land it.

The greenlight model has three “gates” a film had to clear.

The first was simply approving films that missed. Gumpert told Pascal in April 2014 that the hurdle for the rest of the year had gone up:

Started the year at 58% and it is now 63% prospectively bc we Greenlit some under roi thereby adding to the load on future use of production dollars.

The second was adjusting the inputs until the film passed. When in December 2013 Sony was bidding against Warner Bros for Get Hard, Gumpert’s note on the financial model shows how small the gap was and how it would be closed:

ROI threshold is 24m and we are 800k UNDER (we make 23.2m) at our target, BUT I know there are likely some revenue and cost tweaks that if we went through the 100% vigorous analysis of the model, we’d certainly find 820k in savings so as to be at the roi target at 100mwwbo..

Sometimes the inputs moved without finance being told. After the greenlight meeting for Pixels in January 2014, Gumpert complained to Pascal and Columbia president Doug Belgrad that:

the ibo # goes up and the territory estimates in key territories with real ancillaries are way up (france and japan were up almost 2x from the #’s we ran), but we are NEVER informed of the changes until Jeff reads from some list that suddenly appears in the room

Sometimes nobody had the inputs at all. In September 2014, De Luca explained to Belgrad how the backend payments (i.e. the talent’s share of profits) had been filled in on a model for a Seth Rogen project set in a 1948 jazz club:

Blair actually didn’t know the backends so I plugged in the interview backend and jay made something up for Jamie in the model

The third way was to want the film badly enough. In March 2014 Hannah Minghella, who ran Columbia’s production alongside De Luca, warned that casting Channing Tatum in the Christmas comedy that became The Night Before would cost money (Tatum didn’t end up in the film):

I’m going to circle back to Jeff to see if his numbers change with Channing. If not it would be difficult to go up on the budget and still make our ROI.

Pascal’s replied simply:

Get him I’ll will make it work

That’s not to say that Sony folks didn’t listen to their models sometimes. In March 2014, they considered the project, which eventually became Bohemian Rhapsody, at its $46.9m budget and found it $24m below the threshold, and Pascal ruled out making it at that price. The Nice Guys lost money in every scenario at the producers’ $60m budget, and Sony didn’t make it.

What about the films Sony passed on?

The leak also includes a folder of greenlight memos marked “Not Doing”. Five of those films were made elsewhere and released in cinemas, and Sony’s figures missed on them too. Two beat the number Sony had put on them, and three fell short.

• “Story of Your Life” was estimated to gross $75m in the US and was eventually made as Arrival at Paramount, grossing $100.5m

• Get Hard was estimated to gross $80m, and when Warner Bros made it, it grossed $90.4m.

• Sony guessed $30m for Ex Machina, passed, and then A24’s version grossed $25.4m

• Terminator 5 was modelled at Sony at $135m, but Terminator Genisys only grossed $90m for Paramount

• Sony thought Poltergeist would gross $80m, but it eventually grossed $47.4m for Fox.

What can’t a comps model see?

A comps model can only see films that look like films already made. Which brings us back to Digger, an R-rated original satire starring one of the world’s biggest action stars, directed by the Oscar winner behind The Revenant. Variety called it a rare big-budget, star-driven R-rated original comedy.

Rare is the problem. Any comps for that package have to come from Cruise films that are nothing like it or Iñárritu films that are nothing like it, and however carefully they are weighed, the result is a confident-looking number for a kind of film the model has never seen.

Digger could also be described as:

An arthouse film with an unusual tone, an unclear plot, starring with an old man who looks vaguely familiar but ultimately isn’t someone you’d recognise.

That version is unlikely to pass any greenlight model!

But what the Sony files really reveal is that, as much as Hollywood likes to pretend it’s all hard-nosed business, powerful people make choices and then look for the numbers to back them up after the fact.

The projects were made after someone had decided to get the films made. De Luca, looking back on his Sony years, told Ben Fritz in The Big Picture:

The projections were insane.

While that’s terrible financial modelling, isn’t that what we want from the people who led huge art-based companies?

Notes

The Sony material comes from WikiLeaks’ searchable public archive of the 2014 hack of 173,132 emails and 30,287 documents. I used three parts of it:

1. The marketing department’s greenlight memos for films due out in Sony’s 2014 to 2017 financial years, each giving the box office figure the film was approved on and the comps behind it.

2. Finance “sensitivity” pages printed between August and October 2014, one per film, each with a column headed GREENLIGHT beside the latest forecast and the box office needed to break even and to clear the threshold.

3. 1,717 internal emails from Amy Pascal’s mailboxes that discuss greenlights, ultimates, comps or the threshold.

I kept the original spelling and punctuation, and only material about greenlight decisions, budgets, forecasts and deals, and nothing personal.

For each film I used, in order of preference: the column headed GREENLIGHT on Sony finance’s sensitivity page (19 films, including Concussion, whose whole page is labelled as the greenlight case), or the latest greenlight submission in the marketing department’s greenlight memo (16 films). Both sources point in the same direction. Films sourced from the finance pages took a median of 81% of their figure and those from the memos 67%.

I left out six films with a greenlight figure.

• The Interview (its release was cancelled after the hack)

• Kitchen Sink (never released)

• Patient Zero (released straight to video in 2018)

• And three projects that changed beyond recognition before release (the 2013 Smurfs 3, which became Smurfs: The Lost Village in 2017, a third Ghostbusters that became the 2016 reboot, and the 2014 Uncharted, made eight years later).

US and Canadian grosses come from The Numbers (via OpusData), except The Equalizer, which comes from Box Office Mojo.

The break-even and threshold levels come from the sensitivity pages printed in August to October 2014. They reflect costs, marketing budgets and financing deals at that point, which later changed for some films, so treat the count of eight as a close approximation.

It's not hard to find other examples:

• A post last week saying 'Every now and then DiscussingFilm posts something that you can tell they were paid to post' has over 18,000 likes.

• Another from August, asking whether DiscussingFilm is 'paid by studios, managers and PR companies', has almost 13,000.

• And the replies under the accounts' own posts are full of lines like 'willing to bet Disney paid them for this', 'Undisclosed paid advertisement' and 'Not beating the paid shill allegations here'.

These are just tweets, and prove nothing on their own. But they do touch a nerve for many, as movie fans often claim that large social media accounts are being influenced by money from distributors.

On its face, the accusations are at least plausible. These accounts do need to earn income, and Hollywood distributors have big marketing budgets. But it’s also unfair to impugn accounts that millions of people enjoy, especially without evidence. So I set out to uncover what the data can reveal.

I looked at the social coverage from major film accounts for every film that opened in North America on 2,000 or more screens between January 2021 and February 2026.

Why do people suspect these accounts?

The suspicion doesn’t come from nowhere. Studios do pay people to post about films, and they’re fairly open about it.

In 2023, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to creators who post from premieres on behalf of studios. One said her deals had ranged from $3,000 to $10,000 per partnership.

The following year TheWrap reported that studios had started screening films for influencers before critics, so that the first reactions online would come from what it called a ‘less discerning’ crowd.

A New York Magazine investigation in 2023 found that a PR agency paid a small number of reviewers to cover the 2018 film Ophelia, which helped lift it to a ‘fresh’ rating. The firm’s founder denied any conspiracy, saying a ‘small handful’ of the writers on its list had set up a system where filmmakers could pay to be reviewed.

When Universal announced that The Odyssey would skip the influencer ‘word of mouth’ screenings, The Hollywood Reporter noted that:

Fans have gotten savvier about the relationship between studio marketing departments and influencers.

Some of the big film accounts are part of that economy.

In August, a Creator Spotlight profile of the founder of Culture Crave listed Lionsgate and Sony among his recent clients and said that his revenue is:

Primarily generated through partnerships with movie studios or agencies representing those studios.

The accounts also turn up in the studios’ own marketing. When Netflix took out awards adverts for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein last winter, the first quote on the page (’Astounding prosthetics’) was credited to DiscussingFilm.

So when one of these accounts opts not to post news that could damage the box office, people connect the dots.

Which accounts post scores at all?

I started with 25 accounts on X that post film news, from fan-run aggregators to trade outlets. Most of them barely post scores. Culture Crave posted one for about one wide release in six, Pop Crave and Pop Base did so for fewer than one in ten, and Variety, IGN and IndieWire almost never did.

Three accounts post scores often enough to measure, i.e. between 43% and 46% of the films. They are:

• DiscussingFilm (3.2 million followers)

• Film Updates (1.6 million followers)

• The Hollywood Handle (176,000 followers)

• I also added the official Rotten Tomatoes X account (2.6 million followers) as a comparison, because it posts its own scores.

The chart below shows how many of the 435 wide releases each account tweeted about the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score, split by how good or bad the score was. If an account posted good and bad news equally, its four bars would be roughly level.

They aren’t level, except for The Hollywood Handle. DiscussingFilm and Film Updates both post the score for roughly half of the well-reviewed films and under a third of the worst ones.

The Rotten Tomatoes account is the most selective of the four. It posted the score for 71% of films rated 80% or higher and just 19% of films rated under 40%.

The biggest predictor of whether an account posts a score is how many screens the film opened on. For DiscussingFilm, doubling the screen count multiplied the odds of a score post by about 14.

Do they ignore the bad films entirely?

The accounts still post about ‘bad’ movies - it’s just their Rotten Tomatoes score that sometimes gets dropped.

DiscussingFilm posts about 76% of ‘bad’ films (i.e. those rated under 40%) and 86% of ‘good’ ones (80% or higher).

So these accounts don’t pretend bad films don’t exist. They post the trailer, the first look and the casting news, and what they’re less likely to do is post the score once it comes in low.

Of the 79 films rated under 40%, DiscussingFilm covered 36 without ever posting the score. Film Updates did the same for 35.

Does it matter whose film it is?

To see whether this under-reporting of scores was linked to certain companies, I split the films by studio and compared the share of rotten films (under 60%) and fresh films (60% or higher) each account posted.

If an account were protecting one studio, that studio’s rotten films would sit well to the right of everyone else’s, close to its fresh ones.

DiscussingFilm posted the score for 46% of Universal’s rotten films and 48% of its fresh ones - not really a bias there. The studio with the highest share of rotten scores posted on both accounts is Disney (57% on DiscussingFilm and 64% on Film Updates), whose rotten films were posted about as often as its fresh ones. The lowest among the big studios was Lionsgate, where DiscussingFilm posted 3 of 20 rotten scores.

But once score and screen count are accounted for, studio doesn’t change the odds of a score post for any of the three accounts, and the tilt towards good scores isn’t steeper for any one studio.

The bigger gaps you can see in the chart (Film Updates posted 75% of Warner Bros. fresh scores and 35% of its rotten ones, for example) are the kind that turn up by chance when you cut 435 films into 14 small groups, some with only 11 films in them.

The account making the most aggressive move toward reporting only good news is Rotten Tomatoes itself.

The interesting thing is that Rotten Tomatoes isn't independent of the studios - it's owned by the parent companies of two of them. NBCUniversal's Fandango is the majority owner of the site, with Warner Bros. owning the remaining 25%.

And yet, its owners get very different treatment. Warner Bros.’ bad scores are posted more often, while Universal’s are posted far less often (20% vs 57% for Warner Bros.), which puts Universal in the bottom half of the major studios.

Working against their own interests

At this point you may be wondering if the accounts post fewer bad scores because their audience doesn’t want to read about them.

The data says the opposite: people on X view bad news at a much higher rate than good news.

So the accounts post fewer of the scores that get the most attention.

Conclusion

The big film accounts on X do lean towards good news, posting the score for about half of well-reviewed wide releases and under a third of badly reviewed ones.

They do cover news about bad films, but they don’t shout about the score.

It’s not a response to what their followers want, as posts about bad scores get more views than posts about good ones.

That said, I couldn’t find any long-term pattern of which studios have their bad reviews underreported.

I feel like there is more to this topic than I uncovered today, so please share your thoughts or ideas in the comments below.

Notes

Today I was looking at the X coverage of movies with North American wide release between January 2021 and February 2026 that reached 2,000 or more screens and have a Rotten Tomatoes critic score - 435 films in all. Release dates, distributors, and screen counts come from OpusData, and critic scores come from OMDb.

Views are shown only for posts from 2023 onward, when X began showing them.

I reached out to all the parties mentioned in this article last week, but none of them replied.

Murch edited Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and he wrote In the Blink of an Eye, which is probably the best book there is on film editing. (On American Graffiti he did the sound, and the picture was cut by Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas).

After the session, the three of us chatted, and as Mark had read an advance copy of my article below, he asked Walter to guess how many shots were in American Graffiti.

Walter’s guess was 952. Was he right?

Let’s go down the rabbit hole of editing and find out!

‘How many shots are there in the average movie?’ is a very common question I get asked. So today I’m sharing the results of my studies into the shot counts of 8,770 feature films released between 1930 and 2025.

By the way, some people might say ‘shots’ others may say ‘cuts’. It’s the same thing, in that a sequence with six shots has five cuts between them. Everyone seems to (in some cases strongly) prefer one over another, but whatever we call them, we’re describing the same thing.

How many shots does a typical film have now?

The most commonly quoted industry rule of thumb comes from editor Vashi Nedomansky, who says the average film has around 1,250 shots, and blockbusters often have more than 3,000. His 1,250 is actually a little low for today’s releases, but his 3,000 is about right for the biggest of them.

The typical film released between 2017 and 2025 has 1,535 shots. That’s the median (i.e., the film in the middle of the pack), whereas the mean is slightly higher (1,603) because a handful of films with very high shot counts pull up the average.

At a typical length of 111 minutes, that works out to roughly one new shot every four seconds once we take the end credits off. More on the length of movie credits here - Are movie end credits getting longer?

There’s a wide spread around that, as a tenth of recent films have fewer than 770 shots and a tenth have more than 2,460. Put another way, four in five recent films have more than 1,000 shots, and one in four has more than 2,000.

One factor bringing up the average is Indian commercial cinema, which cuts faster than anything else on earth. All fifteen films with the most shots in the last nine years are Indian, led by K.G.F: Chapter 1 (2018) with 6,222 shots in 154 minutes (a new shot every one and a half seconds).

If we leave the Indian films out, then the median for the rest of the world drops to 1,474 and for American films alone it’s 1,515.

So if you want a rough rule of thumb for a typical Hollywood film, then let’s call it 1,500.

How does it differ by director?

You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.

Out of the 120 directors with at least eight films in my data, Jaume Collet-Serra cut the most at 21.2 shots a minute, Paul W.S. Anderson at 21.1, Simon West at 21.0, Robert Rodriguez at 20.6, and Michael Bay at 20.5. That’s a new shot every three seconds, sustained across a career.

At the other end of the spectrum are Michael Haneke at 2.5 shots a minute (i.e. one new shot every 24 seconds), Ingmar Bergman and Billy Wilder (both 3.8), Woody Allen (3.9 across thirty films), and Stanley Kubrick at 4.7.

Do directors know how many shots are in their own movies?

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho told Filmmaker Magazine:

I don’t shoot a lot of shots. Other than Snowpiercer, none of my films have gone over a thousand shots.

He’s absolutely right. His first four features have 580, 772, 891 and 753 shots, and Snowpiercer (2013) has 1,171. After that, he made Okja and Parasite, which come in at 1,000 and 1,001.

Given that my detector is only good to within a few %, I’m calling that a win for Bong. (He has since broken his own rule with Mickey 17, which has 1,323.)

When George Miller launched Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, he told a press conference:

Mad Max 2 had 1,200 cuts. This has 2,700 cuts, and it’s not much longer.

By my count, the older film has 1,344 shots, and the newer one 2,486, and Fury Road is 25 minutes longer. So Miller’s numbers are a bit off in both directions, but he’s right that the 2015 film had close to twice as many shots as the 1981 flick.

How has the shot count changed over a century?

What happened between those two Mad Max films is a microcosm of the last century of cinema. (Not sure of the plural here - Mad Maxes? Mad Maxima? Mads Max? Maximi Insani? Answers on a postcard, please).

The chart below shows the median number of shots per film between 1930 and 2025, with the shaded band showing where half of all releases sit.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, films averaged between 550 and 580 shots. The median started to climb in the 1960s and didn’t slow until the current century. In recent years, the increase has been minimal, sitting at 1,479 for the 2010s and currently 1,559 for the first half of the 2020s.

American Graffiti fits neatly on the line. With 906 shots, it’s exactly on the median for 1973 (of the 43 films I have from that year, 21 have fewer shots and 21 have more). If it were released today, 85% of new films would have more shots than it does.

So Walter's guess of 952 was 46 shots off, which is within 5% of my count. Pretty impressive for a film he worked on more than fifty years ago.

So the typical film today has almost three times as many shots as the typical film of the 1950s. However, most of that growth happened between about 1960 and 2005, and the last twenty years look like a plateau with a gentle upward drift.

It’s worth noting that my time series starts at about the slowest moment in film history. As film historian David Bordwell put it in The Way Hollywood Tells It:

In the 1920s, Hollywood films were cut quite fast, averaging four to six seconds per shot, but the arrival of sound put on the brakes.

Some of you may already be thinking - but haven’t movies got longer over that period? Yes, they have (See Are two-hour movies the new normal?) so let’s account for run time.

Between the 1950s and the 2020s, the median cutting pace went from under six shots a minute to fifteen. In a 1950s film the average shot lasted about ten seconds, whereas today it lasts a little over four.

Murch has thought about this more than most. In In the Blink of an Eye he wrote:

a convincing action sequence might have around twenty-five cuts a minute, whereas a dialogue scene would still feel “normal” (in an American film) averaging six cuts per minute or less.

Six a minute is where the whole of a typical 1950s film sat. Today the typical film averages fifteen across its full running time, quiet scenes and all.

When Murch was asked in 2015 about the idea that shots keep getting shorter, he said:

I would dispute that concept.

If he was referring to the last twenty years, then he’s right. If he was referring to the much wider period, then the data says otherwise.

Has the gap between fast and slow films widened?

One thing you may have spotted in the previous chart is that the blue band, which runs from the slowest tenth of movies to the fastest tenth, has got progressively wider.

In the 1950s the slowest 10% of movies cut at 3.3 shots a minute and the fastest 10% at 8.6 (a gap of about five shots a minute). In the 2020s the equivalents are 8.1 and 21.1 (a gap of thirteen).

The 2,000-shot film, once a rare aberration, is now a quarter of everything released (27% of films in the 2020s so far, against none in the 1950s).

Which genres have the most shots?

The median action film has 1,927 shots and the median adventure film 1,789. At the other end, dramas have 1,355, horror 1,324 and music films 1,277.

Part of the genre gap is down to length, as action films run longer than horror films. So I’ve redone the same comparison as average shot length (with the credits removed), which is the fairer measure of how quickly the editor is working.

In action and adventure films, the average shot lasts 3.5 seconds, while dramas, war films and biographies hold each shot for about five. By this measure, the genres are closer together than on the raw count, but the order barely changes.

Do longer films have more shots?

Yes, but less than you might think. Across the recent films, running time explains a little over a quarter of the variation in shot count and the rest is style.

I found that each extra minute of running time brings about 17 more shots on average. A film under 90 minutes has a median of 1,087 shots and one over 150 minutes has 2,549. But look at the scatter at any given length (two films of 110 minutes can have 500 shots or 3,000).

Long films aren’t noticeably cut faster or slower per minute than short ones, and the median pace in every running-time band sits between 12.7 and 15.8 shots a minute. So epics have more shots because they’re longer.

Does money buy more shots?

Yes, and consistently across the 601 recent films I matched to their production budgets. Films made for under $5 million cut at a median of 9.9 shots per minute, whereas films costing $100 million or more cut at 18.0 (almost twice as fast).

Some of that is genre (expensive films are action films and cheap films are dramas), but that’s not the whole effect. A bigger budget buys more cameras, more set-ups, more coverage, and more time in the edit, and all of that becomes more shots.

Top Gun: Maverick’s editor, Eddie Hamilton, told Deadline that he was handed ‘800 to 814 hours’ of footage, and that on one day in March 2019 there were 27 cameras running at once. Yikes!

The finished film has 2,995 shots and cuts at 24.3 a minute. That’s roughly what Murch said a convincing action sequence needs, but this is the average across two hours!

Do award films cut differently?

Before we go, one more fun fact - Oscar voters haven’t sped up with the rest of cinema.

In the 1990s, the median Best Picture nominee cut at 9.7 shots a minute, compared with 12.0 for all films. In the 2020s so far, the Best Picture nominees in my data cut at 9.4 against 15.1 for everything else.

The films nominated for Best Film Editing sit in between. They kept pace with mainstream cinema until the 2000s (13.6 against 14.4) and have since drifted back to 11.7 in the 2020s.

Murch’s own verdict on fast and slow cutting, in In the Blink of an Eye, is:

There is no “right” or “wrong” speed, obviously.

I’d go with that. American Graffiti would be one of the slower films in a multiplex today, and at no point last night did I wish for shot number 907.

Notes

A shot here means a continuous run of frames between two edits, so a film with 1,000 shots has 999 cuts. It doesn’t mean a camera set-up, and a scene that returns to the same set-up ten times adds ten shots. Dissolves and fades count as an edit.

I detected shot boundaries for 8,770 feature films using TransNetV2, a neural network built for exactly this job, which its authors report scoring an F1 of 96.2 on the BBC Planet Earth benchmark and 93.9 on the RAI benchmark.

Every figure for the number of shots counts the whole film, credits included, because that is available for every film. Every figure for pace (shots per minute and average shot length) excludes the end credits, using the credits start times I measured for an earlier piece. I have data on 1,276 of the 1,909 recent films and 6,228 of the 8,770 overall, so the pace charts rest on a smaller sample than the count charts.

To check the detector I compared its counts with hand counts from Cinemetrics, the crowd-sourced database in which film scholars and enthusiasts count shots by hand. The detector’s count was within 10% of the human count for 85% of films and within 20% for 96%, with a median ratio of 0.99. It runs very slightly under human counts, by about 1% on films from the 1960s onwards and about 4% on films from before 1960, where dissolves and low contrast cost it some shots. It occasionally overcounts on strobe lighting and very fast camera moves.

The detector also misses more cuts as films get faster. Against the hand counts it runs about 3% under on films cut at 15 to 20 shots a minute, 7% under at 20 to 25, 10% under at 25 to 30 and 19% under on the eight films above 30. So the figures for the very fastest films and directors are understated, probably by about a tenth. This squeezes the top of the charts but wouldn’t hide a rise, so the plateau since the early 2000s stands.

The comparison with Cinemetrics also says something about who measures films by hand. Its contributors choose what to time, and they lean towards slower cinema. The films they timed cut about 9% slower than the typical film of the same release year in my collection, and 58% of them sit below their year’s median.

Academic samples tend to lean the other way. The studies by Cornell psychologist James Cutting, the most cited in this field, select the most popular films of each year by box office or IMDb rating, so they describe hits, not cinema as a whole. His 2016 study of 210 films puts the average shot at 10.5 seconds for 1930 to 1955 and 4.3 seconds for 1990 to 2015, and says the number of shots per film has roughly tripled since the 1930s. My study, which is larger and less selective, lands in the same place (10.3 seconds in the 1950s, 4.1 in the 2020s, and a count that has grown 2.8 times), which is reassuring for both of us.

Genre comes from IMDb and a film counts under every genre it carries. Budgets and box office come from OpusData, the database behind The Numbers, and the budget analysis uses the 601 recent films with both a budget and a credits time. The director comparison covers the 120 directors with at least eight films in the data as sole credited director. The 70% is the share of the variation in pace across those films that the director accounts for, with no adjustment for genre or year, so some of it is directors choosing their genres.

This time - how tall is Tom Cruise, really?

I measured the gap between actors' eyes in 8 million frames from 2,000 films to find out whether Hollywood's most famous 5'7" man is secretly being made to look taller.

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 Verity took four times as much money, and opening-night audiences liked the two films equally, as both got a C+ from CinemaScore.

But as of right now, Digger has 14,000 votes on IMDb, and Verity has just 6,900. In other words, the film that took a quarter of the money has twice the votes, and a better score too (7.3 against 6.1).

Deadline reports that 79% of Verity’s audience were women, which matches a pattern I have noticed for a while.

This is nothing new.

A Bad Moms Christmas and Alien: Covenant were released six months apart in 2017, and they did almost identical business.

• Film data supplier Numero provides Movio data tracking loyalty-card members at 12 US cinema chains, and they log 161,520 visits for A Bad Moms Christmas and pretty much the same for Alien: Covenant (160,184).

• At the US box office, the two movies took $72.1m and $74.3m, respectively.

• Their audiences were a similar age, too.

They differed in who bought the tickets. Women made up 63% of the cinema audience for A Bad Moms Christmas and 28% for Alien: Covenant. And on IMDb, Alien: Covenant has 349,692 votes and A Bad Moms Christmas has 63,000, which is 5.6 times as many for the same number of people in cinemas.

This weekend’s example spurred me to investigate it properly.

I matched audience data for 1,608 films released in US cinemas 2015-25 with their IMDb votes and found that for every 10 extra percentage points of women in a film’s cinema audience, it gets about 40% fewer IMDb votes per cinema visit.

Among films whose audiences were mostly men (i.e, men at least 60% of the cinema audience), the typical one got 1,860 IMDb votes per 1,000 tracked visits, versus 422 for the typical film whose audience was 60% or more women.

That’s a gap of 4.4 times.

Who votes on IMDb?

IMDb used to show how many votes came from men, women, and four age bands but removed that feature in 2023.

Thankfully, archived copies survive on the Wayback Machine, allowing me to build a dataset of 955 films.

The fact that IMDb is so male-skewed is not new:

• Luis Aguiar found that 79% of a typical film’s IMDb ratings come from men, across 12,657 films.

• Bryan Stroube and David Waguespack put it at 80% of 383 million ratings.

• In 2016 Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight found that 70% of IMDb’s TV raters were men.

But no one seems to have tracked how this compares with the people who actually bought the tickets.

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Numero, I have this.

On the chart below, each dot is a film, with the share of its cinema audience who were women along the bottom and the share of its IMDb voters who were women up the side. If voters matched audiences, the dots would sit on the dashed line.

Only one film matches: Captive State (2019), with women making up 28% of both the cinema audience and the IMDb voters. In every other case, men make up a higher percentage of the voters than they did of the cinema audience.

How big is the gap?

Overall, women made up 46% of cinema visits but just 18% of the votes.

In the chart below, I’ve grouped the films by the share of their cinema audience who were women and shown the median number of IMDb votes each group received per 1,000 tracked visits.

As you can see, the fall is steep and steady. Films whose audiences were 40-50% women got about two-thirds of the votes per visit of mostly male films, and the most female films got less than a quarter.

At this point you may be wondering if genre has a role to play. Women make up more of the audience for romance, musicals and faith films, and those genres might collect fewer votes for reasons that have nothing to do with gender. I wondered that too, but genre doesn't explain it. When I held genre constant, the gap barely moved.

Is it just IMDb?

IMDb is the biggest and best-known database of film ratings, but it’s far from the only one. Every platform I could check showed the same gap.

For every 10 extra percentage points of women in a film’s cinema audience, the film gets this much less activity per cinema visit:

• MovieLens: 45% fewer ratings

• Wikipedia: 41% fewer pageviews

• IMDb: 40% fewer votes

• IMDb: 40% fewer written reviews

• IMDb, US users only: 31% fewer votes

• Letterboxd: 25% fewer ratings

• TMDb: 20% fewer votes

Each thin line shows the range the true figure probably sits in (a 95% confidence interval).

The Wikipedia figure is the striking one, because nobody has to sign up or rate anything to read a Wikipedia page.

Who rates films online matters, and so does attention. For each person who saw them in a cinema, films with mostly female audiences get a lot less online attention of any kind.

Is it only that women vote less?

I expected the explanation to be that women vote less often, but that's only part of the story.

If men simply rated films more often than women, a man who saw A Bad Moms Christmas would be as likely to vote for it as a man who saw Alien: Covenant. He isn’t. For each group of films, the chart below shows how many votes came from men for every 1,000 visits by men, and how many came from women for every 1,000 visits by women.

In every group, men vote more often than women (about 3.5 times as often for the typical film), but both sets of bars fall. Each extra 10 points of female audience means 40% fewer votes per visit from men and 39% fewer from women.

This means two things are happening at once:

1. Women are much less likely than men to rate films on IMDb.

2. Films that women go to see in large numbers get less online activity from everyone who sees them, men and women alike.

Given there are no gendered barriers to rating, I'm happy to put the first down to taste. The second is harder to explain. A few possibilities fit:

• These films may have smaller lives after the cinema, so fewer people see them at home and fewer votes arrive later (a vote can come from any viewing, in a cinema or at home).

• The men and women who go to films with mostly female audiences may simply be less likely to use IMDb, Letterboxd or Wikipedia at all.

• Online film culture (fan communities, lists, arguments) may gather around some kinds of film more than others, pulling in votes from people who never saw the film in a cinema.

All three fit the Wikipedia data, but the data alone cannot tell us the level (if any) of effect from each.

Bonus question - Does it change the score?

Before we go, I thought I’d look at a follow-up question from today’s findings.

Fewer voters is one problem. A different mix of voters could give a different score.

On IMDb, women rated the median film 0.2 points higher than men did, and rated it higher for 76% of the films. So if the voters looked like the cinema audience, most ratings would actually go up. I re-weighted each film’s rating so votes from each gender and age band counted in proportion to the real audience. For the typical film the change is small, with the median film moving up by 0.08 points and films with audiences 60% or more women moving up by 0.18.

For some films it’s much bigger. In all, 144 of 835 films moved by 0.2 or more, and 14 by half a point or more.

Nearly all of the films that move most are faith-based. Women made up 52% of the cinema audience for God’s Not Dead 2, yet men cast 78% of its gendered IMDb votes. Women on IMDb gave it 6.2 and men gave it 3.8, so re-weighted to the people who went to see it, its rating rises from 4.2 to 5.4.

So the mix of voters matters a lot for a few films and a little for most.

CinemaScore polls audiences on opening night and turns their verdict into a letter grade, making it a decent measure of how much people in the cinema liked a film. So if IMDb and the cinema audience agreed, two films with the same CinemaScore grade would get about the same IMDb rating, regardless of who was in the audience.

To test that, I took the 1,055 films with a CinemaScore grade. Below, I’ve compared the average IMDb rating at each grade for films whose audiences were mostly men (under 40% women) and films whose audiences were mostly women (60% or more).

At every grade, the films watched mostly by women get the lower IMDb rating. Among films graded A or A+ on opening night, the mostly male films average 7.5 on IMDb and the mostly female films average 6.7. Opening-night audiences liked them equally. IMDb doesn’t.

This weekend’s pair fits the pattern. Verity and Digger both got a C+, and Verity sits 1.2 points lower on IMDb.

It’s not just these two films. Across all 1,055 films with a CinemaScore grade, the more women there were in the audience, the lower the IMDb score compared with how much the opening-night crowd liked it. Every 10 extra percentage points of women knocks about a third of a point off a film’s IMDb rating. Women do this on IMDb too, just less than men do.

There are two ways to read that:

• Opening-night audiences of mostly women may grade more generously than other audiences.

• Or the people who rate films online (women included) may judge these films more harshly than the people who paid to see them.

I can’t separate the two with this data, but either way, an IMDb score and an opening-night grade measure different people.

Can you correct for it?

If you use IMDb votes as a stand-in for how many people saw a film, as I have, you should adjust for the audience mix. I’ve built a simple way to do that, which I’m calling “Audience Adjusted Votes”.

Multiply a film’s IMDb votes by the factor below, set by the share of women in its cinema audience. The reference point is a film whose audience is 45% women (the median across all these films).

• 30% women in the cinema audience = multiply IMDb votes by 0.53

• 40% women = multiply by 0.81

• 45% women = multiply by 1.00

• 50% women = multiply by 1.23

• 60% women = multiply by 1.88

• 70% women = multiply by 2.86

• 80% women = multiply by 4.36

Why does it matter?

IMDb votes and ratings get used as a shorthand for how many people saw a film and what they thought of it. On the evidence here, that shorthand short-changes the films women go to see.

Per person in the cinema, a film with 60% or more women in its audience gets less than a quarter of the IMDb votes of a film with mostly men in its audience, so it looks smaller than it was. At the same CinemaScore grade, every 10 extra points of women in the audience means an IMDb rating 0.32 lower, so it looks worse than its audience thought.

Those films also drop out of any sample built on vote counts. Among films with 50,000 or more tracked visits (about half of the films here), a 50,000-vote floor would remove 51% of those whose audiences were 60% or more women and 2% of those whose audiences were mostly men.

I’ve done it myself, more than once. My recent articles on directors’ ages and on packaging in Hollywood both kept only films with at least 50,000 IMDb votes. My study of nepo babies used a 10,000-vote floor, and the piece on what gets a director a second film used 1,000 votes as a sign that a debut had been seen. Samples built that way lean towards films that men and IMDb users have heard of, which is narrower than films people have heard of.

So what is an IMDb vote count measuring?

Online engagement, mostly.

A film’s IMDb vote count is a fine measure of how much it matters to people who rate films online. It’s a poor measure of how many people saw it.

By IMDb’s count this week, Digger is twice the size of Verity. At the box office, Verity was four times the size of Digger.

Notes

The audience data covers new releases in US cinemas between 1 March 2015 and 31 August 2026 with at least 5,000 tracked visits, and comes from loyalty-card members at 12 US cinema chains, about 5% of US box office. Numero weights each film’s audience to match a survey of US moviegoers by age and gender. Every audience figure is a share of visits, not a count of people.

IMDb votes come from IMDb’s public data files; MovieLens ratings come from the MovieLens 32M dataset; Wikipedia pageviews cover the 24 months from each film’s release month, for films released by March 2023. The voter breakdowns by gender and age come from archived copies of IMDb ratings pages on the Wayback Machine and cover only voters who gave IMDb their gender, about two thirds of votes for the typical film.

The Verity and Digger figures are not part of the study. Their IMDb votes and ratings are as shown on IMDb on the morning of Monday 5 October 2026, three days after release, and will have moved since. The weekend box office figures are Deadline’s estimates for the US and Canada, and the 79% figure and the CinemaScore grades are as reported by Deadline. IMDb votes come from every country, so the two measures don’t cover quite the same audience.

Votes measure engagement from every kind of viewing, at home and abroad as well as in US cinemas. Votes for these films aren't growing faster for male-audience films now (between June and October 2026 they grew at the same rate regardless of audience mix), so older male-audience films pulling ahead over time can’t account for the gap by itself.

I tested the audience-adjusted votes factor by fitting it on films from odd-numbered release years and applying it to films from even-numbered years, and it removed about three-quarters of the gap.

This got me wondering how accurate box office predictions are in the few days up to release.

On the one hand, you'd think it would be straightforward to use surveys to gauge people’s intentions, given that the opening is only a few days away.

On the other hand, so many of the reasons when and why I go to the cinema are down to whim, cultural moments, and reviews - all things tracking might struggle to price in.

So I took a quick look at what the data reveals. I tracked opening-weekend forecasts from the major film trade press (The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, and Screen Daily) for 1,184 American wide releases between 2006 and 2025. I then checked them against the real box office grosses to see how they fared. (This only covers films whose forecast somebody chose to print, which is a little under three in five wide releases -more on this in the Notes at the end).

What even is tracking?

Tracking is a bit like the film industry’s political polling. Research firms survey a sample of the public in the weeks before a film opens and ask a handful of questions. Have you heard of this film? Are you interested in seeing it? Is it your first choice this weekend?

The answers are compared with those for previous movies, and that comparison produces a forecast for the opening weekend.

Although today’s research uses figures in the pulic domain, the business is private at its core. The studios pay for the surveys, and the results go to them, not the public. The best-known firm, National Research Group, was founded in 1978, and by 1999 the Los Angeles Times reckoned it had its fingerprints on nine out of ten major studio films.

What you and I get to see is whatever reaches the trade press. Sometimes that is a figure a studio has chosen to share, sometimes it is a leak, and sometimes it is a reporter’s own estimate. Of the forecasts I found, only one in four was credited to tracking by name, and fewer than one in fifty named the firm behind it.

If we plot all 1,184 movies I tracked on a scatterplot, comparing the prediction and the reality (thanks to OpusData), we can see that most guesses are pretty good.

Both scales are stretched so doubling takes up the same space everywhere, meaning a dot a centimetre off the line is wrong by the same percentage whether it is a $5 million film or a $200 million one.

The median film opened at 0.97 times its forecast, and 46.9% of films opened above their number, so as a group the forecasts lean neither way.

Let’s look at last weekend to get an idea of this in practice. On 23 September, Variety printed forecasts for four films opening two days later.

• Avengers: Endgame Encore was tracking at $25 million to $28 million and took $26.1 million.

• Heart of the Beast was projected at $17 million to $20 million, and took $20.0 million.

• Primetime had the same $17 million to $20 million range, but was slightly lower at $19.2 million.

• Forgotten Island was ‘aiming for $15 to $17 million’ and opened to $13.0 million, which Rotten Tomatoes called ‘an incredible disappointment’.

The smallest forecast of the four was the one that missed. And we see this pattern on a much larger scale, too.

Which films have the greatest margins of error?

The bigger the movie, the more reliable the tracking is likely to be.

I sorted the 1,184 films by forecast size and split them into five groups of roughly equal size, between 220 and 246 films each. Below is the typical miss in each group, meaning the median gap between the forecast and the opening, as a percentage of the forecast.

Across all movies, the typical forecast misses by 19.9%, but this changes when you account for movie size. Films with the smallest forecasts typically miss by an average of 25.5%, whereas the largest miss by just 13.9%.

Is it the kind of film that's hard to call?

When I first looked at this, I suspected that dramas, standalone films, original screenplays, R-rated films and films from smaller distributors would be the hardest to call. And they are - but not for the reasons I had assumed.

Below is the typical miss for five film types across all 1,184 films (1,164 for the ratings, because G-rated and unrated films are left out). The smallest group is the dramas, at 158 films.

• Standalone films are missed by 21.1% and franchise films by 18.3%.

• Dramas by 22.6 % and every other genre by 19.5.

• Original screenplays by 20.7% and adapted material by 18.9.

• R-rated films by 22.6% and PG and PG-13 films by 18.6%.

• Films from outside the six major studios by 22.9% and films from the majors by 18.6%.

It is tempting to add those up and conclude that a standalone, original, R-rated drama from a small distributor is on the wrong side of five separate effects. But these aren’t the ones that are really making the difference - it’s scale.

Each of those groups is also forecast to open small. The typical standalone film was forecast at $12.0 million and the typical franchise film at $32.6 million. Dramas were forecast at $12.0 million against $18.5 million for everything else. Films from outside the majors at $10.0 million against $21.0 million.

So I compared like with like. The chart below shows the typical miss gap between each pair, first across all films (orange) and then between films with the same forecast size (slate). A bar above zero means the first-named group is harder to call.

Are big films missed by less money?

No. They are missed by more.

Everything so far has been in percentages. Below is the same miss counted in dollars, by what the film cost to make. It covers the 1,128 films with a production budget on record, with at least 251 films behind each bar.

Films costing under $25 million were missed by a median $2.5 million. Films costing $100 million or more were missed by $7.0 million, almost three times as much, even though as a percentage they were the best forecast of the four groups, at 15.2% against 24.8%.

So big films do not land in a narrower range. The range is wider in dollars. It is only narrower as a share of a much bigger number. When three-week tracking had Spider-Man: Brand New Day opening at $180 million to $190 million this July and it opened to $360 million, the miss was $175 million. Only 14 of the 1,184 films in this study took more than that in their whole opening weekend.

Which measure matters depends on who you are. A cinema deciding how many screens to give a film cares about the percentage. A studio finance team cares about the dollars, and for them the big films are the risky ones.

How far ahead are these forecasts made?

Tracking inside a studio arrives three weeks before release and firms up as the opening approaches. What reaches print is mostly the number they have on the week of release.

Of the 1,184 scored forecasts, 69.5% were printed on the day the film opened and 97.2% inside two days of release. Only 14.9% of movies had a usable forecast printed more than a week out, and 7.2% more than a fortnight out.

Below is the typical miss for forecasts printed at each distance from release, taking the last one printed inside each window for every film that had one.

A figure printed in the third week before release missed by 20.5% and one printed on the morning of release by 19.5%. Whatever makes a film hard to call, the last fortnight of survey data does not fix it.

What might be driving this?

The data can show that small forecasts miss by more. But that doesn’t explain why.

Here are my best guesses:

• Small numbers are more naturally erratic. A tracking survey measures awareness and intent. For a film few people have heard of, that is a small number with a large error, and a swing of a few million dollars either way is a big percentage.

• Bigger films have bigger marketing budgets. A large campaign should make the opening safer because fewer people are left to persuade in the final days. Studios don’t publish marketing costs, but production budget is a rough proxy and carries some weight. Between two films with the same forecast size, the more expensive one was missed by less. This is another reason why Digger is so interesting - a $125 million film with just $20 million forecast is an outlier.

• Bigger films are built for an audience. Test screenings, known characters and sequels with a track record should all (in theory) remove surprises.

• Advance ticket sales. Event films sell a meaningful share of their opening weekend before it starts, which gives forecasters hard numbers to work from. Maybe they have a peek at the answer sheet before the test.

• Wider releases average out local variation. A film on 4,000 cinemas is in every kind of town, so a bad night in one region is covered by a good one elsewhere. I can actually test this theory as OpusData provides opening cinema counts, and it holds up. Among films forecast at under $10 million, those opening in fewer than 3,000 cinemas were missed by 26.9% and those in 3,000 to 3,499 by 19.3%. Among films forecast at $10 million to $20 million, the typical miss falls from 24.9% to 20.6% to 17.0% as the release gets wider. Above $20 million, the pattern disappears.

• Release dates are chosen and defended. Big films claim their weekends years ahead, and smaller films move out of the way, so a big film rarely faces a surprise competitor.

Notes

Today’s research includes every film released in the States between 2006 and 2025 that opened in 2,000 cinemas or more and which recorded an opening weekend gross. That’s 2,046 films. Of those, 1,765 had some kind of forecast printed, and 1,184 had one that can be scored. Everything here rests on what the trades chose to publish.

I looked at forecasts printed in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, or Screen Daily, published from 21 days before a film’s release to 3 days after, that named the film and included both a dollar figure in millions and a forecast word.

Interestingly, before 2011 the trades printed far fewer forecasts. In 2007 they published one for 58.5% of wide releases, whereas from 2011 onward the figure runs between 78.5% and 100%.

My model measured the miss as the absolute difference between the logarithms of the opening and the forecast. With the forecast, the budget, franchise, drama, the source of the figure and the number of outlets, only the size of the forecast and the budget are significant. Adding original screenplay, R rating and major distributor changes nothing. Adding the opening cinema count, the count is significant; the size of the forecast and the budget each fall just short, and franchise films are slightly harder to call. The forecast and the cinema count correlate at 0.78 on a logarithmic scale, so the three measures of size overlap heavily, and I would not lean on any one of them. The full model explains 8.6% of the variation (of the 1,128 films with a budget figure on record).

Launching any new business is a challenge, especially in film, and even more so given the current state of the market. It was a bold play that didn't pan out. The company’s founder, Zygi Kamasa, blamed ‘extremely challenging market conditions’.

This got me thinking - if you start a new film distribution company, how long should you expect it to last?

And are conditions harder than they were previously?

Finally, what happens to the films they had deals with, now that the company is no more?

How I measured it

To answer these questions, I built a database of all the distributors I could find and logged their date of birth (i.e., the year they released their first film) and their date of death (i.e., three years without having released a film). I appreciate that the real world is slightly more complex than this, but it gives us a good baseline for what’s going on. Each company will have more nuanced incorporation and closing dates, but this method lets us see the big picture.

Using this method, I examined the lives (and afterlives) of 4,593 distributors who released at least three feature films, with their first release between 1980 and 2020. The Notes at the end cover the definitions, the checks and what happens when you change the rules.

What is the typical lifespan?

The chart below is a survival curve. It starts with every distributor launched in a given decade and shows what share of them were still releasing films one year, two years, five years and so on after their first release. (The 2010s line stops early because those companies have not had time to get any older).

Across all distributors, 83% were still releasing three years after their first film, 69% at five years, 49% at ten and 31% at twenty.

The median lifespan (i.e. the point at which half have stopped) is 10 years.

• Of the 664 distributors launched in the 1990s, 75% made it to five years and 57% to ten.

• For the 1,803 launched in the 2010s the figures are 65% and 47%.

• The 2000s sit in between at 73% and 50%.

• The 1980s cohort looks almost as fragile as the 2010s, at 66% at five years, for a different reason that I come back to in the Notes.

So the 1990s were the good years to start a distribution company. The good old days of VHS and DVD income on top of the cinema, a growing number of screens, and no streaming services buying up the middle of the market. If you bring this up to any film sales professional, they will get misty-eyed (followed by telling you some mad story about what they did with all that money).

When do distributors die?

A survival curve shows how many are left, but it doesn't tell you when the danger is greatest. To do that, we need to calculate the hazard, which is the chance that a company still trading at the start of a given year of its life has stopped by the end of it.

The chart below shows that chance for each of the first 20 years.

Year one is almost nothing at 1%, which is basically a quirk of the method (you cannot fail before you have released anything). Then the danger jumps.

In the second year, 7.9% of surviving distributors stop. In the third, it is 8.9%; in the fourth, 9.1%; and in the fifth, 8.1%. Those four years between them account for 47% of every distributor death I tracked.

After year 10, the chance drops to an average of 4.2% a year, and a company that has reached its fifteenth birthday is about as safe as this business gets.

The shape makes sense once you think about how a distributor is financed. The first slate is paid for with the money that launched the company. The second has to be paid for by the first, and the first slate’s results arrive in years two, three and four. That is when the investors find out whether the plan worked. True Brit’s collapse in its third year is fairly typical.

While surviving the danger years lowers the risk, it does not remove it. Below are some notable distributor closures from the past four decades (with exact dates, not rounded to the year as I did for the wide dataset).

Are more distributors dying than before?

Kamasa blamed True Brit's failure on market conditions, and I suspect you would struggle to find someone attending a film market in 2026 who doesn’t agree that things are tough right now.

So I looked at when each distributor has crossed the rite of passage of releasing their first film and their last film. (This can only go up to 2020 because a company needs a couple of years of history before I can be sure it has started, and three empty years before I can be sure it has stopped).

This chart says two things to me;

1. The number of new distributors has more than doubled. An average of 71 companies a year released their first film in the 1980s, compared with 180 a year in the 2010s, with a peak of 207 in 2016.

2. The number of distributors releasing their last film has also risen sharply, from under 60 a year in the mid-1990s to a spike of 318 in 2019.

Initially, I was suspicious of that spike, but three independent sources confirm this pattern (i.e. IMDb, Lumiere, and The Numbers). Their numbers differ slightly because of differences in methodology and criteria, but the effect is real. It is the companies that went into the pandemic and never came out.

However, it’s not only the pandemic. The failure rate had already been rising steadily since about 2005, so the pandemic only accelerated something already underway. Of the 967 distributors launched between 2015 and 2020, 328 have already stopped releasing. And the list of closures since the pandemic is long including:

• EuropaCorp’s distribution department in France in 2018

• Mars Films in 2019

• Kew Media in receivership in February 2020

• Aviron in 2020,

• STX’s domestic distribution in 2022 in the US,

• Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment and its Screen Media label in 2024,

• Belga Films in February 2026,

• True Brit a few days ago.

Where is it hardest to survive?

True Brit also operated in the UK market, which had the lowest five-year survival of the 14 markets I could measure from official release records covering Europe and North America.

Read more

After it merges with Warner Bros. Discovery, the combined company must release at least 30 films a year in US cinemas for two years, then 32 a year for three years after that.

If they miss any release targets, they must pay a $30m fine per movie, mostly going toward union health and pension funds. Not only that, if they then don’t make up the shortfall within six months, they forfeit Miramax!

What makes it so unusual is that nothing like it has been imposed on a Hollywood studio before, and no single company has released 30 films a year nationwide since 2007.

Paramount and Warner Bros., between them, are on track for 28 this year. In my data, their combined slate fell from 71 US cinema releases in 2007 to 22 in 2023.

In all, this settlement is twelve US states trying to legislate the middle of the film business back into existence.

Specifically, they are looking to restore “mid-budget” movies, something many people have claimed is dead. These include:

• Matt Damon has said the mid-budget movie is dead in at least six interviews.

• Steven Soderbergh said it in 2013 and again in 2025.

• A coalition of 5,767 film workers said it in an open letter against this very merger.

I decided to dig into what people are claiming, what a mid-budget movie even is, and what the data reveals about what happened to them.

What did Paramount and Warner Bros actually release?

The settlement doesn’t require all 30 to 32 movies to be mid-budget. At least four a year must be independent films, six must be blockbusters, and at least 20 must also be wide releases. The movies can’t be cheap or AI-made, but otherwise the new company can allocate its money as it sees fit.

It seems unlikely they will commit to making 30 films costing over $100m, given that no year from 1995 to 2019 saw more than 43 US cinema releases with a reported budget over $100m (in 2026 dollars), not to mention the huge risks in capital cost and market saturation.

So we’re left assuming that the deal will produce a big increase in “mid-budget” movies. And this is a type of movie both companies have avoided in recent years.

Between 1995 and 2007, the two companies (and their affiliated entities like New Line and Paramount Vantage) released between 27 and 37 mid-budget films a year (films I estimate cost $20m to $80m in 2026 dollars, more on how below).

It peaked in 2007 at 37, but in both 2022 and 2023 it was just five. Mid-budget films made up more than half of their output every year from 1995 to 2009 except 2004, and 23% in 2023.

How to investigate a vague claim

“The mid-budget movie is dead” is almost industry lore by now. To investigate it, I had to narrow it down. So I found 70 instances of people talking about the topic.

• 46 were claiming the mid-budget movie has gone

• 12 said it is back

• 12 sit on the fence (including myself nearly a decade ago).

I logged what they claimed, their evidence, and what they meant by “mid-budget.”

The evidence trail is thin. 25 of the 70 claims were just someone stating it from their industry experience (albeit many were informed industry experts). 14 pointed to the box office performance of a few select films, 10 recycled a statistic from somewhere else, three quoted a studio executive, and 10 offered no evidence at all. Only 8 did some actual number crunching. Tsk tsk. Sounds like a job for me.

They couldn’t even agree on how much a movie has to cost to be classed as “mid-budget”.

29 stated a budget range, with minimums from $500,000 (Matthew Weiner, in Flavorwire) to $50m (The Ankler, December 2025), and the top end running from $15m to $100m, all in today's dollars.

It’s not even consistent for one person. Matt Damon alone has used $25m to $60m, $15m to $60m and $20m to $70m in different years.

The median definition has a floor of $20m and a ceiling of $60m. Great, now we have our definition to study, right?

Hmmm, well, yes and no. We can do that, but the coverage is getting very patchy.

Let’s start with the data we have and then talk about why that method is weakening.

What the published budgets show

In the second half of the 1990s, movies costing $20m to $60m (inflation-adjusted to 2026 dollars) accounted for 31% of the cinema releases with a public budget, on average. Twenty years later, that was down to 24%.

Given how each commentator created their own floor and ceiling, I thought I’d see how much of a difference there is between definitions.

Quite a bit, it turns out.

If you think a “mid-budget” movie is one costing between $10m and $60m, then its share of budgeted US cinema releases actually rose slightly, by 1%, between 2000-2004 and 2015-2019.

However, if you feel that $40m and $100m are fairer limits, then it fell by 32%. Every definition with a floor of $15m or more shows a fall. The ones that start at $5m or $10m, with a low ceiling, show a rise.

But this isn’t the end of our number-counting woes.

So far, we have only been counting films with a reliable, public budget figure, which over-index towards studio films and wide releases. As I wrote last year, coverage of movie budgets has fallen through the floor in recent years (“No-one knows how much movies cost to make anymore”).

So we can’t just look up the budget on IMDb or The Numbers and start number crunching.

We have to find another way.

We’re going on a mid hunt

Over the years, I have found strong correlations between budgets and the number of people who work on a movie. It makes sense, since crew costs make up a huge share of the budget, with the production period accounting for between 56% and 74% of the total cost.

I used IMDb crew counts and budget figures for 6,519 US cinema releases to build and test a model to detect mid-budget movies. (I also checked that crew size tracks real, audited spending, using California Film Commission tax credit figures for 281 films, as we cannot trust published budgets.)

The model sorts films into five budget bands, and its middle band is a little wider than the median claim, at $20m to $80m in 2026 dollars. That is because most of the claims were made years ago in the dollars of the day, and a $60m ceiling from 2015 is about $80m today. As the definitions chart above shows, any band with a floor of $20m falls, whichever ceiling you pick.

When tested on movies outside the training dataset, it was right seven times out of ten when it said a film cost $20m to $80m. More importantly, it does not tilt the middle up or down. For films from 2020 to 2023, years the model never saw, the true mid-budget share among films with a known budget was 21.9%, and the model estimated 20.9%.

I then used the model to estimate a budget band for each of the 15,824 US cinema releases, and then, for every feature film on IMDb with a crew list, whether it reached a US cinema.

This revealed what has happened to “mid-budget” movies. They were released in US cinemas at a rate of:

• 102 to 116 a year in the late 1990s

• 99 to 127 a year in the 2000s (with a peak of 127 in 2008)

• 74 to 103 a year through the 2010s

• 47, 52 and 62 in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

The cinema middle is less than half what it was at its 2008 peak. (My data stops at 2023, because credits for newer films are still arriving.)

The orange bars on the chart below show where the rest went. They are films at the same scale that never played in a US cinema but start with a logo from Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+ or Peacock.

For example, in 2022 the list includes Enola Holmes 2, Spiderhead, Hustle, The Greatest Beer Run Ever and All Quiet on the Western Front.

If we add the streaming films to the cinema releases, then we see that the middle did not disappear - it split.

Half still opens in cinemas, and half just appears somewhere on the home screen of a single streaming service.

If you are a cinema owner, or a filmmaker whose career depends on a theatrical release, that is a disappearance. If you are counting films, it is a relocation.

Which half went?

Before I go, I want to dig a little deeper into a more niche aspect of the “mid-budget movies are dead” debate.

Many people speaking or writing about the shift say it’s not just the number of movies that’s the problem. It’s that this shift disproportionately hurts a certain type of movie.

Matt Damon has lamented the loss of the drama that was his “bread and butter”, and says “Courtroom dramas, all that stuff, they can’t get made”.

So I split the mid-budget movies I found into two groups:

1. “Grown-up”, including drama, comedy, thriller, crime, romance, biography and the other things adults used to go to the cinema for.

2. “Spectacle”, meaning any film action, adventure, science fiction, fantasy or animation.

(Horror is a small third group, left off the chart and covered in the Notes).

The chart below shows the average number of films per year at $20m to $80m in each genre group across four eras. Dark blue shows cinema releases, and orange shows straight-to-streaming releases.

The two groups went in opposite directions. Spectacle films grew by more than a third, from 40 a year in the 2000s to 55 a year in 2021 to 2023, and most of the growth went to streaming. Grown-up films started well ahead and fell by 29%, from 67 a year to 48.

So, is it true that “mid-budget movies are dead”?

We’ve learned three things:

1. Everyone who says the $20m to $80m film has left cinemas is correct. The timing they usually give (i.e the DVD collapse from 2008) is right too. The cinema middle peaked in 2008 and had lost a third of its count by 2013, before the streamers had started making their own movies. Streaming didn’t cause the first stage of the decline, but it did absorb the second.

2. Everyone who says the films are no longer being made is wrong about half of them. Mid-budget action, animation and fantasy films are made in greater numbers than ever. It’s just that more of them now come from Netflix, Apple, and Amazon than reach a cinema, and they don't get a poster outside a cinema. The mid-budget drama and comedy are made less than they were, by more than a quarter, and play in cinemas a third as often. The studios stopped, and the streamers that picked up action films picked up fewer dramas.

3. Everyone who says it is back, on the strength of one or two hits a year, is reading noise. The cinema middle has averaged 47 to 62 films a year for three years. It ran at 99 to 127 a year through the 2000s. One good summer doesn’t change that.

Which brings us back to the settlement. The states have bought 30 films a year, four of them independent and a fifth of them blockbusters. What they have not bought is a single $40m drama, because nothing in the terms says what the other 20 films have to be.

If the merged company fills them the way the two studios have filled their slates since 2019, the middle stays where it is now, on a streaming service, and the states will have legislated more of the same.

Notes

I built my claims dataset on 70 public instances of the claim, from October 1995 to August 2026, one per speaker per occasion, with repeats of the same interview in other outlets not counted again. Twenty-nine give a floor and a ceiling, in the dollars of the day, that I could confirm on the original page or a syndicated copy. Four more gave figures I could not confirm, or point values instead of a range, so I left them off the chart.

The film set includes every IMDb feature film released from 1995 to 2025, joined to The Numbers, excluding documentaries. A US cinema release means a theatrical release strategy, a US opening theatre count on IMDb, or a domestic gross in The Numbers; wide means 600 or more screens at the widest point. Budgets come from IMDb, The Numbers, and Wikiedpia (The Numbers preferred), and are inflated to 2026 dollars using the US consumer price index. My earlier studies found that the average $100m-plus Hollywood blockbuster costs about 12.5% more than stated, and that only 70% of claimed UK indie budgets were even broadly accurate,

My mid-budget prediction model is a gradient-boosted regression of log budget on log counts of distinct people, crew, cast and 20 departments, log opening theatres with a flag for whether a count exists, running time, animation and wide-release flags and release year, fitted on 4,889 US cinema releases from 1995 to 2016 with a budget and tested on 1,630 held-out films from the same years. Held-out results: R-squared 0.82, typical error a factor of 1.7, correct band 71%, $20m to $80m precision 0.705 and recall 0.76. Out of window on cinema releases: 2017 to 2019 R-squared 0.84 and band accuracy 72%, 2020 to 2023 R-squared 0.84 and 74%. The second model drops the theatre features and scores films with no US cinema release. On streaming films with a known budget, it gets the band right 67% of the time but slightly undercounts the middle (13.4% against a true 15.8% for 2020 to 2023), so the streaming counts are, if anything, low.

IMDb credits keep arriving for years after release. Comparing crew counts I took for 4,000 top-grossing films in March 2018 with the same films in 2026, a crew list was 85% complete two years after release, 90% at three to four years, and 95% to 97% from five years on. Counts for films released from 2021 were scaled up by that curve before scoring, which moved the estimates by one to four films a year.

The California check uses 281 feature films with an approved California tax credit, 2009 to 2025. The correlation between the number of crew hired and audited qualified spend is 0.77.

Mid-budget horror ran at about eight films a year in cinemas in the 2000s and nine a year, including streaming, from 2021 to 2023

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.

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. Its own juries hand out seven cash prizes worth €130,000 a year: €50,000 for the best first feature, €40,000 for the documentary award, €20,000 for the best short, and four prizes in its Generation strand for young audiences worth €20,000 between them. 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.

I updated this article on 27 September 2026 to avoid some ambiguity in my phrasing. The Berlin paragraph now lists all seven cash prizes awarded by the festival’s own juries, worth €130,000 in total, whereas it previously named only three. No totals or charts have changed, as the dataset behind them already included all seven.

• 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 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, an arm’s-length Royal Charter charity 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). That federal money funds the whole Berlinale operation, including the European Film Market, not just the public screenings. And the finance ministry’s own report counts 447,655 visitors across all 1,913 Berlinale events in 2024, which would bring the figure down to about €33 a head.

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. Some of the funding figures also cover more than the public-facing festival, so a few bars will read higher than a strict per-cinema-goer measure would give.

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 pay was €153,000 for her first nine months in the job (April to December 2024), published individually in the German finance ministry’s annual shareholdings report. That works out at an annualised rate of about €204,000, which is my calculation rather than a published figure.

Ben Roberts runs the entire BFI (including the London Film Festival) for £163,000, per its annual report. That’s the salary - with pension benefits, his total package is £210,000 to £215,000, which is closer to how the American totals are reported.

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 (the German finance ministry’s report counts 447,655 visitors across all 1,913 Berlinale events in 2024, a broader measure that includes the industry side); 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.

I updated this article after publication on 27 September 2026. I had presented an annualised figure for Tricia Tuttle's pay as if it were the published number. The published figure is €153,000, covering her first nine months in the job. I also tightened some ambiguous language around how I described government ownership and control, and added more detail to the per-festival-goer calculations