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

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

TIFF TL;DR

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

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

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

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

Time to tackle the TIFF tips!

Starting out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Focus on realistic 2-3 goals.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booking and money

5. Check the current pass tiers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Ask your national body before you buy direct.

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

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

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

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

8. It’s not going to be cheap

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

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

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

9. Book accommodation absurdly early, and stay close.

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

“Stay as close as possible.”

10. Economise on food, not on days.

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

11. If you need a visa, register first.

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

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

The market nobody has been to

12. Walk the floor.

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

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

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

As a few people put it:

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

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

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

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

13. It’s about the people.

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

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

Some of my respondents put it like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. The centre of gravity has moved south.

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

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

16. Find your national stand on day one.

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

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

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

Films and screenings

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

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

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

Others put it more warmly:

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

And, from a funding body:

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

18. Go to the public screenings too.

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

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

A TIFF veteran put it like this to me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One person put it like this:

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

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

20. Your pass is not a ticket.

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

21. Never accept ‘sold out’.

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

22. Book what you care about early.

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

23. Go to the odd ones.

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

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

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

24. It is fine to walk out.

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

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

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

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

The people part

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

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

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

A producer suggested to me the following system:

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

27. Know what an ‘event’ actually is.

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

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

Somebody else put a similar thought a little more bluntly:

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

28. The film agencies throw the best parties.

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

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

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

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

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

30. On business cards.

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

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

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

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

31. Follow the programmer, not the film.

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

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

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

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

As one experienced film professional put it:

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

Toronto, and staying upright

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

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

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

One respondent brought up the old industry adage that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

36. Assume the internet will be awkward.

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

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

37. Feet, water, snacks, sleep.

You will need:

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

• A water bottle.

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

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

38. Relax, and then follow up.

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How far films get

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has it always been one in ten?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are these sales agents?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five ways to own a film festival

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

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

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

1. Owned or run by the state

2. Technically private but state-controlled

3. Publicly funded nonprofits

4. Private nonprofits

5. Privately owned companies

Let’s look at each in turn.

1. Owned or run by the state

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

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

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

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

2. Technically private but state-controlled

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

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

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

3. Publicly funded nonprofits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Private nonprofits

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Privately owned companies

Now for the most complicated type - commercial companies.

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

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

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

How much public money are we talking about?

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

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

Other interesting tidbits I gleaned from the documents were:

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

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

• The Berlinale runs on roughly 40% public money.

• Locarno is 38%.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that come to per festival-goer?

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

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

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

How much do festival CEOs get paid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How American are the leads of American films?

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

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

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

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

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

So what about the “invasions”?

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

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

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

But where did they learn the job?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money buys foreigners

Two last tidbits before I go.

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

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

What have we learned?

I took four things away after conducting this research:

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Who produced it

• What genre it was

• Whether it won anything

• Whether anyone actually watched it

• What the director had made beforehand

• and more.

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

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

How rare is a second film?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The clues, all in one place

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

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

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

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

Being seen beats being good

A major factor is whether anyone actually watched it.

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

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

Quality that nobody sees converts to nothing.

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

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

The strongest clue is recognition

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

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

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

The producer effect

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

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

Previous form counts

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

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

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

Does genre matter?

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

The person, not the film

Two clues have nothing to do with the debut film.

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

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

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

Which effects stand alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this means if you’ve made one film

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long are end credits these days?

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

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

Have end credits got longer?

In a word, yes. Spectacularly.

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

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

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

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

Which films have the longest credits?

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

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

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

There was no connection between credit length and production budgets in the middle of the last century (1960s = 0.08, 1970s = 0.07), but as credits got longer, the connection grew (1990s = 0.33, 2000s = 0.39) until the modern era, where it’s up to 0.5.

The same is true of the number of people involved. How many crew a film credits explains its credit length far better than how many actors it has (0.44 versus 0.18), and once you account for the crew, cast size tells you nothing at all.

Animations have the longest credits, with documentary credits having the shortest - just a third of their animated cousins.

And when we drill deeper into the types of movies, we see an even clearer culprit - Marvel et al. Superhero films run a median of 7:09, compared with 5:08 for everything else.

Why are credits getting longer?

The data can’t give us a definitive reason this is happening, but I think the four most likely causes are:

1. Freelancers need credits

2. The credits moved

3. The VFX boom

4. Nobody is in charge

1. Freelancers need credits

Under the old studio system, most film workers were salaried staff and simply weren’t named on screen. The Wizard of Oz (1939) ended with on-screen titles listing eleven names, and one of those was a dog.

The Paramount Decree of 1948 broke up the studios’ vertically integrated empires and the studios fired many of their permanent staff. Filmmaking shifted to a freelance, project-by-project business, meaning a screen credit became more important in securing the next job.

2. The credits moved

As more people angled for an on-screen credit, the main roller had to move from before the film to after it. Until the late 1960s, credits mostly ran at the start of the film, where the audience had no choice but to sit through them, so they stayed short.

Films like Around the World in 80 Days (1956), West Side Story (1961) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) pioneered pushing them to the end, and by the 1980s the modern pattern was standard.

Once the names moved to the end, where nobody had to watch them, there was no longer any pressure to keep the list short.

Industry guilds had a role in this. When The Empire Strikes Back (1980) opened without traditional front credits, the Directors Guild objected (their rules required the director’s name up front if anyone’s was there), and the guilds fined George Lucas a quarter of a million dollars. He paid up but called it extortion, and resigned from both the DGA and the WGA.

The current rules that survive today mandate surprisingly little about end credits, other than the actors’ agreement, which requires that at least 50 cast members be listed in the end titles. Almost everything else in the crawl (the technicians, the drivers, the caterers, the accountants) is there by custom rather than by contract.

3. The VFX boom

The department that has seen the biggest growth in recent decades is that of visual effects. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) credited 5,109 people and over half of them (2,659) were in the visual effects department. Modern tentpoles farm work out to 13 or 14 VFX companies at once, each of which submits its list of names.

Across all movies the numbers are far smaller, but the shape is the same. VFX went from under half a percent of all crew credits in the 1970s to around 12% today, or roughly one crew credit in eight.

The bitter irony is that even fifteen-minute credit rolls leave people out. Studios cap how many names each VFX vendor may submit (insiders told me around 40 names is a common maximum, no matter how many people actually did the work, and ILM’s John Knoll has publicly opposed the practice).

In my earlier study of 4,113 films, 7.5% of crew credits went officially uncredited, with stunts (25%) and VFX among the worst affected.

4. Nobody is in charge

The WGA limits how many writers can share a writing credit and the Academy caps how many producers can collect the Best Picture Oscar. But no body anywhere caps the total length of end credits. Without a countervailing force, inflation naturally set in.

Some of this credit-grabbing is down to the increasingly complex way films are funded. Many film tax incentives legally require an on-screen thank-you: Georgia’s famous programme grants an extra 10% tax credit in exchange for embedding a five-second state logo in the finished film, and New Mexico, Louisiana, New York and California all have their own statutory versions.

We see the same pattern in almost every unregulated issue involving credits. In previous research I’ve shown how the average number of executive producers per film has more than doubled since 2000.

And then there's a general sense of freedom to play with the credits. Pixar began listing “production babies” (children born to crew during production) with Toy Story in 1995, and WALL-E (2008) credited 58 of them.

But the all-time GOAT of credits has to be Hot Shots (1991), which included a recipe for a brownie topping.

Marvel has changed public attitudes to end credits

And as an appropriate post-script, I wanted to briefly talk about the post-credits scene, which is likely older than you might think.

Possibly the first proper post-credits sequence was at the end of the 1966 Dean Martin spy comedy The Silencers. Twenty years later, Ferris Bueller implored audiences to “Go home!”. But Marvel industrialised the practice, starting with Iron Man in 2008.

This has slowly changed public views on watching all the credits, dividing along generational lines. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 93% of over-65s consider leaving before the credits finish perfectly acceptable behaviour, compared with 69% of 18- to 29-year-olds.

At the same time, the battle is going the other way with home viewing. Streaming services have decided that credits are a problem to be engineered away. Netflix say that their Skip Intro button is pressed 136 million times a day, and autoplay countdowns routinely squeeze the credits into a corner before the first name has scrolled past. Filmmakers have pushed back with limited success. The credits took fifty years to conquer the end of the film, and the technology companies un-conquered them in about five.

Notes

The dataset covers 6,515 feature films released between 1920 and 2025. Credits length here means the time from the first frame of end credits to the end of the entire film. That means anything else sitting in the file after the credits start (mid-credits scenes, post-credits stingers, bonus material) is counted too, so franchise films with stingers will read slightly long. My research skews towards well-known, English-language films, and the early decades are thin (19 films from the 1920s, rising to several hundred per decade from the 1970s). Cast and crew counts come from IMDb, which lists people who never appeared in the on-screen crawl, so I've used them as a measure of production scale rather than a literal count of scrolling names.

We learned that getting your script on the annual Black List or winning the Nicholl Fellowship can turn heads, but that few other competitions or laurels help.

So let’s say you’re not one of the lucky few who have achieved those rare accolades - how else can you get an agent to read your script?

Today I’m sharing the advice these same people gave to aspiring screenwriters.

Overall, the sentiment was not warm towards cold approaches. One put it like this:

I pretty much delete all cold emails automatically unless I’m bored, which is rare.

Yikes. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, if we look at the numbers another way, we can see that, like Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber, I’m saying there is a chance.

So what can you do in your cold approach to be one of the select few? In my interactions with these gatekeepers, a number of actionable steps emerged.

1. Personalise, because they can tell

2. Do your homework

3. Never use AI

4. Hook ‘em fast

5. Do not oversell - they check

6. Make it short, professional, and polite

7. Tell YOUR story

Let’s look at each in a little more detail.

Rule one: Personalise, because they can tell

The most common theme by a distance was personalisation, or the lack of it. A cold query that could have been sent to anyone gets deleted on sight.

Immediate pass if there is zero customization to me personally, ie I can tell someone has sent the exact same query to myriad reps and they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

And they really can tell. The mechanics of the mass-blast betray the sender in ways writers may not realise:

Please don’t copy and paste the same email to every manager... we can absolutely tell (especially when our names and companies are in different fonts than the rest of the email).

Some described wanting a genuine point of connection, a mutual professor, the same festivals, a shared former colleague, and added a detail that should give any name-dropper pause. If a writer claims to know one of their clients, they will sometimes text the client to check.

Rule two: Do your homework

Know who the company is and what it does, include the logline, a short synopsis and the practical details, and be clear about what you are actually asking for.

They need to do research about what we do.

One assistant even offered a workaround for companies that officially take no cold queries at all:

If the person put the work in to find my personal email address NOT JUST LINKEDIN I will at least read a logline and go from there.

Several also said the smartest queries arrive with more than a bare script. As one expert put it:

You always love to see a short sizzle or something extra, before I just commit myself to 120 pages of a stranger’s script... at the minimum showing that there’s more of a vision beyond the pages usually helps.

Rule three: Never use AI

I would hope this one was obvious, but just for the avoidance of doubt - don’t use AI. Anywhere, ever.

I’m not anti-AI, but if you’re saying you’re a professional writer, then even a whiff of generative AI in “your” writing or emails is a killer. (And the suspicion of AI use can even lose you a $2 million book deal, as we saw last week).

As one person put it:

And never ever use AI to write your cover note. One can pick that a mile off.

Rule four: Hook ‘em fast

Even a perfect email only buys you a few pages of attention. We already learned that just 8% read the whole script. 13% have decided by page five, and two-thirds have decided by the end of page ten.

So the opening pages have to do what your email did and earn the next minute of their time. One agent with more than ten years in the business went further than any page count:

I read the first line. Not so good is lots of description to start the script. Less is more!

And a junior exec made the same point about the query itself:

I rarely respond to cold queries, if at all. If anything an undeniable logline can get me interested.

It’s a layered approach - the logline earns the click, the first line earns the first page, and the first ten pages earn the rest. You’re fighting uphill at each stage.

Rule five: Do not oversell - they check

Inflating a minor credential reads as naivety, the opposite of what the writer intended.

Bigging up more low key prizes, or interest from irrelevant producers, too much... it shows a naivety or lack of industry understanding.

And the checking is not hypothetical. One manager described their own diligence:

What turns me off is if the query says they’re “in development” on a number of projects and easy research shows those projects are, at most, optioned.

Rule six: Make it short, professional, and polite

This is a lesson we should all apply in our everyday lives, but it applies even more when cold-calling industry gatekeepers with your script. As one put it:

A long, verbose, cryptic query letter is an immediate pass. Concise and professional, and material-forward!

Long emails with typos, loglines that strain to be funny, flowery begging, all named as instant passes.

One exec boiled the ideal email down to a formula:

Short and concise is good. Pitch the hook, why this project is UNIQUE, relevant attachments and background, and a very short reason the writer is compelling as well.

This etiquette does not stop at the first email. One agent, a generous reader who gets through whole scripts and advanced three cold writers last year, drew a single hard line:

I will immediately pass if I get a rude chase up.

There was even a warning for writers who do have representation and query anyway. More than one reader said an already-repped writer reaching out alone is a red flag rather than a plus. As one agent put it, the first question in their head is simply:

Why doesn’t their rep reach out?

And several respondents added that their company will not read genuinely cold queries at all, often for legal reasons, and route everything in through a referral instead.

Rule seven: Tell YOUR story

Many of the respondents said that the query needs to tell them where you are going, not just what you have written. One said they wanted writers who have:

…achieved momentum on their own and know why they’d now want an agent.

That word momentum came up in different forms across the answers. It does not have to mean much. One manager with over a decade in the business set the bar at:

I will read if they’ve been recommended by a producer or have produced something (even if only a short film, taster, etc)

Another put the same idea in the past tense:

My default is to pass immediately - the few I have responded to were because they had some level of success already with produced credits or competition wins.

This matches the numbers from my previous article, where a produced credit was the second-strongest signal of all, behind only a referral. A short film, a taster, a staged reading, a web series: anything.

The headline here is that the writers who get read arrive mid-journey, whereas the ones who get deleted arrive asking someone else to start the journey for them.

Other tidbits

One of the POVs I personally file as “unfair-and-wrong-but-also-I-kinda-get-it” was:

Do not send a feature script longer than 110 pages.

I have previously shown that length of screenplay is not a good measure of the final movie. (see Does one page of a screenplay really equal one minute of screen time?). That said, if the perception is shared by whoever the gatekeeper will later have to share the script with, maybe it has merit.

Not all the advice was depressing. One said :

The only thing that could ever get me to read a cold query is an amazing log line.

Epilogue

At the end of the day, as dispiriting as it can be to have to write cold emails that are endlessly ignored or rejected, remember that the people at the other end are passionate industry professionals like you.

They are dealing with a deluge of hopeful strangers who are swamping their inboxes, and making it hard to tell who’s good and who’s not.

But if you have the right talent and work ethic, these people DO want to hear from you. They DO want to champion good writing and to build a career alongside you.

You just need to work extra hard at the start to show that you exist and that you stand out.

Good luck!

To prepare, I gathered the biographies of the 6,921 people who wrote, directed, or starred in the 100 top-grossing films of each year since 2000 (2,600 films in total). I then looked at who had a family member already in the entertainment industry before they joined.

I was excited to share the results, although I wasn’t quite ready for the reaction. As the Hollywood Reporter put it “the surprise, or shock, of the audience was audible”. I thought it was fairly well known just how nepotistic the top of Hollywood is, but it seems that most people were not expecting the scale the data revealed.

So let’s dig into the findings.

What counts as a ‘nepo baby’?

The word ‘nepotism’ entered English in 1669 via a scandalous book called Il nepotismo di Roma, about the popes’ habit of making cardinals of their ‘nephews’ (itself just a polite word for their bastards). The insult ‘nepotism baby’ has been in print since at least 1915, when a Missouri newspaper used it to attack a state governor for stuffing the payroll with relatives.

The earliest traceable use of its newer form, ‘nepo baby’, is a December 2020 tweet about Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, and Urban Dictionary had an entry by July 2021. In December 2022, New York Magazine put a gaggle of famous actors’ faces on babies’ bodies and declared it ‘The Year of the Nepo Baby’.

While the term ‘nepo baby’ is fun and evocative, it’s a little imprecise for the data research, so instead I am going to refer to people who have family ties within the industry.

I counted someone as having family ties if a parent or close blood relative (i.e. a sibling, grandparent, uncle, aunt or cousin) worked in film or television before that person’s own entry into the industry.

I excluded spouses and partners as it takes most people years to get into the industry, so a partner who works in film is far more likely to be a consequence of being in the industry than the way in. Secondly, I also excluded relatives who joined up after our subject did. There’s more detail in the Notes at the end of this article.

How commonplace is it for film folk to have family ties in the industry?

Of the people I studied, roughly a quarter had a family member already in the film or TV industry before they joined.

Top-billed actors lead on 28%. Directors are close behind on 26%. Writers come out lower, on 18%, though they are also by far the least written-about group, so there’s a greater margin of error.

All this means that when Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, declared herself ‘an OG Nepo Baby’ and wrote ‘I am not alone. There are many of us’, she was spot on. There are many of them - about one in four.

How many films have connected creatives?

As well as helping the individuals themselves, a film project can really benefit from having an industry veteran rooting for it.

So let’s flip from people to films. For each of the 2,600 films, I counted how many people with family ties sat in its core creative team, i.e. the director, the credited writers and the top three billed actors.

30% of top films have no nepo baby anywhere in their core team. 36% carry exactly one, 23% carry two, and 11% have three or more.

Put the other way round, seven in ten of the biggest films of the past 25 years had at least one person with industry family at the heart of their creative team. This was the headline stat that shocked the folks in Locarno.

Is it getting better?

While the term ‘nepo baby’ might be new, nepotism in Hollywood most certainly is not. Universal founder Carl Laemmle reportedly kept more than 70 relatives on the payroll (including making his son head of production as a 21st birthday present), and the Barrymore acting dynasty was on its third generation even before talkies arrived.

The rate of already-connected directors has not wavered for two and a half decades. The most recent period I looked at (2020-24) saw a slight dip, but not because things improved but because the composition of ‘top-grossing movies’ changed due to the pandemic. Bigger movies were held back, and more indie movies cracked the ‘Top 100’.

Does it help in the longer-term?

Having a leg up at the start of your career is not the same as having a career-long advantage. When you listen to actual nepo babies talk about their experience, they tend to reflect the same idea: that it’s only an advantage of breaking in. Lily-Rose Depp told Elle magazine:

Maybe you get your foot in the door, but you still just have your foot in the door. There's a lot of work that comes after that.

Gwyneth Paltrow said much the same:

you get access other people don't have, so the playing field is not level in that way. However... once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good.

So I tested if the data supports this idea. And it does.

Films directed by industry-family directors have a median adjusted domestic gross of $84m, compared with $87m for films directed by everyone else.

The films were also not any better, according to IMDb audience ratings.

So what does a famous surname actually buy?

I narrowed in on the 1,804 directors whose debut feature since 2000 attracted a meaningful audience, whether or not their career went anywhere afterwards.

Connected directors get their first film made younger (a median age of 33 against 35), and those who eventually reached the top 100 climbed faster (a median of 8 years from first feature against 10).

Most of all, they get more chances. 72% went on to a second feature against 66% of everyone else, and their median career is three features against two.

Family ties get you a modest start earlier, keep you in the game longer, and buy you another roll of the dice when a film disappoints. The surname is more of a safety net than some kind of accelerator or guarantee.

Talent, it turns out, is not hereditary. Access is.

Director Jason Reitman, son of Ivan, put it rather pithily when telling NPR about the reception of his first film:

People presumed that nepotism would pave the road for my career. And nepotism let me down, frankly.

Epilogue

The point of today’s research is not to imply that having family ties is inherently a bad thing, or that the people who benefit from them are villains. If you grow up around the industry, you absorb it. You get a chance to learn how sets work, how deals get made, and talk with experienced folk who can advise you on your own journey.

The data is highlighting what those advantages buy. I.e a higher chance of being ‘lucky’ enough to get a shot at showing what you can do, and another shot when the first one misses.

The real question is not about the individuals. It is about fairness for everyone else, and what kind of industry we want. One where talent finds its way in, or one where the door opens fastest for those born nearest to it.

Notes

The film panel is the 2,600 top-grossing films released domestically from 2000 to 2025 inclusive, i.e. roughly the top 100 per year, with box office measured as domestic (US and Canada) gross adjusted for ticket-price inflation. So this is not strictly a study of Hollywood; it is a study of the films that topped the North American box office, wherever they were made. The underlying film, credit and people data draws on Wikipedia, IMDb, OMDb, TMDb and The Numbers. ‘Stars’ means the top three billed actors per film.

Background data came from public web sources, producing a structured record with cited sources for every person. Every claim of industry family was rechecked by a separate verification pass using fresh searches; claims that failed that check were excluded. Family background could be established for 87% of directors, 76% of stars and 37% of writers, and the percentages in this article are shares of those people. Writers are the least publicly documented group by a distance, which is why their number carries the least weight.

The debut-director group is every director whose first feature film was released between 2000 and 2024 and has at least 10,000 IMDb ratings, a floor chosen so the group is documented well enough to study. That yields 1,804 directors, of whom 566 also appear in the main panel. Career outcomes (second features, later top-100 films, ages) come from public filmographies. Film quality is measured by IMDb audience ratings, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and the quality-adjusted box office comparisons split films into equal thirds by rating and compare medians within each third.

Survivorship matters. Everyone in this data already succeeded, so these figures measure how common industry family is among people who made it, not how much a connection improves your odds of making it. The debut group softens this but does not remove it: its members all got a noticed first film made. The box office comparisons are between films that all reached the top of the market.

For example, there is only one reliable source for the average age of Oscar voters. In 2012, the Los Angeles Times conducted an investigation and concluded that Oscar voters had a median age of 62, with just 14% being aged under 50.

Fourteen years have passed since then - #OscarsSoWhite, a membership overhaul, and roughly 6,000 new members, recruited in part to make the voting body look less like its “male, pale, stale” stereotype.

Did it work?

So I set about finding out by researching the age of the 11,200 people who vote on Hollywood’s top awards. There’s more detail on my methodology at the end in the Notes section.

The average ages of Oscar voters

Let’s start with the headline figure. The median Oscar voter is 64 years old, with two-thirds being between 50 and 79 years old.

The youngest members are found in the Short Film and Animation branches, with a median age of 50 and 60 years old, respectively.

Another way of looking at it is to ask what percentage of each branch is over 70. If you’re printing handouts for members, then the Sound and Production Design branches might need the largest font, given that both have a plurality of people older than 70.

Wait, why hasn’t the average age changed?

We’ve just seen that the Oscars voters are largely the same median age as they were when the LA Times reported in 2012. This might seem strange, for a couple of reasons:

1. Shouldn’t they be older? People remain members of the Academy until death, and so those same folks who were there in 2012 should be fourteen years older.

2. But didn’t they just invite a load of younger folks? In the decade, the Academy has made a big deal about inviting a broader spectrum of people to refresh its membership.

Interestingly, the answer to both questions is yes.

It is true to say that there has not been a disproportionate number of people leaving, given that the Academy has not faced the kind of membership exodus the Golden Globes did in 2021.

This means that Academy members are indeed ageing in real time (despite the best efforts of their plastic surgeons and what their publicists will tell you).

But it’s also true that an unusually large number of people have been invited to join in recent years, with the express goal of changing the composition of the voting body.

When we narrow into the new entrants, we can see that their median age is a spritly 49 years old.

The youngest member I can verify is Quvenzhané Wallis, who is currently 23 but was invited at 14 after her Best Actress nomination for Beasts of the Southern Wild. Her 2018 class also included the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, then 86, a 72-year spread inside a single year's intake.

But this isn’t some radical new act - the new entrants to the Academy since 2016 have had a median age of between 48 and 51, with the middle half of each intake sitting in the same band, roughly 40 to 57.

The passage of time and the flurry of new entrants have pushed against each other in order to keep the median age of voters fairly stable since 2012.

Mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke (both 100), Eva Marie Saint (102) and Jacqueline White (103) pull so hard on the average that the Academy would need to invite ten typical new members just to cancel them out.

Age is a sensitive topic in the film business

Each year, the Academy announces each new class with stats on the gender, ethnicity and background of the new entrants… but not age. Age is the one demographic it does not publish stats on, nor set any targets for.

To some degree, I can see why. Every other dimension of the diversity drive can be fixed by invitation. But because the Academy’s own membership rules manufacture an old-skewing body (i.e. you need to have had a long career to get in, and then you’re offered a lifetime membership), it can’t quickly affect the age of its constituency.

In 2016, as part of the post-#OscarsSoWhite reforms, the Academy began moving long-inactive members to non-voting emeritus status. The backlash was immediate. A 91-year-old screenwriter named Robert Bassing, a member since 1958 whose last credit came in 1977, threatened to sue for age discrimination rather than give up his ballot.

The purge, in the end, was tiny. The Academy’s CEO, Dawn Hudson, said:

It was fewer than 1% of members that were asked to move to this status, and most of them willingly did.

This is, after all, an industry that has litigated the question of whether your age should even be public. In 2011 the actress Junie Hoang sued IMDb for more than $1m for publishing her real birth date, arguing it branded her over the hill; a jury sided with IMDb. California then passed a law in 2016, backed by SAG-AFTRA, forcing IMDb to delete ages on request. The courts struck it down as unconstitutional, and the ages stayed up.

In the end, I was left surprised that the Academy wasn’t older. And there is something fun about an electorate with an 80-year age gap trying to agree on their favourite movie.

Further reading

If you want to read more about the Oscars, you may enjoy:

• Was Harvey Weinstein thanked more often than God at the Oscars?

• How do women fare in gender-neutral Oscar categories?

• Can media coverage predict who wins an Oscar?

• How “popular” are Oscar-nominated movies?

• What do Oscar-winning short films have in common?

• How much do Oscar nominations help films in theatres?

• How much do Hollywood campaigns for an Oscar cost?

Notes

The member list comes from the Academy’s 2026 member directory (11,200 members). I matched 92% of members to credit-database identities, then took birth years from IMDb, TMDb, OMDb and Wikidata. After excluding members with recorded deaths, that gives 5,367 living members with a verifiable birth year, 48% of the membership.

Coverage is not uniform, as actors and other prominent members are more likely to have public birth years than, say, publicists. The least-documented members skew towards recently recruited and to younger branches, so the true median age is likely to be slightly lower than I can calculate.

The age-at-invitation figure covers the 2,350 members of the 2016 to 2026 classes with known birth years. The LA Times figures cited are from its February 2012 study (median 62, 14% under 50, 86% over 50, identities confirmed for 5,112 of 5,765 voting members). Their study covered voting members; mine covers all listed members, roughly 91% of whom hold voting status per the Academy’s most recent announcement.

Morbius had died at the box office in April 2022, opening to $39.1m and then dropping 74% in its second weekend. But over the following weeks, a meme playing on the film’s dreadful dialogue (’It’s Morbin’ time’) had taken off.

Sony read this massive increase in engagement as demand for the movie and decided to re-release it theatrically on 3 June. It did not do well. The re-release took roughly $300,000 across 1,037 cinemas, which works out as a per-screen average of $300, or 30 tickets over three days. Yikes.

And this is not an isolated experience. A number of movies have thrived and failed to capitalise on internet meme fame. And yet, some of the biggest moments for cinema in the past few years have been driven by memes and outsized online interest.

So how can we separate the memes that mean money from the fads that fuel failure?

I have isolated 24 movie meme moments, from Barbie to Cats, and looked for patterns in the wins and losses. After all that, there are some pretty clear lessons for studios and movie marketers.

I’m going to go through examples of both virality working and failing, talk about how studios try to manufacture these moments, and end with tips for how to know when a meme means money.

Viral moments which did not drive Box Office

Let's start with an example in which a film's inclusion in a popular meme did not translate into box-office sales.

Cats (2019) is one of the biggest examples. When the first proper trailer dropped, the movie’s ‘digital fur technology’ sparked no end of online conversation and became a global punchline weeks before release. Then the film opened to $6.5m against tracking that had once hoped for $14m to $17m.

The internet’s reaction to Cats’ fur somewhat mirrored the film press corps’ reaction to the full version of Megalopolis (2024). Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed opus cost $120m to make but opened to just $4m domestically.

When PostTrak asked buyers why they had chosen to see the movie, 61% said ‘because of Coppola’, and only 9% said they had ‘heard it was good’. Megalopolis sold on morbid curiosity to a tiny audience of people who wanted to witness the car crash in person.

Snow White (2025) probably had the longest and loudest run of pre-release bad headlines than any movie in recent history. So on the one hand, there was high awareness and a strong viral conversation, but on the other it was almost entirely negative. It opened to $42.2m on a reported $336m budget and fell 66% in weekend two. Being talked about constantly is not the same as being wanted.

These three examples all have one thing in common - the joke was that the movie was bad. But that’s not the main common thread in the memes which don’t convert to tickets.

Saltburn (2023), because it went viral in a big way, with Saltburn-themed videos racking up nearly 4 billion views on TikTok, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ shooting back up the charts. Despite this, the film’s global Box Office takings were the same as its reported budget ($21.1 million vs $20 million).

The memes that could

Now let's look at some viral moments that did seem to drive success on the big screen.

Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) is the model. The ‘#GentleMinions’ trend had teenagers turning up to screenings in suits, filming themselves treating a kids’ cartoon like a black-tie event.

Illumination was expecting their movie to take $70m to $80m over the four-day opening. It ended up taking over $125m. A key part of those extra audience members was, unusually for a Minions movie, 13-to-17-year-olds, who accounted for 34% of the opening audience, compared with just 8% for the previous film in the series.

A Minecraft Movie (2025) also tracked at $70m to $80m but opened even bigger than The Rise of Gru, at $163m. The ‘chicken jockey’ meme, in which audiences shout and throw popcorn at a specific line, erupted soon after its release, extending the film’s life on the big screen. Warner Bros leaned in, formalising it with official rowdy ‘Block Party’ screenings that gave people a fresh reason to go back.

Read more

Some competitions directly provide top scripts to influential industry people during or just after the competition runs. Beyond that, the implication is that having placed well in their competition will be a mark of quality you can use to get people to notice you.

Final Draft’s Big Break says:

Enter the contest that has been launching screenwriting careers for over 20 years.

Winners and finalists have signed with agents and managers, sold and optioned scripts, and been staffed in TV writers’ rooms.

Is this the year for YOUR Big Break?

The PAGE International Screenwriting Awards say:

many dozens of our past winners have secured representation, landed paid writing assignments, signed option agreements on their work, and many now have movies and television shows in production, on the air, and in theaters.

The BlueCat Screenplay Competition puts it like this:

we’ve consistently introduced our winners and finalists to the industry, launching numerous successful careers in film and television.

BlueCat has a long and distinguished history of discovering unknown screenwriters, introducing them to the industry and launching their careers.

I wanted to test the utility of winning or placing highly in these competitions, so I reached out to a number of top Hollywood agents, assistants, and junior execs who handle the first read. In the end, 38 shared their thoughts.

I’m going to split the results over two articles, as there were a lot of great nuggets that came out of it.

So what actually gets a script read?

I asked each person how a given thing mentioned in a cold query would affect their likelihood of actually reading the script. I have converted those answers into a score ranging from -2 to +2, where 0 indicates no difference.

In the chart below, the dark blue bars represent what I think of as industry pre-validation, and the orange bars represent competitions open to all.

Nothing beats a referral from a trusted contact. And the second most important signal was also an indicator that the industry has pre-validated you - namely, that you had already had a script produced.

Real work, and a warm introduction, beat every competition by a long way.

To help get a sense of this perspective, it’s worth listening to UTA literary agent Peter Dodd in a 2016 interview on the Scriptnotes podcast. He described himself as ‘a recommendation-based engine’ and when asked whether a single client had ever come to him through a query letter, he replied:

Never happens.

The annual Black List was the highest-ranked “competition,” although it’s not quite the same as the others. To get on it, your script needs to have already been read by well-placed people in the industry, so while it’s technically open to all, it also fits the model of industry pre-validation.

By far and away the most useful competition to win if you’re a true industry outsider is the Nicholl Fellowship. This is from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the folks handing out Oscars), and it awards up to five winners $35,000 each to spend a year writing.

(Minor note, but it is arguable if the Nicholl Fellowship really is “open to all” any more. Last year they changed their rules to only accept submissions through partner universities, labs, and the Black List website or the Writers Guild Foundation).

Even a high placement at Austin, a win in another contest, or being a Nicholl semifinalist barely have any effect. A handful of the experts said it actually makes them less likely to read:

I want to know WHY I should look at something. Compel me. I don’t care which competition (that usually no longer exists) gave the script a high score.

The Nicholl cliff

While winning the Nicholl Fellowship is a clear advantage, the drop-off to later placements is steep.

Winning was worth +1.1 (on my five-point scale from -2 to +2), but being a finalist drops to +0.7, which was the same as having a rep attached. A semifinal place falls to +0.3, which is almost nothing.

Which screenwriting contest does the industry respect?

As a follow-up, I also asked everyone, “Which of these actually carry weight in the industry?” and listed some of the biggest screenwriting competitions.

This is obviously a highly subjective question, so all we’re measuring is everyone’s opinion.

Here again we see the annual Black List top the poll, in an exact tie with Sundance’s programmes (i.e., its Labs: Screenwriters, Episodic and the rest) and with the Nicholl Fellowship a distant third.

Outside of those top three, it’s slim pickings. This is a rather stark answer as they could pick as many as they wanted. So it’s not a case of the top ones crowding out the others; rather, they really don’t think the others matter.

Underneath those three, everything drops off a cliff. The Austin Film Festival, the biggest name in the next tier, gets just 18% of the votes. The paid contests that market themselves hardest to writers sit at the very bottom. BlueCat and Stage 32 were picked by nobody at all.

One agent, asked what gets them to read a cold query, said:

There are a handful of writing competitions like the Black List, Nicholl Fellowship, Channel 4 Screenwriting, BBC Writersroom competitions that if you win or are a finalist, they pique some interest, but I would say the absolute BEST way of getting your work read is through reputable recommendation... Sadly the old tale of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” plays a big role in getting your material read.

The Black List and its website are not the same

The annual Black List (the year-end list of the most-liked unproduced scripts) and the Black List website (the paid script-hosting and evaluation site) are treated very differently by the people I canvassed.

The annual list is named as carrying weight by four out of five, and scores +1.2 on read-likelihood. The website is named by just 21%, and scores +0.6, with three people saying a high website score makes them less likely to read.

How much of a script do they read?

I also asked how much of a script they read before they know it is a pass.

The most common answer, from more than half of respondents (53%), was ten pages. A further 13% said they only need five. Put those together and roughly two in three gatekeepers have decided your script’s fate before the end of page ten.

The more patient 26% hold out until page thirty, which is roughly the end of the first act. And just 8% said they read the whole script before passing.

So, do contests get your script read?

For two of them, sometimes, yes. Being on the annual Black List or winning the Nicholl puts a writer just below a produced credit, and both clearly help.

For almost everything else with an entry fee, the honest answer from the people reading the scripts is - not really, and occasionally the reverse.

But the thing that beats every contest, every time, is a person the reader already trusts saying ‘read this’.

However, I don’t wish to imply that that is the only proposed benefit of entering a competition. Entering a script competition provides something every writer wants (i.e., a deadline), and many also provide what writers need (i.e., feedback).

In addition, the moment a script wins, it is likely to catch the eye of many industry watchers. Many competitions have distinguished industry names on the judging panel, and some even offer mentorship and connections as the core prize.

Break the rules

To end on a more hopeful note, I wanted to point out that this is what people told me, not what they always do. There are instances where a cold email with a less-than-top-tier placing in a competition can lead to glory.

In August 2020, unknown writer Sophie Dawson sent literary manager John Zaozirny a cold query that led with a Nicholl quarterfinal placement. The whole email, as later published, read:

Hi John! My dark comedy just made the quarterfinals of the 2020 Academy Nicholl Fellowships competition! Would you be interested in taking a look?

Four months later her script Headhunter was the number one script on the 2020 Black List.

As Zaozirny tells it:

Sophie was someone I found off of a query letter in August and four months later she was the number one writer on The Black List.

So don’t let anyone tell you to stop trying - least of all me.

UCLA have been publishing annual reports on diversity in Hollywood since 2014 (covering films from 2011 onwards), each with the core finding that diverse movies make more money.

Gadfly’s contention was that nobody ever seems to check the maths behind these claims. I realised I too had been reading versions of that headline for years but had never once checked it myself.

So I decided to take up the challenge and address the question: Do movies with diverse cast members make more money?

What I ended up uncovering was far more interesting than I thought it would be at first, and I learned a lot along the way about measuring subjective topics.

This is a long, complex piece, so I thought I’d help everyone with a TL;DR before we get into the detail:

1. Diversity is not one thing. “A diverse cast” can be measured in at least six defensible ways, with each method producing different findings for the same film.

2. The current headlines come from a shaky process. UCLA’s method is questionable and produces volatile results. The findings are more likely a result of the choice of method and the effect of small numbers than tracking a real connection.

3. Once you account for things like budget and release size, there is no academic consensus that increased cast diversity will lead to higher financial returns.

4. I tested 108 defensible methods across 2,600 films and 26 years. I found that almost all the methods produce no meaningful connection, and the median answer is a 2% dip. No method shows cast diversity meaningfully lifting box office. None shows audiences punishing it either.

5. The one pattern that survives everything tracks budgets, not audiences, with the most diverse casts being concentrated in the cheapest films. This is the problem the industry should be focusing on, rather than putting stock in the idea that cast diversity drives revenue.

Ok, let’s start at the top and work our way into the findings.

What does a ‘diverse cast’ mean?

“Diverse casts earn more” sounds like a single claim, but in fact it can mean two different things.

It can mean how much of the cast comes from minority backgrounds. Or it can mean how varied the cast is, i.e. how many different backgrounds are represented and how evenly.

I know they sound similar, but they are not, and the difference is more than pure pedantry. Look at the two fictional films below:

1. Movie one has eight actors, all from the same minority background, meaning that it is “100% minority actors” but has zero variety.

2. Movie two is mostly White but has lots of variety.

So which is the “more diverse” cast? Your answer depends entirely on which definition you use, and most headlines never say which one they mean.

Not to mention that “diversity” can cover background, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, socio-economic background, etc, etc. I’m going to focus on ethnicity and gender for this article, but only to keep it focused, not because they are more important than others.

How do you turn eight people into one number?

I have laid out my methodology in detail at the end of this article, so I’m just going to gloss over it here for readability's sake. I looked at the top eight billed actors, plus the credited directors and writers, of the 100 highest-grossing films at the US box office 2000-25. For each person, I researched their publicly documented background from their own public statements, interviews, official biographies and reputable coverage, ending up with classifications for almost all.

We now need to turn that biographical data into statistics around diversity. This is much more subjective than you might think.

Here are six reasonable approaches one might take (names are my own):

• Minority Share. The share of the top eight cast from minority backgrounds. The simplest and most common yardstick.

• Weighted Share. The same share, but the top of the bill counts for more, on the logic that the lead sells more tickets than the 8th name.

• Minority Lead. Forget the ensemble: is the number one name on the poster a minority actor, yes or no?

• Mix Score. The chance that two randomly picked cast members come from different backgrounds. This measures variety rather than quantity.

• Group Count. How many different backgrounds the cast spans, and how evenly. A cast split across four groups scores higher than a cast drawn from one.

• Female Share. The share of the top eight cast who are women, kept separate from the race measures throughout.

Let’s take the example of Fast Five, the 2011 edition of the Fast and Furious franchise in which they drag a bank vault through the streets of Rio. Each method ranks it differently in my dataset, from being more diverse than 99% of movies down to more diverse than just 10% of them

So when someone tells you “diverse films earn more money”, your first response should be to ask “What do you mean by diverse?”

Now, let’s tackle the second half of the claim by considering what we mean by “make more money”.

How do you test the money question?

You cannot just compare the earnings of diverse and non-diverse films, because films differ in ways that swamp everything else. A $200m franchise sequel will outgross a $5m horror whatever their casts look like. So we should compare like with like - same genre, same year, franchise against franchise, animation against animation, and so on.

But sadly the complexities of the real world mean that it’s not that simple. Some things that look like fair controls are actually part of the subjectivity and might mean the person who's doing the counting has their hand on the scales.

The number of cinemas a film opens in is decided by the distributor, after seeing the finished film and deciding how hard to push it. If films with diverse casts were systematically given smaller releases, then “controlling” for release size would remove the very thing we are trying to measure. The same logic applies, more arguably, to budget, where the final budget is heavily linked to casting.

If at this point you’re getting exasperated at the futility of something that felt like a simple question, don’t worry! Because we cannot fairly pick just one methodology without adding subjectivity, I tested many.

But before we look at all the tests I ran, let's look at the study that prompted Hollywood Gadfly to reach out to me, the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report.

What does the best-known study say?

The Hollywood Diversity Report has been published annually since 2014 by researchers at UCLA. It is a serious, long-running series, with its authors having studied this field for over a decade.

They use the "Minority Share" method I mentioned above, sorting films into six bands (e.g. under 11%, 11 to 20%, and so on up to over 50%), then comparing the median box office of each band.

The latest edition reports that films in the 41 to 50% band earned the highest median global box office. They note that:

This cast diversity interval happens to align with the BIPOC share of the U.S. population (45.2%).

And the report concludes:

As found throughout this report series, new evidence from 2025 further demonstrates that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content in theatrical film releases.

This tidy, optimistic, quotable finding has been the source of a decade of headlines on the topic.

There are two rather big problems with the method, and consequently with the conclusion.

Problem one: The banding method is unreliable

Their scale sorts films into bands 10 points wide. But a cast here is eight people. This means that one person represents 12.5 points. The smallest possible change in a cast is bigger than the width of the boxes the films are being sorted into.

Let's see what this means in practice. If we imagine a film with zero minority actors, then it will be in the under-11% band. If the 7th- and 8th-billed actors are recast to be minority actors, then the film jumps up to the 21%-30% band straight away.

This is the kind of casting I doubt most audience members notice, and yet the film has crossed two full bands.

It’s true that representation of all types matters, and that it's important for people to see characters like them on-screen. However, it feels a stretch to then extrapolate that to the point where you’re attributing the film’s overall performance to the two minor casting changes.

The banding method they use massively amplifies the effect of minor casting choices and creates data which implies there are big differences between films which are, for all practical purposes, not different.

Problem two: the results are very inconsistent.

If the sweet spot were a real feature of audience behaviour, you would expect it to show up year after year. The chart below tracks the winning band in each year of the report series’ own published tables, going back 15 film years

The winner has bounced across three different bands. The 21 to 30% band has won six times, the 31 to 40% band four times, and the 41 to 50% band five times.

The recent run of 41 to 50% wins, the one that aligns so pleasingly with the population share, describes the last couple of years of a series that spent a decade contradicting it.

And this is where I can add my new data, to go deeper than the UCLA published tables. I rebuilt my own 26-year version of their exercise using their method. I believe I have almost all the same classifications of individuals, but, as we have seen above, even one different classification can have outsized effects on the final data. So my charts are not an exact copy of theirs.

The chart below is entirely my data, and shows (a) how volatile their method is; and (b) that there hasn’t been a sweet spot for diversity this century.

So the UCLA data does not provide a robust, clearer answer than the headlines would have you believe. Instead, it reflects the often changing output of a particular method, heavily influenced by the property of small numbers.

What have other studies found?

I had built up a cache of 29 other studies and reports on the topic, to see what others have said on the issue (details and links in the Notes section).

16 found a positive link between diverse cast and financial success, seven found no effect, and six found negatives abroad or results that split by market and method.

But yet again, we need to look under the surface. Nine of those positive studies did not control for other factors, and the seven that did mostly used only the US box office.

Every study that compares raw grosses concludes that diversity pays. These are also typically the studies behind the headlines, such as the annual diversity reports, the talent agency indices, the consultancy studies with the billion-dollar opportunity numbers. But because they do not control for key factors, we cannot count them as rigorous tests of the claim.

Of the studies that do compare like with like:

• Several found genuine positives for Black-led casts in the US market.

• Seven found nothing at all.

• Six found negatives abroad, or answers that flip depending on the market, the measure or the statistical correction.

One finding was reported as a 149% revenue boost for films with multiple Black leads when its working paper made headlines. By the time peer review had finished, the published figure was revised to 47%. It is a genuinely good piece of work, and its published finding still stands as one of the strongest positives in the field. But I wanted to highlight it here to show how far a headline number can travel from the figure that survives review.

So we are STILL left with a murky picture. I’m sure by now you are screaming at the screen - Stephen, please just answer the damn question! Do diverse casts make more money at the box office, or not?!

Ok, ok, I’ll have a go.

Asking the question every possible way

Rather than just picking a single subjective methodology, I decided to test 108 of them. That’s a combination of:

• The six measures of cast composition we saw above.

• With and without budget as a control.

• Four different statistical models, including ones designed for the fact that box office is dominated by a few giant hits.

• Worldwide and domestic takings.

• Plus a version that only compares films from the same studio.

In total, 108 defensible ways of asking “is cast composition related to box office?”, every combination decided in advance so I could not fish for a result I liked or didn’t.

Each test produced a figure for the relationship between cast diversity and box office (worldwide and domestic were tested separately). A positive figure means the more diverse the cast, the more money it brought in, and a negative figure means the opposite.

I then plotted each result on the chart below.

86% of the answers land within 5% either way of zero, and the median answer is a 2% dip. It’s fair to say that there are few ways we can reasonably read the data to produce the finding that “more diverse casts earn more money”.

To give you a sense of how the tests work, here are five of the 108 answers, spanning the whole range:

• The most negative answer anywhere was an 11% dip, which came from Minority Share against worldwide takings, using median regression (which asks about the typical film rather than the average) and no budget control.

• A 4% dip was found for Minority Share against domestic takings, standard model, no budget control.

• A 2% dip, indistinguishable from zero, showed up for Female Share against domestic takings, median regression, no budget control.

• Almost exactly zero (+0.5%) was the outcome of Minority Share against domestic takings, using the skew-robust model with controlling for budget.

• The most positive answer was a 7% lift and came from Group Count against domestic takings, standard model, no budget control.

A motivated researcher could truthfully report “diverse casts are associated with lower box office” or “more varied casts are associated with higher box office” from this same dataset, just by choosing the measurement criteria.

Both would be technically true, and if they didn’t reveal the 107 other ways to crunch the same data, we might never question it.

What this all adds up to

So my answer to the question "do films with diverse casts make more money than those with less diverse casts?" is no. I ran every defensible method on 26 years of hit films, and couldn't find a version of the analysis where cast diversity meaningfully lifts box office.

And the most rigorous academic work in the field agrees with me on this. Once budget, marketing and release width are taken into account, they dominate everything, and the cast’s own effect shrinks towards nothing.

The diversity of the cast is just not a meaningful factor when assessing the financial performance of films en masse.

By the way, there is no honest reading of this data in which audiences punish diverse casts either. What this exercise really measures, in the end, is the measurers. The choice of yardstick moves the answer more than the casts move the money.

(Regular readers may remember that last year I tested the “Go Woke, Go Broke” claim across 10,524 films and found no general rule there either. This all reflects the same idea that movies are very complex products and that it should not be surprising that their financial outcomes are unlikely to be reducible to one factor).

The one effect that is there and needs more study

A McKinsey study reported that Black-led films receive budgets roughly 25% lower than comparable projects. And this is a finding I replicated in my study too.

So something is happening in Hollywood, but it’s taking place in studio greenlight meetings, not by audiences in line at the cinemas.

There is a genuine question about why the most diverse casts are concentrated in the cheapest films, which deserves better study than a diversity band.

Advocacy versus academia

I want to end on a question that kept coming up when I was researching this topic: what are reports like this actually for?

There are two very compelling reasons to take the time to do what UCLA have been doing so consistently over more than a decade:

1. Advocacy. I.e. making the case for a fairer industry, the way a guild, a trade body or an agent would. There’s no doubt there is a lot wrong with how the industry currently functions, and we need dedicated, passionate people to take the time to make us all better.

2. Science. I.e. finding out what is true, including when it is inconvenient. It’s important we know how things operate and, ideally, why. This allows everyone to have the same view of the world and to make realistic plans and accommodations in their own lives.

Both jobs are valid and needed. But they are different jobs.

Given their language and press releases, I doubt many would disagree that the Hollywood Diversity reports are doing the former. They are passionately advocating what they believe needs to change and why. But they do so under the guise of the latter, an independent study from a university, a research institute, endnotes and all.

The series describes its own purpose as exploring “relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry”. Their conclusion is that the binned medians “demonstrate” that audiences “prefer diverse content”. The latest edition puts it like this:

During a tumultuous era in the business of Hollywood, one thing remains true, films with relatively diverse casts tend to do better at the global box office.

Nothing in their tables is false, and I have no reason to doubt their commitment to gather data or computational rigour.

But the method behind the headline, raw medians of 10-point bands on a single year of top films, with no like-for-like controls, is one of the very few ways of analysing this question that produces a result that big, in that direction.

The UCLA answer is not THE answer. It is one answer from the far end of a distribution of many. It is the answer that sparks the headlines they feel are needed to change the industry in the way they believe it must change.

Notes

I studied the 100 highest-grossing films at the US box office in each year from 2000 to 2025, using Domestic gross to define each year’s list. Box office and budget figures come from OpusData, Box Office Mojo and IMDb, converted to 2025 dollars throughout. This is deliberately a hits-only sample, because I was asked to respond to UCLA’s chosen focus. This means that any conclusions should not be automatically applied to the thousands of smaller releases each year - indie films operate very differently to the mainstream.

For each of the 8,854 individual people, I researched their background via public documentation, prioritising their own public statements, then interviews, official biographies and reputable coverage. Categories follow the convention used in the research this article engages with: White, Black, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern and North African, Native American, and Multiracial, alongside gender. Each classification carries a confidence level and a note of its source.

When these sources could not reliably define the correct categories (i.e. 16.4% of people), I assigned working categories in two logged tiers. I reviewed photographs for 723 people alongside a second automated opinion and individually logged best guesses for the remainder. The blind double-coding, the 100 redraws and the two extreme scenarios described are how that guessing was priced; only findings that survive all of it are reported.

The UCLA team does not seem to have this problem (or at least they do not report it), as their tables carry a value for every person. Their methodology cites commercial casting databases (Gracenote Studio System, Luminate and IMDbPro) alongside their own research, and with a decade of accumulated records, institutional resources and the ability to contact people directly, they may genuinely have closed the gap that public records cannot close. The first edition of the report in 2014 allowed a person’s background to be “left blank if unascertainable”, but after that I can’t tell what happened to the unknowns.

I don’t like that I have any data gaps, so I dug a little deeper to understand if this could be skewing the results. I ran two sets of tests:

1. I re-researched a random sample of 242 people blind, twice over, to measure how often two honest attempts at the same person agree. For people with strong documentation, the answers agreed 94% of the time. For the middling cases, 74%. For the weakest, 57%. Those rates became probabilities, and I rebuilt the entire dataset 100 times, letting every uncertain person vary, and re-ran the headline models each time.

2. I ran the two most extreme scenarios possible, with every undocumented person assigned White, then every undocumented person assigned minority status. Whatever the truth is, it lives between those two brackets.

The result was that the error bars widen, the "more varied casts earn a bit more" signals dissolve into noise, and the small financing-shaped negative survives even the worst case. Most importantly, no assumption about the undocumented people, however extreme, produces a world in which cast diversity meaningfully lifts box office. So my handling of these 'unknowns' bothers me, but they do not change the conclusions.

For readability, I have been rather colloquial in the writing of the main article. For those who want the technical terms:

• The Mix Score is a bias-corrected Blau (Gini-Simpson) index

• Group Count is the exponential of Shannon entropy

• The models are ordinary least squares on logged revenue with standard errors clustered by distributor, Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood on real dollars, and quantile regressions at the median and 90th percentile

• Controls are genre, creative type, franchise and sequel status, animation, release year and month, with production budget included in half the specifications by design

• The uncertainty pass pools the redraws using Rubin’s rules

• The extreme scenarios are Manski-style bounds. The 108 specifications were fixed before any results were computed.

Quotes and figures attributed to the Hollywood Diversity Report series are taken from the published PDF editions, 2014 to 2026, all of which I read for this project; the winning-band chart is built from their own published tables. I want to repeat the point that their team has studied this field far longer than I have, with resources and data access I do not have, and where our approaches differ it does not follow that mine is right.

This is a summary of the overall claims they have centred their research around each year:

[2014] Films with Relatively Diverse Casts Excel at the Box Office

[2015] Evidence from this report (and its predecessor in the series) shows clearly that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content created with the input of diverse talent. Diversity sells.

[2016] Consistent with the findings of earlier reports in this series, new evidence from 2013-14 suggests that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film and television content.

[2022] films with casts that were from 21% to 30% minority enjoyed the highest median global box office receipts, while films with casts that were less than 11% minority were the poorest performers.

[2023] New evidence from 2022 continues to support findings from earlier reports in this series suggesting that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film content in both theatrical and streaming releases.

[2024] New evidence from 2023 continues to support findings from earlier reports in this series suggesting that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content in theatrical film releases.

[2026] As found throughout this report series, new evidence from 2025 further demonstrates that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content in theatrical film releases.

I contacted all the authors and the appropriate UCLA Press liaison. I asked them to share their data and/or to have a chat with any of them (on or off the record) to better understand their data and methods, and to look for weaknesses in my work. Both were refused (albeit politely!).

The 29 studies in the field chart, classified by whether the analysis controlled for budget, genre and release factors.

• Raw comparisons (9, all concluding diversity pays): the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report series (counted once), CAA's Motion Picture Diversity Index (2017), the CAA/shift7 female-led films study (2018), the Geena Davis Institute reports (2016 to 2019, counted once), ReFrame (2025), McKinsey (2021), Vocativ (2014), Slated (2016) and the BBC's return-on-investment analysis (2018).

• Controlled, positive (7): McKenzie (2010), Kuppuswamy and Younkin (2020), Zhong, Crema and Paserman (2024), Murray (2022), Nguyen (2023), Evans and colleagues (2024) and Valentowitsch (2023).

• Controlled, no effect (7): Lindner and colleagues (2015), FiveThirtyEight's controlled result (2014), Yang and colleagues (2020), USC Annenberg (2023), Roth and McAndrew (2026), Hesslevik and Ramm-Ericson (2024) and Ravi (2025).

• Controlled, negative abroad or split (6): USC Annenberg and ReFrame (2020), Pedace and colleagues (2019), Pattnaik and colleagues (2025), Giannetti and Chen (2023), Stroube and Waguespack (2024) and Fan (2021).

These classifications are mine, from each study's published method, with composite series counted once to avoid double-weighting.

As a side note, I do believe that advocacy research is perfectly capable of rigour. The most thorough controlled study in this field was commissioned by an advocacy group, and when its controls erased the famous claim that female-led films outperform, it published the null anyway. That study is "The Ticket to Inclusion" (2020), run by USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and commissioned by ReFrame, the gender-equity coalition founded by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film. It modelled 1,200 top films with controls for production cost, marketing, distribution and genre, and found the gender of the lead made no significant difference to revenue in either direction, while also showing that female-led and underrepresented-led films were given smaller budgets and narrower releases. Passionate advocates for change are the main reasons we have anything nice in this world, and in many cases it's the ONLY thing the oppressed have on their side. My issue here is method, not mission.

Everything here is association, not causation. Casts are chosen, not randomly assigned, and no statistical method can fully separate a cast from all the other decisions a studio makes alongside it. The budget pattern is a description, not a claim about the 'true value' of a movie. Cheaper films may cast differently rather than diverse projects being given less money.

No work like this is truly objective, and what we count is shaped by who we are. I am a middle-aged CIS white man living in a Western capital city, classifying the public identities of thousands of people I have never met. I have tried to let people’s own public statements lead wherever they exist, to log every judgement call, and to report what breaks my conclusions as prominently as what supports them. Despite trying to be aware and sensitive to all points and lived experience, it’s more than possible I have made mistakes or assumptions. I would be very keen to learn of any, and will be delighted to correct them. Please do reach out to help me in this regard.

Finally, I would love for this to be part of a big conversation. I don’t seek to police what people think or say, but I would ask two things:

1. Be nice. We’re all humans trying to make sense of the same confusing world. Treat others with respect and grace, and I’ll back you if others fail to afford you the same courtesies.

2. Focus. This article’s comments section is not where we are going to settle big questions like “What is a woman?” or “Is [x] racism?” The internet already has myriad places for everyone to shout their views. Let’s keep this one about the facts and methods listed above.

Epilogue - the world of AI-powered research

This project would have been impossible for one person until very recently. The person-by-person research ran on AI models, with research passes with live web search to find and read interviews and biographies (with every claim carrying its source), a separate auditing pass by a second model checking that each classification matched its own evidence, batch photo checks against my own manual review of around 650 photographs, and in-session research agents for the hardest cases.

The classification machinery ran over a handful of days and cost roughly $480. So a HUGE thank you to my paying subscribers who make this kind of research possible.

A decade ago this would have been a research team working for months. The Hollywood Diversity Report is what that fuller version looks like. It is a standing university research initiative with dedicated staff, commercial data subscriptions and, per its own acknowledgement pages, financial support from UCLA's Division of Social Sciences alongside sponsors including Netflix, the Golden Globe Foundation, the Latino Film Institute, Disney and Hulu. The report receives public money, too, in the form of a $250,000 allocation in California's 2021-22 state budget, and a $1.5 million state investment announced in 2022.

That money buys real things my $480 cannot, such as institutional memory, professional researchers, direct industry access and the ability to do this every single year.

When I started my journey into film data 15 years ago, I was 100% hand-coding and using Excel spreadsheets. As the tools have expanded, I’ve been able to operate at larger scales and in ever-increasing detail. That said, if you would have told me even a few years ago that a project of this depth could be done in just a few days by myself, I would have thought it fanciful.

While this is genuinely thrilling, it comes with limits worth naming:

1. An AI pipeline applies my judgement calls at scale, including any I got wrong.

2. It lacks the domain memory of researchers who have lived in this field for years.

3. Its consistency is only as good as the auditing conducted on it.

So I’m not saying ‘one person with AI beats an established research team’, but just that it is amazing how close one can get alone.

Put another way, I looked at over a million frames of Matt Damon’s on-screen performances to understand the power of his acting and his enduring charm.

Along the way, I assessed how much it’s cost for humanity to keep trusting Matt Damon (Hint: it's quadrillions of dollars).

I’ll be 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:

Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.

On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does - with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, 'Where's this page that you used to have and you don't have anymore?'

Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet.

First, some background

On Friday 17 October 1997, mathematician and former IBM software developer Bruce Nash launched a Geocities site that tracked 300 films.

Bruce described the launch in a 20th anniversary essay (which now survives only in the Internet Archive, for reasons that will become clear):

I hit a button in an Access database, uploaded some HTML pages to Geocities, and made a brief announcement on the Hollywood Stock Exchange message boards to let people know that I was starting to analyze box office for films to help them pick MovieStocks to trade on HSX.

From those humble beginnings, Bruce and the team he built around the site turned The Numbers into the film industry's most reliable financial source.

At the start of 2026, the database tracked 78,396 movies, 178,375 theatrical release records, and 236,176 people.

The robots arrive

During its lifetime, the challenges The Numbers has faced have changed immensely. For its first quarter century or so, the traffic was manageable and mostly polite. As Bruce puts it:

Pre-AI, we got human traffic, mostly well-behaved search engine crawlers, and a few people crawling the site for personal projects. If someone got too greedy, we could spot them and block them.

Over the past couple of years, website owners the world over have seen their web traffic change. What was initially only people browsing gave way to an ever-increasing number of bots. By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests.

The Numbers felt this shift in two distinct waves. The first started around 2024:

We saw a big increase in crawls as AI training joined the search engine crawlers. The AI crawlers are generally less well-behaved than the search engines, which increased the management tasks for us to keep the site running smoothly.

And the second wave was stronger and more damaging:

Around December 2025, we saw another big spike in traffic which I attribute to agentic AI: a combination of AI agents that scrape sites in response to prompts, and people being able to write agents that scrape sites.

Like every data-rich site, by early 2026 The Numbers was being hammered hard by AI bots scraping its pages over and over at an industrial scale. Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

Websites try to adapt to the new robots

This put enormous strain on the site, but Bruce and his team were able to take measures to mitigate the worst of it. One of the cleverest was talking to the robots in their own language:

There’s stuff on the site which is designed for an LLM to read, so that it can tell somebody ‘here’s how you licence the data’ rather than ‘here’s how you scrape the website’. It’s had a huge effect. We’re now getting probably ten times the volume of licensing enquiries.

But mitigation is not the same as escape. From December through early March, the team struggled to keep the site alive under the load. Bruce estimates that:

Around 90% of our time was spent keeping the existing site running while we spent our spare moments working on a new and improved system.

The problem was compounded by the site’s age: thirty years old, with approximately 160,000 source files serving around 2 million pages.

Then, in the early hours of Thursday 5 March, the servers collapsed.

The team scrambled to understand what had happened, initially assuming it was the sheer weight of AI traffic. It seems AI was to blame... but possibly not only in the way they first thought.

Buried in the flood of agentic traffic, the site’s logs showed something more pointed than scraping. As Bruce describes it:

Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.

On the advice of a friend who works in cybersecurity, the old server stayed off. For good. Restoring the backups and nursing the thirty-year-old site back online would have meant defending 160,000 legacy files against attackers who had spent months probing them.

The team rushed up a skeleton version of the website on new infrastructure, which could at least keep delivering the latest box office figures while they took stock of what had happened and what to do next. It went live on Friday 13 March.

Who would want private access to a box office website?

At first glance, The Numbers may not seem like an obvious target. It doesn’t collect credit card information, and there is no juicy customer data to flip on the dark web. It is a small, independent company that publishes how much money movies make.

How could someone expect to make money purely from having private access to their site?

In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s linked to prediction markets.

Polymarket runs weekly markets on opening weekends, and names The Numbers as the ultimate source of truth:

The ‘Daily Box Office Performance’ figures found on the ‘Box Office’ tab on this movie’s The Numbers page will be used to resolve this market once the values for the 3-day opening weekend are final.

The sums on any single weekend market are modest by financial-market standards, typically in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a couple of million dollars across live box office markets at any given time.

If you could see The Numbers data before everyone else, every single week, you would have a significant edge over all the other traders - learning the answers slightly ahead of publication would allow you to front-run the trades.

In a situation like this, it is hard to know for certain what happened. We know that the logs showed months of automated probing and scraping of the site, but what finally brought the site down, and who did it, remains an open question.

But the theory that someone used AI to develop an advantage in a prediction market is entirely plausible. The Numbers experience shows us that:

1. We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money.

2. Hacking websites is now something anyone can do with a cheap AI subscription.

3. The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile in the face of large-scale swarms of agentic AI bots.

How hard is hacking these days, anyway?

In November 2025, Anthropic (the AI lab behind Claude) published a report on what it called the first documented AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. A state-sponsored group had used its coding tool to attack roughly 30 organisations, with the AI performing 80% to 90% of the work and humans stepping in at only 4 to 6 decision points per campaign.

Anthropic’s own conclusion was:

The barriers to performing sophisticated cyberattacks have dropped substantially, and we predict that they’ll continue to do so.

In an earlier threat report, Anthropic were even clearer:

Criminals with few technical skills are using AI to conduct complex operations, such as developing ransomware, that would previously have required years of training.

Meanwhile, an autonomous AI penetration tester called XBOW reached number one on HackerOne’s US leaderboard, the ranking of the people (formerly all people) who find security holes in real companies for bounties, submitting nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities along the way.

Getting access to a thirty-year-old website with 160,000 legacy files is exactly the kind of known-flaw surface that AI tools have made cheap to probe. The expertise barrier that once protected small sites from all but the most determined attackers has largely evaporated.

What now for The Numbers?

Bruce and his team were relatively lucky. Despite having their entire site knocked out overnight, they were able to keep going. The Numbers has always been free to use, and the site hasn’t relied heavily on advertising for the past few years, so the outage didn’t destroy an income stream they depended on.

Their core business is tied to selling bulk data through the OpusData service, producing comp analysis reports for filmmakers and investors, and publishing the Business Report - all of which were unaffected by the public site going down.

But they do need to build an entirely new website, from scratch, to host those 78,396 movies, 178,375 release records and 236,176 people. Restoring the site from a backup wasn’t an option, as Bruce points out:

It was really clear that we couldn’t just put that server up again, because it would inevitably be brought down again, possibly within minutes.

That is why the site came back bare-bones in mid-March, and why features are returning gradually rather than all at once.

Right now, the team is having to reconsider what a public website even means in 2026. Bruce’s analysis is that The Numbers used to serve two audiences (human beings and search engines) and now serves roughly six: humans, search engines, LLM training runs, prompt-based AI traffic, agentic AI, and prediction market punters. Each has different needs and a different traffic profile. As he puts it:

We’ve gone from a world where running a web site meant focusing on three things (content, ads, and SEO) to about eight to ten different factors that go into every design decision.

The goal, he says, is to support all six audiences, with new OpusData services and online features for Business Report subscribers, and, importantly, to help regular human users of the site regain the data it has always provided, some of it in new and improved form.

How bad could bot scraping really be?

Pretty bad, tbh. Enough that site owners such as Bruce have to question the value of something that will take so much time and money to build and defend.

Cloudflare, which protects a huge share of the world’s websites, publishes data on how many pages each AI platform crawls for every one visitor it sends back to the websites it crawled.

Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.

Note that the scale is logarithmic, i.e. each step along the bottom is ten times bigger than the last, because otherwise the differences are quite literally too large for me to include on one chart.

For the history of the internet to date, the principle of the open web was that, in return for letting the search engine robots read your site, they would send you readers. But now, that trade no longer applies. The number of robots has exploded, and they no longer send anyone back.

When this firehose is aimed at a small site, it can inflate the bandwidth bill and possibly even take down an entire site. Sites which can relate to Bruce’s experience include:

• Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts documentation for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5,000 in bandwidth.

• iFixit, the repair-guide database, logged a million hits from Anthropic’s crawler in a single day.

• Triplegangers, a seven-person company selling 3D scans, was knocked offline during business hours by OpenAI’s bot, in what its CEO described as “basically a DDoS attack”. The founder of code-hosting service SourceHut reported spending “anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week” fighting AI crawlers, with “dozens of brief outages per week”.

• The editor of Linux news site LWN described crawler traffic from “literally millions of IP addresses” and concluded: “it is a distributed denial-of-service attack”.

• When the GNOME open-source project measured its traffic, roughly 97% turned out to be bots.

• A university library banned 16,000 IP addresses in 48 hours to keep its catalogue online.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, reported in April 2025 that bots account for about 35% of its pageviews but at least 65% of its most expensive traffic, because crawlers bulk-read obscure pages that human readers rarely touch.

Six months later came the other half of the squeeze, when Wikipedia’s human pageviews fell roughly 8% year on year, as people increasingly get Wikipedia’s knowledge from AI summaries without ever visiting Wikipedia. The machines are taking both the content and the readers at an industrial scale, too.

Testing it in public

AI tools are some of the most powerful and destructive things humans have ever created. And they are being effectively tested by the public in real time in the real world. When the Manhattan Project was trying to work out the power of their atomic tech, they did not do so by sending everyone the specs each morning and seeing which houses blew up.

The world we have built thus far is so incredibly ill-prepared for the power and scale of the AI models we all have access to.

I don’t wish for this to sound like a one-sided anti-AI fear campaign. There is a lot to like about AI and what it can do for the human race. But we do need to consider the world we’re currently stepping into.

What breaks first are the things built for the old internet. The open web was built on assumptions such as that visitors are mostly human, that traffic roughly tracks readership, and that the cost of serving your site is related to the value you get from serving it. Every one of those assumptions is now out of date.

A year ago, Cloudflare launched pay-per-crawl, letting sites charge AI crawlers per page. Last week, it went further, announcing a pay-per-use model in which publishers get paid when their content actually appears in an AI answer, and declaring that, from 15 September, its customers’ ad-supported pages will block unpaid “mixed-use” crawlers by default.

Whether any of this works depends on whether the AI companies play along rather than route around it. But as Bruce put it to me, somebody has to try.

Epilogue

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

Last month I was asked to return, this time to look into the future and consider what the German cinema industry might want to do.

(I am aware that an Englishman going over to Germany and saying “This is what you must do” is a tough gig! But the organisers were very supportive, the audience highly engaged, and overall I feel my suggestions were taken in the spirit they were intended. Zum Glück!)

Today’s article is a précis of the ideas, partly as a record and because many of the lessons will apply to countries worldwide.

A quick recap: the two German cinemas

Last year I showed that German cinema has two distinct identities depending on who is watching. At home, the box office belongs to comedies and family films. They are warm, silly, hugely popular and almost never seen outside German-speaking countries. Abroad, the German films that succeed are serious dramas about moral conflict, psychological weight and difficult history.

Comedies and family films have taken 73% of the domestic box office for German-language films since 2000. In North America, those same kinds of films account for 0.9% of German-language cinema's earnings.

Two cinemas, in other words - one that stays home and one that travels.

How the world talks about German film

To add to last year’s findings, I also gathered 25 years of articles from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen and Deadline, around 1.3 million pieces in total, and identified roughly 49,000 that concern German film.

Then I counted the language used about seven major film nations: how often each country’s cinema is described in terms of success and breakouts, versus crisis and decline.

Every country gets more crisis talk than success talk. That is simply how trade journalism works. But the size of the gap varies a lot, and Germany’s is the widest of any nation I studied.

To be clear, this doesn’t show that German cinema is in decline. Instead, it shows how German cinema is framed in the press, which shapes whether an audience, a commissioner, or a distributor gives a film a chance.

So German cinema carries a reputation problem it hasn’t earned. Which turns out to be less of a burden than you’d think, because reputations like this can flip.

The world falls for a country’s cinema in waves

International attention doesn’t spread evenly across the world’s film industries. It moves in waves.

• France had the New Wave, which reset the country’s cinematic reputation for a generation.

• City of God put Brazilian film on the world map.

• Britain has had at least two “British cinema is back” moments, one around Chariots of Fire and one around Four Weddings and a Funeral.

• Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También launched a new generation of Mexican cinema.

• Dogme 95 made Denmark, a country of six million people, a global brand.

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon opened Western audiences to Chinese-language cinema.

What makes these waves so valuable is that a single breakout film gets audiences fired up to ask what else there is, and when there’s a shelf of films waiting, many films benefit from this new halo.

The Parasite effect

Earlier this year I published a study of what happens to a country’s films after it wins the Best International Feature Oscar. I tracked the entire back catalogue of each winning nation, 12,267 films across nine countries, in the year before and after the ceremony, using Wikipedia attention and almost ten million written audience reviews.

After Parasite won, attention to Korea’s entire back catalogue rose by around a quarter relative to its peers, and the review data showed an even bigger jump. The lift lasted for years. And it wasn’t just people discovering Bong Joon-ho: the whole of Korean cinema rose by about the same amount.

Notice that Germany is on that chart too. All Quiet on the Western Front won four Oscars and moved the rest of German cinema by a modest 8%, with some of that due to Netflix’s global release rather than the award.

It could be argued that had that film received a proper cinematic release (as opposed to being a streaming title), the effect would have been larger and more profound.

The broader point is that a single film can really lift an entire national cinema. It has happened, measurably, within the last six years. It’s not something we can conjure with certainty, but we can describe the conditions which make it most likely to happen.

Three conditions at once

Parasite did three things simultaneously.

1. It reached the world.

2. It was genuinely popular, a tense, funny thriller rather than a critics-only piece.

3. And it was completely, unmistakably Korean, with no attempt to sand that off for export.

Germany’s version of that film would need the same three things: international, mainstream and deeply German. Here’s what the data says about each.

1. It needs to reach the world

The reflex here is that German films don’t travel. That used to be a reasonable bet, but streaming has changed the landscape.

Dear Child, a German-language thriller, reached number one on Netflix in 92 countries and was the second most-watched title on the entire platform in the second half of 2023, behind only Korea’s The Glory. Around 90% of the audience for Dark was outside Germany, in German, with subtitles. All Quiet on the Western Front surpassed 150 million hours viewed, and its viewership tripled when the Oscar nominations were announced.

And when the films themselves don’t travel, the stories do. Wikipedia maintains a category of remakes of German films that runs to over 150 titles, with no comparable list flowing the other way. Fack ju Göhte, a German school comedy that never stood a chance in English-language cinemas, became No Manches Frida, a Mexican franchise worth roughly $50m. Paramount has held the remake rights to Toni Erdmann since 2017, at one point with Jack Nicholson attached. The BBC remade the cult NDR comedy Der Tatortreiniger as The Cleaner, written by and starring Greg Davies.

2. It needs to be properly mainstream

While the international community of cinephiles might think of prestige, dour dramas when they think of German cinema, within Germany it’s another matter. Multiplexes are regularly packed with home-grown, mainstream hits.

Der Schuh des Manitu sold 11.7 million tickets; six German films have surpassed seven million admissions; and only last year, Das Kanu des Manitu sold around five million tickets.

In a symbiotic loop of film and filmmakers, Germany has a wealth of experienced mainstream talent to draw from.

• Michael “Bully” Herbig holds the all-time number-one and number-two spots.

• Bora Dağtekin has released six films, and each has surpassed 2 million admissions.

• Elyas M’Barek anchored a trilogy that sold over 21 million tickets.

• Til Schweiger topped the annual box office repeatedly as both director and star.

While these will be household names to most Germans, they barely register outside of Germany. In my trade press dataset, the most-covered German film-makers are Wenders, Tykwer, Akin, Herzog and Petzold. Wonderful film-makers all, but they are the festival names.

The directors who actually pack German cinemas are pretty much invisible abroad. The world’s press covers the German cinema of prizes and misses the German cinema of crowds. Hence, why one film alone could awaken international audiences to Germany’s goldmine.

3. It needs to be undeniably German

The final part of the puzzle is to ensure that this breakout film is undeniably German.

Parasite was full of Korean specifics, and that specificity is what made the world curious. The equivalent German move is to lean into what the world already admires about Germany, and the polling on that is remarkably strong:

• Germany holds the number-one “Made in” label on Earth, ranking first among 49 countries in the Made-in-Country-Index.

• 48% of global consumers trust German products “a lot”, the highest of any country YouGov tested.

• It is the second-most admired nation brand in the world and the first in Europe, having held the global top spot from 2017 to 2022.

• 73% of people say German cars are the best in the world.

• Gallup has rated Germany’s leadership the most approved of any major power for six years running.

• The Brothers Grimm tales are inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World and translated into more than 160 languages. The world’s most famous fairy-tale castle is Bavarian, and Disney’s logo owes it a debt.

Engineering, precision, order, fairy tales, music, forests, castles. They may, at first blush, feel like clichés, but they are, in fact, the best route to promoting Germany and German culture. They are pre-sold story worlds the global audience already trusts, the same way The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey sold the world exactly what it expected of Britain.

Two out of three, every time

As you can see, Germany already excels at all the other things our mythical new breakthrough needs to do. Many films have hit two out of the three requirements.

But I believe that all three are needed. With just two, you get the following:

• Anonymous. International and mainstream, but not German. Films built to travel with the Germany taken out: shot in English, or a minority stake in someone else’s production. They reach people, but nothing of Germany travels with them.

• Prestige festival dramas. International and German, but not mainstream. Toni Erdmann, The Lives of Others, All Quiet. Unmistakably German and they travel, but to festivals and critics rather than a mass audience.

• Home hits. Mainstream and German, but not international. The comedies and family films German audiences adore, which the world never sees.

Three overlaps, all of them real, familiar, repeatedly successful kinds of German film. And a centre, where all three meet, that is empty.

Germany has never made a film that is international, mainstream, and unmistakably German at the same time.

What the film might look like

Here is a checklist for factors which are likely to improve the film’s path to success:

• Fun first. Parasite was a thriller before it was anything else. Films break out by being entertaining, not by being important.

• Unmistakably German. The specificity is the point, not something to hide or overcome.

• A universal feeling underneath. A local layer on the surface, and something everyone knows beneath it. War, family, survival, love, grief, betrayal, revenge, justice, ambition, freedom, guilt, sacrifice, belonging, growing up, growing old. Or the brighter register: joy, friendship, first love, laughter, hope, wonder, homecoming, a dream coming true.

• A genre to carry it. Genre is the passport that gets a local story across a border. Thrillers and science fiction travel best; comedy travels worst, which is precisely why Germany’s biggest domestic genre has stayed home.

• A bench behind it. When curious viewers come looking for more, there has to be somewhere to go. Korea had Oldboy, Memories of Murder and Train to Busan waiting. Germany’s shelf runs from Metropolis and Nosferatu to Fassbinder, Wenders and Dark. Few countries have a deeper one.

• Built for streaming. The modern breakout may be a series, and may never see a cinema. That is where the world now discovers non-English stories.

The empty middle

Germany makes films that travel, films that fill cinemas, and films that are gloriously, specifically German. It's time they did all three and aimed for what Parasite did, hopefully lifting the whole national cinema.

Notes

The trade press analysis covers around 1.3 million articles from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen and Deadline, 2000 to 2025, of which roughly 49,000 concern German film. The success/crisis comparison counts articles using breakout and success vocabulary versus crisis and decline vocabulary, applied identically across all seven countries. It measures the language of coverage, not the performance of the industries, and word-counting of this kind is a blunt instrument at the level of any single article. The cross-country comparison is more robust than the absolute percentages.

The Oscar halo analysis is described in full, with its own methodology notes, in my April piece on Parasite. In brief: winners of Best International Feature; each country’s back catalogue (excluding the winner) tracked for 12 months either side of the ceremony; controlled against the average of the other tracked countries, using Wikipedia pageviews and around 10 million dated audience reviews.

German admissions figures come from the FFA (the German Federal Film Board) and InsideKino and are measured by tickets sold rather than revenue, so that films from different decades can be compared fairly. The figure for Otto – Der Film excludes East German admissions; including them would lift it to roughly 14.5 million, putting it at the top of the list.

Netflix reach figures are drawn from Netflix’s published Top 10 and engagement reports, as well as third-party trackers (FlixPatrol, What’s on Netflix). Netflix self-reports these numbers and changed its headline metric in late 2021, so treat them as directional rather than audited.

I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, 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!).

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

So I went looking for real-world examples of indie movies where the people behind them had published how much they spent on marketing, and why.

I ended up with 57 case files, built from interviews, Substack post-mortems, podcast transcripts and the small number of organisations that publish full release ledgers.

The four big lessons

Across the 57 cases I looked at for this piece, four key lessons kept occurring to me.

1. You need to seriously budget for marketing. The filmmakers who fared best (Hundreds of Beavers, Columbus, Thunder Road) had already raised money before they needed it. The ones who suffered most ran out mid-release, such as the team behind the Oscar-shortlisted documentary UNION (2024), who published their campaign sums ($800,000 planned for an 18-month campaign, $400,000 actually raised against a $1.2m production budget), wrote that their theatrical “could have kept going to even more success, but ran out of money to fund our modest social media ad budget”.

   

2. Theatrical almost never recoups directly. “The theatrical release did not come close to recouping” (You, Me & Her). “Was not profitable. P&A is truly costly” is how Lisa Hurwitz put it in her account of self-distributing the documentary The Automat (2022) into 100+ cinemas, where her cut of the $255,000 box office “nearly covered” the $100,000 P&A. The 306 Hollywood team knew from the outset it was “nearly impossible to make a lot of money from our theatrical”. “Expect to lose money” (Bomb It). What theatrical bought, in many cases, was legitimacy that led to later deals and revenue.

3. The biggest line item is not in the budget. The Beavers team valued their unpaid social labour at $150,000–$250,000. The UNION team “primarily worked for free throughout 2024”. Hammond counted 18 months as “a part-time marketer and DVD shipper” against his Sriracha profits. Warshawski toured Big Sonia for two years and reported the damage to her health. When you read about a film doing miraculously well on a low- or no-budget, look for the unpaid labour that made it happen.

4. The numbers are shaky, hidden, and rarely complete. Very few filmmakers are kind enough to share their costs, and there are no effective tools to make a reasonable guess from the outside. Even when there are publicly agreed numbers, they often don’t tell the full story. For example, the trades said Eno grossed $300k, but its actual US revenue was $730k when the filmmaker-led one-off events are included. Burn grossed more than $1 million with no distributor at all, almost none of it through channels the trades track. The documentary Age of Champions (2011) built more than $1.5 million from screening kits, speaking fees and sponsorships, almost entirely outside every reporting system in the industry.

Let’s start with a few excellent full case studies and after that go into the individual line items.

“Hundreds of Beavers”

The most recent and most complete case study is Hundreds of Beavers (2024). The film cost $150,000 to make, but when producer Kurt Ravenwood was offered an MG (minimum guarantee) of just $30k, he declined and opted for self-distribution.

The total release cost was “approximately $135,000”, meaning they spent almost as much releasing the film as making it. Kurt opened his books to Jon Reiss over a 90-minute video I highly suggest watching.

In the end, the movie grossed just over $1.5m in cinemas worldwide, plus roughly $500,000 on digital platforms and $250,000 in merchandise sales (according to Wikipedia).

This is also a good example of the value of unpaid labour. The team ran their own social media for two years at no cash cost.

Large scale social media engagement was done by producers and SRH at no cost - this would have normally cost between $150K-$250K if they were paid for it.

The unpaid labour was worth more than the entire cash release budget.

“You, Me & Her”

You, Me & Her (2025) is the same shape at a higher price point, as seen in Distribution Advocates’ case study. Selina Ringel and Dan Levy Dagerman made their rom-com for $500,000, and then raised an additional $350,000 for theatrical marketing and distribution.

That paid for a national release across more than 250 cinemas, a $100,000 marketing co-op with exhibitors, 250 influencer boxes, and digital billboards in Times Square and on Sunset Boulevard (a bargain at $3,000, “affordable due to timing and inventory”).

The theatrical release did not come close to recouping the cost to market and distribute the film. But the visibility we generated would ultimately help to secure a STARZ SVOD deal and in-flight licensing agreements with American Airlines, Qantas, and Jetstar through Encore Inflight.

Theatrical has traditionally been seen as a loss leader for many movies. The splashy, big release increases awareness and cements the movie's status as a ‘proper movie’ in the public eye. The filmmakers can then (hopefully) reap the rewards of their all-important “third window” (such as VHS, DVD, or TV), where costs were much lower.

“Sriracha”

The most complete micro-budget P&L belongs to Griffin Hammond’s Sriracha (2013), a documentary made for $12,728 that then spent $27,807 on marketing and distribution, more than twice its production cost.

Hammond published everything at 18 months and again at 36 months, revealing $136,813 of revenue, $78,186 of profit, 42 festival submissions at an average of $42 each, and the sobering discovery that ad-supported YouTube paid him $341 for 127,485 views.

The pre-pandemic Sundance case studies

The Sundance Creative Distribution case studies remain the most granular release breakdowns, and although they describe a 2017–18 world, their category splits are still the best benchmark we have at scale.

Columbus (2017) turned down a $150,000 all-rights offer against a $700,000 budget and self-released with a final P&A budget of $189,032. PR took $51,328 (close to 30% of the P&A budget), theatrical costs $50,673, and social media ads $24,000, split $8,000 theatrical, $12,000 iTunes, $4,000 boosting posts. The film grossed $1,014,533 in domestic cinemas, and per the case study:

More than twice as much money came back to the filmmakers in the self-release model as compared with a hypothetical traditional distribution arrangement.

Thunder Road (2018) did it smaller, with a distribution and marketing budget “just under $70,000” on a $200,000 film, after rejecting a $125,000 minimum guarantee. By January 2019 it had netted about $510,000 across all platforms. The single biggest revenue line was, unusually, airlines, at $166,396, at over ten times the theatrical take ($12,345).

And at the micro end, distributor Matt Grady of Factory 25 published a complete ledger for Christmas, Again (2014) on Sundance’s blog: PR $10,000, marketing $2,500, digital deliverables $3,400, an LA four-wall $5,000, and so on. $23,550 costs against combined digital and theatrical income of $20,004. They noted that they expect a Netflix deal later, see it as “the tipping point financially”.

Assorted other case studies

A few others worth a read:

• SADIE (2018): $650,000 budget; declined a 25%-of-budget MG; set aside $50,000 for marketing plus a $100,000 non-recoupable Amazon Festival Stars bonus; did not recoup. Producer Lacey Leavitt’s honest write-up is at Dear Producer.

• First Girl I Loved (2016): P&A “approached six figures”, including roughly $35,000 of social ads; approached three times its best Sundance offer. Producer Ross Putman wrote it up for Sundance.

• The Discoverers (2014): raised $100,000 on Kickstarter purely for distribution; split 31% exhibition, 37% publicity/marketing/creative, 32% advertising. The filmmakers’ account is at IndieWire.

• Red State (2011): Kevin Smith toured his $4m thriller as 15 one-night events with “less than $500 in paid advertising”, grossing $851,832 on tour (IndieWire, IGN). His stated alternative: “minimum $10 million on P&A” for a traditional release.

• Marcus Markou’s Papadopoulos & Sons (2012). Markou self-financed the £825,222 film and self-released it in the UK on a P&A budget of £35,525, itemised down to £1,000 for the BBFC certificate and £8,000 of Facebook ads targeted at people with ‘Greek interests’ living near Greek churches. It took the second-highest screen average of its opening weekend. The full costs and income are in my original article from 2015.

• Christmas, Again’s small but successful holiday release costing $24,000.

Publicists and PR

If there is one cost every self-releasing filmmaker eventually confronts, it is the cost of a publicist. The disclosed fees run from $2,000 to $54,000, and the verdicts run from “well worth it” to a lawsuit.

Part of the reason I saw such a wide range of costs across the examples is that “Publicity” isn't a single thing. It’s a collection of the full cost of activities, ranging in scope, scale, and complexity.

In the chart below, the Columbus and Unrest figures are total PR spend across the entire campaign (consultants, print ads, travel, press screenings), whereas the 1946 figure is a publicity firm’s fee within a $75,000 theatrical release. The small ones are single engagements.

Read more

One finding was that women were less likely than men to make a second film on the same scale. A few of you got in touch to ask for more details on this, so I went back to the numbers.

I studied the career paths of 1,765 directors, all of whom have directed a top-grossing movie since 1980. I looked at the professional work they had done since directing a movie that appeared on the ‘top 100 US-grossing’ chart that year. More detailed information about my methodology is at the end of the article.

Among directors who reached the top 100 and had plenty of time to go again, 53% of men directed a second top-grossing film, but only 40% of women did.

So I wanted to know why. And the answer turned out to depend almost entirely on one thing: how well the first film did.

Does the size of the first film matter?

I sorted every director by the size of their first top-grossing film, using its US box office rank that year, and then checked how many went on to a second.

When the first film was a genuine smash (i.e. one of the 33 biggest of its year) the gap disappears. In fact, women actually do a touch better, getting a second film 76% of the time, compared to 72% for men.

This means that if you’re seen as a successful director, then your gender does not seem to matter much. Money talks!

(This is the same logic as the famous orchestra experiments, in which putting a screen between the musician and the panel sharply increased the number of women hired. A hard, objective signal leaves less room for bias.)

But if you fall short of expectations, a gender divide comes into play. Among directors whose first film landed outside the very top tier, 46% of men went on to have a second top-grossing film, but just 29% of women did.

You might reasonably wonder if that is about gender at all. Perhaps the female directors simply made smaller or less commercial first films, and are being judged on the film rather than on being women. I tested this with a model that holds the first film's size and the era it came out in steady.

Even when you line up a man and a woman whose first films performed identically in the same years, the woman’s odds of a second top-grossing film are about 40% lower.

A recent study of French cinema found the same asymmetry from the other direction, with box-office success raising a woman's chance of directing again far more than a man's.

What happens after a flop?

The sharpest version of this is what happens when a first film loses money.

When a director’s debut lost money at the US box office, the men still returned to the top 100 at 35%, versus just 25% for the women. When the first film made money, the men returned at 59%, the women at 44%.

A man is forgiven for a first film that underperforms. A woman, by and large, is not.

This is not unique to film. Economists have long found the same forgiveness gap in other high-pressure jobs. Female surgeons lose far more referrals than male surgeons after a patient dies, female financial advisers are more likely to be sacked and less likely to be rehired after misconduct, and women whose start-up fails are markedly less likely than their male co-founders to get funded again. Psychologists have a name for the underlying habit: a man’s failure tends to be read as bad luck, a woman’s as a lack of ability.

This is not news to the people at the coalface. Actor and director Eva Longoria put it like this in 2023:

The problem is if this movie fails, people go, ‘Oh Latino stories don’t work…female directors really don’t cut it.’ We don’t get a lot of at-bats. A white male can direct a $200 million film, fail and get another one. That’s the problem. I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.

But did the women just step back?

Another suggestion, following the previous article, was that female directors may be stepping back from directing due to family commitments.

Directing a huge film is brutal on your private life, no matter your age, gender or support network, with 14+ hour days for the best part of two years. If anything, the economics would predict that women would bear the brunt of this. Claudia Goldin won a Nobel prize for showing that jobs which reward long, inflexible, always-on hours push out whoever carries the caregiving load, usually mothers.

Directing a tentpole is about as greedy a job as it gets, which makes what the data show all the more surprising. So do these demands lead to more women choosing to step back than men?

The data says no.

If women were leaving in their late thirties to raise children, you would see a bump in the ages at which they stop directing. As the chart below clearly shows, there is no baby bump.

The two curves sit almost on top of each other, and both peak around 60. Women who eventually stop directing make their last film at a median age of 61, the men at 60.

Only about one in ten of either gender makes their last film between 35 and 45. If anything, the women keep going a little longer, with directing careers that run about three years more than the men’s after their first big film.

The second convincing piece of evidence debunking the ‘women chose to leave’ myth is that the women who don’t get that second top-grossing film have not, for the most part, left directing altogether.

Among directors who never returned to the top 100, the women carried on directing other things, smaller films, television, shorts, at almost exactly the same rate as the men (86% against 88%). They actually directed slightly more of them.

USC Annenberg reached the same conclusion when they asked the people who actually hire directors. In their interviews, work and family balance ranked well below gendered financing and male-dominated networks as the reasons women were missing.

The female directors did not stop directing, but the industry stopped offering them big jobs.

This fits something I found a decade ago in a study I conducted for Directors UK, that women were less likely to be handed a second, third or fourth film even after directing their first.

Epilogue

This is all rather depressing, but in the pursuit of finding an encouraging angle to end on, I will note that this is a narrow problem, and a fixable one.

The entrance is already roughly fair, and the evidence shows that women lack neither talent (their films score no worse with critics), ambition (in one study, 44% of female directors said they wanted to make big-budget films, even as most doubted they would get the chance), drive, nor staying power.

The thing that would move the numbers most is unglamorous and entirely within the industry's gift. Let women fail like men, and hire them back anyway.

Notes

For today’s research, I defined a “top-grossing film” as one of the 100 highest-grossing releases at the US box office in its initial year. A “top-grossing director” is anyone who directed a film that grossed over $100 million, and a “first-time” top-grossing director is one who reaches that group for the first time. Co-directors are each counted. My study covers first appearances from 1980 to 2025, 1,765 directors in all. This top-100 framing follows the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s annual analysis of the director’s chair, which I rebuilt to track each director’s career.

Box office data came from The Numbers, Box Office Mojo, and Wikipedia. Directors, prior roles, release years and dates of birth are from Wikidata, OMDb, IMDb, The Numbers, Opus and other data sources.

The headline second-film figures (40% of women and 53% of men) and all the splits below use directors who reached the top 100 by 2018, so everyone has had at least seven years to make another film. That is 1,399 directors.

A director is considered to have stopped directing if their last credited directing work, of any kind, was in 2021 or earlier. For the age analysis, I used directors who arrived by 2015 and have a recorded birth year. The “kept directing” figure counts any directing credit for a film, short, or television programme after the first top-grossing film, but not any additional top-100 films.

I measured the size of a first film by its US box office rank that year, splitting into the top third (ranks 1 to 33), the middle third (34 to 66), and the lower third (67 to 100). The “below the top tier” figure combines the middle and lower thirds. The female groups in these bands are small (25, 36 and 43 directors), so the individual bars are best read together rather than one at a time. The pattern runs the same way across all of them.

To check that the gap was not just women making smaller first films, I ran a logistic regression of whether a director made a second top-grossing film, against gender, the inflation-adjusted domestic box office of their first film (logged), and the year they arrived. Holding the first film’s size and the era constant, women had about 40% lower odds of a second film (odds ratio 0.60; 95% confidence interval 0.39 to 0.91; statistically significant).

The money-lost-or-made comparison uses the 936 first films for which I had a production budget, comparing the budget to the domestic box office. The group of women whose first film lost money is small (8 directors), so treat that particular pair as indicative rather than precise. The direction matches everything else.

A director’s gender was applied across their whole career, using their present-day identity. This is a very minor point from a purely data perspective, which is why it is in the Notes rather than flagged in the main article. However, I know it will animate some people on either end of a topic where feelings run high.

It’s relevant here as both Wachowskis identify today as transgender women, using the pronouns she/her, but were seen as men when they co-directed their first top 100 film The Matrix in 1999.

I cannot profess to have any special insight into the best way to tackle this. It’s a deep topic that many people feel aggrieved by. I would note that the comments section of this article is hardly the right forum to debate something as big as ‘What is a woman?’ No one is going to solve anything, nor change anyone’s mind.

Whichever perspective you take, this decision accounts for just 1.9% of the directing credits for the year 1999 and 0.27% of all directing credits I studied.

I genuinely want to hear from everyone in the comments. Feel free to share your thoughts, ask me anything, challenge me, etc. Just be nice to each other. I won’t delete comments I disagree with, but I will remove nasty ones.

If you would like a slightly more… ahem… sensible reading of the data, you may want to check out my article from a few weeks ago, titled "Are film directors getting older?"

I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, 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: