Guarantees exist for the strong, and not for the weak. The armour of ‘orthodox’ finance envelops the mighty. The humble stand naked and are expected to feel ashamed.

A lot has changed over the past 75 years, but I suspect that the average modern film producer will hear that quote and feel seen!

So when I came to write a piece about ‘everything that’s wrong with film finance’, I was struck by just how many of the complaints people have are as old as the invention of film itself.

This is all in preparation for a series of projects I’m doing with the legendary Phil Hunt. Phil lends to and invests in independent films and has executive produced more than 300 features, but financed almost 600

Phil and I are doing three things together:

• We’ve co-written a paper entitled ‘Where film money will come from in 2027’ which you can download here.

• On 8 December, we’re hosting a free webinar entitled ‘What you can’t look up about film finance’, where we’ll take a finance package apart line by line, live. Sign up here.

• The main piece is our live online course, Advanced Film Financing, which runs as six live sessions from 12 to 28 January 2027 and ends with a meet-up at the European Film Market in Berlin on Friday 12 February. Find out more and book your place here.

All three projects are here to help you finance your film. As part of that, it’s time we were honest about the issues and shortcomings in the film financing sector.

Some of these are inherent in the nature of the beast, rather than failings of the people involved. The way I see it is that there are two types of people involved with film financing:

1. People trying to make money

2. People trying to make films

As much as they might not like to admit it, they need each other. And each is willing to do a bit of the other's job to get what they really want (producers learn to talk about returns and financiers learn to talk about cast).

But almost everyone knows which camp they're in, and most problems happen where the two meet but cannot agree.

With that in mind, below are 20 ways I think the film finance system is flawed - ten of which are new and ten which are as old as time.

1. Nobody pays the asking price

When a sales agent prices a film for a lender, each territory gets two numbers. The ‘ask’ is where the agent opens negotiations, and the ‘take’ is what they expect to settle for. Across 1,120 territory estimates I studied, the median ask was exactly twice the take, and 27% of all asks were precisely double.

The chart below shows the 40 territory deals I could match to an estimate, and what each one closed at for every $100 the agent asked.

The median deal closed at $60, and only 5 of the 40 reached the ask. Measured against the take, the same deals landed almost exactly on target. So the take is a fair guess, and the ask is an opening bid. Lenders lend against the take.

The trouble starts when a producer builds a plan on the bigger number, and when I spoke to Phil about it, he described how that happens:

Quite often the producer asks the sales agent to nudge the estimates up a bit, because that’s how they make the numbers close. Everyone knows the ask is optimistic. The lender’s job is to work out what’s real.

2. Investors only win on hits

After tracking almost a billion dollars of investments across a number of major films, I calculated that investors got $0.77 back for every dollar invested. And that's before we account for inflation, opportunity cost, or risk.

For films that grossed under 2.5 times their budget at the box office, investors got their money back in 3% of cases. Above that line, it was 85%.

About 5 cents of every box-office dollar reached investors.

3. A few films earn all the money

In one slate of almost 100 movies, the top five films brought in 42% of the money. The bottom half of the slate (49 films) brought in 6% between them.

I’ve written more about this before, in an article entitled How to make money in film when nobody can predict a hit.

4. The producer gets paid last

In a 2025 survey of 107 UK producers, 89% said the job was not sustainable. Deferring part of the fee until the film earns money is the traditional way to close a budget gap, and in the UK survey I covered last week, 94% of producers who deferred a fee never received it.

It starts long before the money arrives. Kevin Loader, who has produced films including The Lady in the Van, described development to Screen in 2023.

You go to the development meeting and you’re the only person in the room not being paid.

5. Distributors don’t always pay

The Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA) publishes awards from its arbitration service, where many unpaid deals end up. Between 2007 and 2021, over 200 cases involved an agreed minimum guarantee that went unpaid. In 92% of cases, the distributor was ordered to pay. (Being ordered to pay isn’t the same as paying, of course!)

When I spoke to Phil, he described how it goes wrong before anyone reaches arbitration.

MGs are smaller than they were, and more of them are paid on delivery or in instalments instead of on signature. A distributor under pressure will reject delivery on a technicality and hold back the money while everyone argues. And some of them go under before they pay.

6. Money can vanish in the middle

A film’s income passes through several companies before it reaches anyone who financed it, and sometimes one of them fails. When distributor Kew Media collapsed in 2020, it owed nearly £11m to producers and other clients, and its administrators said they did not expect producers to get much back.

A year earlier, the UK collection agent MM Cam (the company whose whole job is to hold a film’s income safely and pay it out in order) left around 200 filmmaking teams waiting.

When the distributor Metrodome was wound up, its unsecured creditors got 0.63p in the pound. In case you read that wrong, that’s NOT 63p (i.e. 63% back), but £0.0063 (i.e. under 1%).

The contracts often outlive the companies. Sales agency agreements can run for 25 years, which is longer than most sales agents, as I discovered in my research entitled How long do film distributors last?

7. Money costs money

When I analysed a cache of film budgets for films costing $5m to $20m, I found that finance, legal, accounting, insurance, and completion bond came to a median 7.0% of the budget. That’s more than two and a half times the sound post-production, music and visual effects budgets combined (together they made up 2.7%).

These are the costs of making a film safe enough to lend against, and the riskier the money, the more it costs. You can read more about the costs of different types of film money in last week’s piece entitled The film finance numbers nobody shows you

Even the quoted interest rates understate the bill, and when I spoke to Phil about loan pricing, he was clear that the headline number is where the cost starts.

The headline rate is never the final price. Add the fees, the reserves and the time it takes to get paid back, and the real cost is a lot higher. Producers need to do those sums before they sign.

8. ‘Financed’ doesn’t mean financed

I tracked 611 projects announced in the trade press as financed and checked whether they were made within three years. Overall, 54% were.

And it’s getting worse. From 61% of the projects announced in 2008-10 down to 43% of those announced in 2020-22. A financing announcement is now a weaker sign that a film will happen than a director or cast attaching (62%) or a sales agent taking it to market (75%).

An announcement can still move money, though, and when I spoke to Phil, he described how.

Half of this business runs on announcements. Someone says there’s a deal happening, it never happens, but people have already made decisions based on it.

The worst version is a film that starts shooting before the money is real. When the UK production of The Climb collapsed last year owing crew and suppliers around £340,000, one of them told Deadline what they thought.

Play your film financing games by all means, but don’t hire crew if you haven’t got the money.

9. Nobody can see the real numbers

All of the above is hard to know, because film finance is almost entirely private. Only 10.7% of 89,839 independent features released between 2010 and 2023 credit any financier at all, and 5.2% credit any private money.

Deal terms, loan costs and returns are never published, so every producer learns them one film at a time. When I spoke to Phil, he put it in a line.

You can’t Google the truth of film. The numbers that matter aren’t published anywhere, so there’ll always be someone who believes the brochure.

10. Tax credits now prop up the budget

Tax incentives rose from 18% of all the money in the finance plans I studied in 2018 and 2019 to 28% in 2024 and 2025. The median film took 27% of its budget from a tax credit, offset or rebate, and 92% of the films used one.

Without the 33 Australian films and their generous producer offset, the rise still holds, from 15% to 27%. France publishes the same breakdown for every film made there, and in 2012 distributors’ advances paid for 21.5% of the average French film, compared with 5.7% from tax credits. By 2025, they had swapped places, at 11.7% and 14.8%.

When I spoke to Phil, he described the change from the lender’s side.

Ten years ago a tax incentive was a helpful extra. Today it is often the single biggest piece of the finance plan. Producers start with the incentive and build the rest of the capital stack around it.

11. Governments pay late or not at all

If the biggest piece of the plan comes from a government, the biggest risk is a government decision. Germany’s federal incentive pot for 2026 (€250m) was fully committed by the end of August, and the draft budget for 2027 would cut it to €200m.

Timing is the other issue. New York’s credit now pays out so slowly that lenders have cut what they’ll advance against it, as a lawyer told The Ankler in April:

They used to loan anywhere between $0.80 to $0.85 on the dollar of the credit. Now, it’s like $0.50 on the dollar because it takes so long.

And more of the budget is heading this way. The UK’s Independent Film Tax Credit pays 53% of qualifying spend on films with core budgets up to £15m, and Congress introduced a US federal production credit of 20% to 30% in September (it’s still only a bill).

Phil knows about this all too well from first-hand experience:

I’ve had governments default on me all over the world. You can sue a distributor, but suing a government doesn’t really work. So the lender has to price in the wait, and it’s the producer who ends up paying the interest.

12. Small films pay most for the wait

An incentive is usually paid after the money is spent (sometimes long after), so somebody has to lend against it in the meantime. That’s a real service carrying a real risk, as Phil’s point above shows, and it has a price. UK producers have been loud about it since the new credit arrived. At the Screen Summit in September 2025, the producer Andy Paterson put the case to Screen International.

The tax credit is effectively a government bond, and people are making 15 to 20% cash-flowing that while producers are not getting paid.

The lenders’ answer, gathered by Screen in March, is that much of the cost is fixed. Legal work on a £100,000 film takes about as long as on a £10m one, so the price hits smaller films hardest. One financier summed it up.

Proportionally speaking, the smaller your production, the worse off you will be in terms of the cost of borrowing.

Both sides are right, which is what makes it a problem with no villain. The subsidy designed to help small films loses the biggest share of its value to the cost of waiting for it.

13. Tax breaks attract the wrong money

Before today’s incentives, many countries supported film through tax shelters, and the shelters kept going wrong in the same way.

• In 1990 Quebec scrapped its film and TV tax shelter after its minister said close to two-thirds of the cost had gone to investors and intermediaries, with only a third reaching production.

• Canada’s national shelter went the same way. Production peaked at 66 certified features in 1979, and more than half of the films made that year were never released.

• In Germany, tax funds sent almost $1.7bn to Hollywood in 2004 alone before the government moved to close them.

• Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild found much the same in the UK film partnerships of the 1990s, reckoning that only about 10% of the money invested reached the film industry.

Most modern incentives are paid to the production itself, which fixes the worst of this, although problem 12 shows some of the value still goes on waiting for it.

14. The gap loan is disappearing

A gap loan is money lent against the estimated value of the territories nobody has bought yet. In the 2018 and 2019 finance plans, three in four films used one. By 2024 and 2025 it was 44%, and the median film used none at all. Pooled across all the films, gap loans fell from 26% of the money to 6%.

But because the deals are private, it took time for this to be discussed outside individual deals. The trade talks about gap financing more than four times as often as it did, from 0.59 per 1,000 articles in 2018 and 2019 to 2.73 in 2024 and 2025.

When I spoke to Phil, his explanation was short:

A lot of lenders are doing zero gap these days because it’s a really hard thing. It’s really hard to get your money back.

15. Equity has to fill the hole

Something had to replace the gap loan, and in the plans it was equity, which is the hardest money in film to raise and the last to be repaid. Its share of all the money rose from 20% in 2018 and 2019 to 36% in 2024 and 2025.

The soft corners of the plan went the same way. In 2018 and 2019, 71% of the plans relied on deferred fees or in-kind deals, and by 2024 and 2025 it was 22%. Phil puts much of that down to tax credit authorities no longer letting as much deferred money count towards the credit, so the hole now has to be filled with cash.

The burden isn’t spread evenly. The chart below shows how much of the budget came from equity and how much was borrowed, by film size.

Films costing $1m to $5m raised a median 18% of their budget as equity. Films at $5m to $15m raised 32%, and also had 53% of their budget borrowed against (38% for the smaller films).

16. One buyer carries the film

Pre-sales (a distributor agreeing to pay for a territory before the film is made) still paid about a fifth of the money in the 2024 and 2025 plans. But the sales estimates on the films I studied show the expected money concentrating in fewer places.

North America’s share rose from 21% to 30%, and Asia’s halved, from 17% to 8%. On the median sales sheet, the US is 31% of the expected money and worth about a fifth of the budget, while 20 of the 40 territories are each worth under 1%.

So one American buyer’s decision now carries a large slice of the plan.

Part of the reason is the collapse of the first pay-TV or streaming window after cinema release (the ‘pay-one’ window), which used to give distributors the confidence to buy before a film was made.

17. The buyers keep changing

Counting only US releases that the trade tracked with a screen count, 22 companies released four or more independent films in 2005, and in 2023 it was still 22. The number is steady, but the names aren’t.

Only 4 of the 22 regular buyers of 2005 were still regular buyers in 2023. A producer’s contacts at the buyers go stale faster than their films do. Since then Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have become one company, Skydance, which has agreed with 12 state attorneys general to release at least 30 films a year for five years, at least four of them independent.

Phil puts it like this:

Every merger removes a buyer and the competition that came with it. Merged companies cut costs, cut slates and cut acquisitions.

18. Streamers pay less and keep more

For a few years, a streamer would pay an independent producer the budget plus a fixed premium and keep everything (a ‘cost-plus’ deal). Producers gave up the chance of a hit in exchange for a guaranteed small profit. Phil says that from his point of view, that deal is ever rarer.

The streamer deal where they paid your budget plus a premium and you walked away whole? For independents, that deal has largely gone.

What’s left is often a licence fee with little connection to how much a film is watched.

When I interviewed Uwe Boll last year, he told me Netflix paid $75,000 for a year’s licence to a film that was then watched for 3.8 million hours.

19. Every film needs more pots of money

The median closing plan listed 8 separate lines of money, and 4 in 10 listed 10 or more. Each one is a contract, a lawyer and a set of conditions that all have to be met on the same day.

Co-productions, which add a second or third country’s rules on top, rose from 21% of the plans in 2018 and 2019 to 44% in 2024 and 2025.

Phil’s not too happy about this shift!

A film’s money now comes in lots of smaller pieces. Every piece is another contract, another counterparty, another set of delivery obligations and another cheque someone has to chase.

20. New money comes with strings

The biggest new money in film this year came from the Gulf. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is putting about $10bn of a $24bn package from three Gulf funds into Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Phil’s view is that this money behaves differently.

Gulf money comes with conditions: content sensitivities, local spend requirements, politics. And it gravitates towards big names.

Old problems, new problems

None of the old problems is going away, because they come from the basic deal between people who want to make money and people who want to make films. The new ones are different. They come from where the money is coming from right now, which means a producer who knows about them can plan around them.

That’s why Phil and I wrote the report. It’s free, and it sets out the nine trends behind the new problems, from the base of the budget to the back of the queue.

You can also join us in two ways:

• On 8 December, we’re hosting a free webinar entitled ‘What you can’t look up about film finance’, where we’ll take a finance package apart line by line, live. Sign up here.

• The main piece is our live online course, Advanced Film Financing, which runs as six live sessions from 12 to 28 January 2027 and ends with a meet-up at the European Film Market in Berlin on Friday 12 February. Find out more and book your place here.

Today’s article is based on a whole bunch of research projects I’ve been running over the past year into how film finance really works. I’ll be sharing much more of it on the course, so if you want to know more, come join us.

Poetic thieves aside, Reese Witherspoon has a name for this kind of moment. In an acceptance speech at Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards in 2015, she said:

It’s my most hated question. I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation... because inevitably, the girl turns to the guy and says, ‘What do we do now?’... I’m serious. Go back and watch any movie, you will see this line over and over.

What she’s saying certainly rings true, but to what extent is this happening? Is it getting better, worse, or staying the same? And how does this change when the screenwriter is a woman?

I studied 2,607 movies (script and on-screen action) to learn more.

How often are female characters seen/heard?

Let's start with how much characters speak, then move into what they’re saying.

I gathered 2,607 screenplays of produced feature films and tagged each line by speaker. Using the actors' gender, I looked at how much women speak on screen.

Women speak 30% of the dialogue in the average screenplay, though this varies widely across movies.

In 37% of films, women speak less than a fifth of the words, while only 16% give women half or more of the dialogue. Women have the most lines in just under a quarter of films, with men taking the most in just over three-quarters of movies.

The same imbalance shows up if we look at the data scene by scene. Of the 164,540 scenes in which two or more characters speak, 35% have only men talking. Only 7% have only women talking (i.e. roughly one scene in fifteen).

What we hear is only half of it, though. I also counted the faces that appear on screen, detected in one frame from every shot, for 2,002 of the same films. Each dot on the chart below is one movie.

• Speaking - The further to the right a dot sits, the more of the script’s dialogue is spoken by women.

• Existing - The higher a dot sits, the more of the faces on screen are those of women.

Broadly, they rise and fall together, which makes sense, since we don’t often see a bevy of mute women or hear disembodied women’s voices (well, I don’t in the movies I watch).

Across these films, women make up 29% of the faces on screen and speak 29% of the words, so a script that gives women more to say tends to become a movie that puts them on screen more often.

But take a look at the ends of the cloud. In films where women speak under a fifth of the words (12% on average), they’re still 17% of the faces on screen, i.e. present but mostly silent. And in films where women do most of the talking (64% of the words, on average), they’re only 52% of the faces, because the camera keeps finding men.

How do screenplays describe women?

The first time a character appears in a screenplay, their name is written in capitals alongside a short description, such as “KAREN, late 40s with a confident air”. I found those introductions for 41,558 speaking characters.

A woman’s introduction references her physical looks (beautiful, pretty, attractive, sexy, etc.) in 11% of cases, compared to just 3% of the time for a male character.

Some of these descriptions are necessary to convey a key trait of the character, but most are not. Here is how The Wolf of Wall Street introduces Naomi:

NAOMI, 24, blonde and gorgeous, a living wet dream in LaPerla lingerie.

By contrast, this is the whole of the introduction Inception gives its lead:

COBB, is 35, handsome, tailored.

I’m hardly the first to spot this. Taika Waititi told the Los Angeles Times in 2017:

There’s one word I hate in all scripts in Hollywood at the moment in describing women, and that is the word ‘badass’... It’s a dumb male writer’s way of saying, ‘Ah, uh, she’s like, she, uh, she’s tough.’ Then straight after that it’s like, ‘She’s badass, but she’s got a beauty about her. And she’s sexy. Unconsciously sexy.’

Across all the scripts I studied, women were much more likely than men to:

• Be described by their looks (3.4 times as likely)

• Have their character cry (3.4x)

• Be directed to look afraid (1.5x)

• Ask “Are you okay?” (1.4x)

• Ask “What’s going on?” (1.3x)

Men were more likely than women to:

• Be directed to grin (2.3x)

• Be directed to shout (1.4x)

Which brings us back to Witherspoon. In scripts written only by men (not quite her “no women involved in their creation” definition but close when it comes to script), women ask “What do we do?” about the same number of times that men do (1.06 times for every 1 from a man).

Huh.

But if we zoom out from the exact wording Reese Witherspoon suggested and look at a closely related issue, we can see what she meant.

Female characters express confusion (such as “What’s going on?”, “What happened?”, “What was that?”) 34% more often than their fellow male characters, in scripts written by men.

The gap is widest in action films, where women ask “What’s going on?” 1.8 times as often as men.

A good example is the script for Iron Man. Pepper Potts walks into the wreckage of Tony Stark’s living room and asks, “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”. The stage direction reads “(never looking at her)”, and his line is “Get my house in Dubai ready. I want to throw a party.”

What changes when women write the script?

I identified the gender of the credited screenwriters for 1,700 films. Of those, 1,401 were written only by men, 178 by mixed teams and 121 only by women, and the chart below shows women’s share of the dialogue in each group.

Scripts written only by women give women 54% of the dialogue, more than double the 25% in scripts written only by men. Mixed teams sit in between at 39%.

The difference goes far beyond the number of words spoken.

• Female characters have the most lines in 66% of scripts written only by women, against 15% of those written only by men.

• Scenes where only women talk make up 21% of scenes in women-written scripts and 4% in men-written ones.

• The same pattern appears in screen time, with women making up 41% of the faces in films written only by women and 27% in films written only by men.

You might expect this to be the director’s influence as much as the writer’s, but the data suggests that it is mostly the writer. In films with neither a woman writer nor a woman director, women speak 25% of the words. A woman director alone takes that to 32%, a woman writer alone to 41%, and both together to 51%.

Types of stories

We should remember these aren't isolated factors. Female writers may be hired for stories already about women, and I can’t fully separate the writer from the story they were hired to tell.

The chart below shows women’s share of the dialogue in the eight genres with 100 or more films in the dataset, which together cover 2,538 films.

Action films give women the least (21%) and horror the most (39%), with drama and comedy close behind horror at 37% and 35%.

While genres differ, the same pattern persists within them. In action films, men-only scripts give women 20% of the words and scripts with at least one woman writer give them 29%. In comedy it’s 27% against 52%, and in drama 33% against 46%.

So far, the data makes a pretty persuasive case that hiring more women as screenwriters would do wonders for how much female characters get to say and do on screen. (Again, this is not a groundbreaking thought!)

Nothing I’m about to say undermines that.

But we should also consider another factor - the environment in which those scripts were created. Scripts are not created in a vacuum. They are part of a culture we all live in, developed in an industry with norms, and shaped by a wider system of audience expectations.

Would more women writers in the 1980s have changed things?

The history of sexism in the film industry could fill a book. It has. Many books. Many, many books. In fact, so many that I am barely scratching the surface with these links. So forgive the narrow focus here.

I picked two moments when Hollywood was formally accused of shutting women out. In the early 1980s, the Directors Guild of America complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of “wholesale discrimination against women” (as Variety put it on 13 May 1983), then sued Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures on behalf of its women and minority members (The case eventually failed on a technicality).

Susan Smitman, a co-chair of the guild’s women’s committee, warned Variety in October 1985 not to read too much into a few success stories:

Because Martha Coolidge is doing features, and because Amy Heckerling is doing features, and Susan Seidelman is doing features, and Lisa Gottlieb is doing features doesn’t mean women are working.

Thirty years later, in 2015, the same commission opened an investigation into the hiring of women directors, and later charged every major studio. So we have two moments in time to compare.

The chart below shows women’s share of the dialogue in films released from 1978 to 2025, smoothed as a three-year average, with those two moments shaded.

After the first, nothing moved. Women’s share of the words sat at about 25% before it, during it and for a decade after. After the second, it climbed from 30.5% in the decade before 2015 to 40.5% since 2020. That rise also coincides with #MeToo and the arrival of streaming.

Over the same period, the share of films with a woman credited on the screenplay rose from 10% in the 1980s to 32% in the 2020s.

So did the change happen because more women got to write, or because writing itself changed?

The chart below splits the 1,557 films released since 1980 with known writers into three eras, then breaks them down by who wrote the script.

Two things jump out:

1. First, women writers in the 1980s and 1990s already had far more to say than the men around them (37% against 23%).

2. Second, both groups have increased since then. Men-only scripts went from 23% to 29%, and scripts with a woman writer went from 37% to 51%.

To separate the two effects, I took the scripts from 1980 to 1999 and asked what women’s share would have been with today’s mix of writers. The actual figure was 25%. With today’s mix, it would have been 27%. With an even split of men and women writers, it would be 30%. The real figure for 2015 to 2025 is 35%.

In other words, we’d have seen more lines for women if more women had been let in during the 1980s. But only about a fifth of the change since then came from the mix of writers, and the rest came from everyone writing differently.

We can see the same effect even more clearly in the data on descriptions:

• In 1980 to 1999, scripts introduced 13% of women with a looks word, regardless of whether men or women wrote them.

• By 2015 to 2025, it was 8% for men-only scripts and 7% for scripts with a woman writer.

This means that fall had nothing to do with who was writing, as both groups dropped together.

In the end, my answer to the headline question is yes and no. More women writers would have meant more words for women, more scenes between women and more women on screen, both then and now.

But the women writing 40 years ago described women’s bodies much like the men around them did, and what changed how women are described on the page was culture, which changed for everybody at once.

Notes

Today’s dataset comprises 2,607 feature screenplays of films released between 1931 and 2026. Most are English-language and American, and they lean towards well-known films (this is not a random sample of every film ever made). The 2020s figures rest on 283 films, and the scripts from recent years that circulate may lean towards awards contenders.

I classified every line of every script (dialogue, action, scene heading, etc) and linked each speaking character to the actor who played the role. (And I created extra checks to catch annoying things such as a flashback to a younger version of a character credited to the adult actor… grrrr).

Gender is the performer’s recorded gender, which is usually but not always the character’s (voice roles and cross-gender casting are the exceptions). Non-binary performers are kept in the data but are too few to chart.

Speakers that could not be linked to an actor (crowds, ‘Guard #2’ etc.) were excluded, which accounted for 4.6% of all dialogue words. A film is included in the share figures only if at least 70% of its dialogue words could be linked to a gendered actor: 2,582 of the 2,607 films. Averages are calculated per film.

An introduction is the first time a speaking character’s name appears in capitals in the action text before they speak. I found one for 41,558 characters, tracking words such as beautiful, beauty, pretty, attractive, gorgeous, stunning, lovely, sexy, cute, striking, knockout, hot, bombshell, alluring, seductive, sultry, voluptuous, curvaceous, curvy, shapely, handsome, good-looking, rugged and chiselled. Much like myself.

Stage directions are bracketed directions within dialogue, such as “(tearful)”, and are counted per word of direction.

• Crying covers tears, tearful, crying, cries, sobbing, sobs, weeping and teary.

• Afraid covers frightened, scared, terrified, afraid, fearful and panicked.

• Grinning covers grin, grins, grinning, smirks, smirking, chuckles and chuckling.

• Shouting covers shouts, shouting, yells, yelling, roars and bellows.

• The “What do we do?” family covers what are we going to do, what do we do, what should we do, now what and what now.

• The “What’s going on?” family covers what’s happening, what’s going on, what was that, what is that, what happened and what does that mean.

Writers are those credited for the screenplay itself (”screenplay by”, “written by” and so on). Story and source credits (such as the author of the novel) and uncredited writers are left out. Writer gender was known for 1,700 films and director gender for 2,458. In the 907 films where the writers’ gender wasn’t known, women speak 33% of the words, close to the overall average.

The faces come from a separate analysis of the footage, in which a face-detection model labelled each detected face by apparent gender. This dataset includes 2,002 of those films.

In 2016, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels published an analysis of 2,000 screenplays for The Pudding, counting only characters with 100 or more words and matching them to IMDb. On the 1,406 films in both datasets, its average share for women is 28.3% and mine is 28.0%, and the correlation between the two, film by film, is 0.97 (where 1 would mean they always move in step). The main disagreement is Network, where its published data has no entry for Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen. In my count, she has more words than anyone else in the film, and women speak 35% of the dialogue, against 5% in its figures.

Women writers may be hired for stories that already centre on women. Splitting by genre and budget narrows that explanation but cannot rule it out, so these differences may reflect differences between scripts, and the data can’t say what caused them.

According to the union’s latest public filing, which covers the year to April 2026, he was paid a salary of $1.1 million. That is about 40 times what the average SAG-AFTRA member earned from union work that year.

(His total package is actually higher than just salary. Their tax return for 2024 includes his bonus, pension contributions, and benefits, which takes the total to $1,366,117, but for this article I’m going to stick to the base salary).

His new contract has arrived at an inconvenient time for this kind of conversation. Actors, including Drake Bell, have been going public about losing their union health coverage, which, from 2027, requires $28,933 in earnings under union contracts in a year. Bell had $17,480.53 over the year to June 2026.

I obviously can’t speak to the most recent deal, as I have no inside knowledge, but I compare the most recent public figures across the unions and look at how they've evolved over time.

Every sizeable American union has to file an LM-2 annual financial report with the Department of Labor. It lists every officer and senior employee, what each was paid, membership, dues income, and the rates the union charges.

I took the complete files for 2000 to 2026 and focused on 877 returns from 35 entertainment unions. They range from SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America down to the Hollywood crew locals of IATSE, the drivers and casting directors of Teamsters Local 399, and the musicians’ locals in Los Angeles and New York. Between them, they hold more than 72,000 individual pay records. The full method is in the Notes at the end.

How much are union bosses paid?

Crabtree-Ireland was promoted from chief operating officer to national executive director in 2021, on a starting salary of $770,000. By his second year in the job, he was paid $954,357 (an increase of about 24%), and his pay has gone up every year since (6.5% in the year to April 2024, 5.2% to 2025 and 2.9% to 2026).

Over five years in the job, his salary has risen about 43%, and most of that came in his second year. (His filing for the year to April 2022 shows $989,700, but that included a payout of holiday he had built up in his earlier jobs at the union).

He’s not the only union leader with a hefty pay packet. The DGA’s Russell Hollander received $824,327, and Ellen Stutzman of the Writers Guild of America West is on $810,286.

After these two, the next-highest paid is quite a step down, with IATSE’s elected international president, Matthew Loeb, receiving $577,762. The 16 IATSE locals in my sample pay their leaders between $131,015 and $381,260. Lowest of all is the president of the Los Angeles musicians’ local, on $126,921.

For the guilds, a hired chief executive runs the place. For most crew locals, it’s the elected business agent who runs the office day to day. In the chart below, orange bars are hired executives and slate bars are elected officers, each from their union’s latest filing.

If you’re wondering why there aren’t any famous names on the chart, it's because the elected presidents of the actors’, writers’, and directors’ unions work for free.

• Christopher Nolan serves as president of the DGA without a salary.

• Sean Astin at SAG-AFTRA and Brooke Shields at Actors’ Equity receive only expenses ($2,210 and $4,833, respectively).

The pattern across the board is that members elect well-known faces to lead the organisation, and then the board hires a professional to run things. The former don’t need the cash, while the latter get the cash.

What does the average member earn?

I wanted to put these figures in context, so I tried to figure out how much the average member of each union earns. It’s harder than it sounds, as none of the unions seems to publish what their typical member takes home.

This is where maths takes the fore!

The actors’, writers’ and directors’ guilds charge dues as a percentage of what members earn on union contracts (aka “covered earnings”), and this data is reported in the publicly filed LM-2 forms. So if we know the tax rate and how much it raised, we can work out the income level it was charged on.

For example, let’s start with SAG-AFTRA. In the year to April 2026, members paid $241.32 in base dues plus 1.575% of their covered earnings (capped at $1 million a year). The union collected $121,315,552 in dues, so if we subtract the base dues for its 180,042 active members, and divide what’s left by 1.575%, and we get roughly $4.94 billion in covered earnings, or $27,460 per active member. Maths FTW!

I did the same for the other guilds. This method shouldn’t be used to draw any wider conclusions as it’s not perfect. The figures include residuals, which also attract dues. WGA West’s annual report puts members’ 2025 earnings, before residuals, at $1.66 billion, and my dues-based estimate, including residuals, is $2.32 billion. But it is a useful figure for comparing leadership salaries and calculating rough multiples.

This shows us that Crabtree-Ireland’s salary in the year ending April 2026 was 40 times the average union earnings of its active members. The figure is lower for Actors’ Equity (32 times) and much lower for the DGA (9 times), WGA East (4.4) and WGA West (3.6).

Let’s remember that this is a two-sided calculation. If a CEO’s salary is higher, the multiple will rise, but it will also rise if the member’s average income falls.

An average WGA West member earned about $224,000 from guild work, so Stutzman’s salary is 3.6 times that. An average active SAG-AFTRA member earned $27,460, so Crabtree-Ireland’s is 40 times. Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, is close behind at 32, because its average member earned just $14,105 on Equity contracts.

Also, these are averages, which greatly flatter the actors. A small minority of well-paid performers (7% earned $80,000 or more in 2023) pulls the mean up a long way. In 2023 the union’s chief economist, David Viviano, said that only 14% of members earned the $26,470 then needed for health coverage.

For the typical SAG-AFTRA member, then, the multiple is far higher than 40.

Has the gap grown?

At SAG-AFTRA, yes.

Under Crabtree-Ireland’s predecessor David White, the multiple sat between 21.5 and 28 for eight years. It has been above 30 in every year since, peaking at 44 in the year to April 2025. Meanwhile, the writers’ line has barely moved.

The chart below tracks the same multiple each year since 2014 for SAG-AFTRA and WGA West. (I left out years when the boss’s pay included one-off payments, hence the gaps).

Between 2014 and 2026 the pay of SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director rose 97%, while members’ average union earnings rose 13% and prices rose 40%. In real terms (i.e. after inflation), the average actor’s union income has fallen by about a fifth, while the top job’s pay has nearly doubled.

It isn’t a new complaint either. Back in 2015, Deadline pointed out that White’s 7.3% raise that year was almost three times the 2.5% rise he had negotiated for members on the film and TV contract.

Is that a lot for a union boss?

There is a reasonable argument that this is exactly how much he should be paid. That top talent commands top salaries, and this is all being done in the open (i.e. annual reports, public filings, etc).

Marick Masters, professor emeritus at Wayne State University, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024:

The airline pilots, the professional athletes, the directors, the screen actors and the writers, they have a lot of highly paid people within their membership. The people that are in the upper end make a lot of money and they can afford to pay staff to represent them.

Most SAG-AFTRA members are not well paid, but there are a lot of them. Spread across 180,042 active members, Crabtree-Ireland’s salary costs each one about $6.11 a year. A WGA West member pays about $78 a year towards Stutzman, a DGA member about $43 towards Hollander, and a member of the Costume Designers Guild about $211 towards its executive director.

As a share of everything their members earn, the actors’ chief executive is the cheapest of the five guilds I could measure, at 0.022% of covered earnings (against 0.035% at WGA West and 0.054% at the DGA).

So while it’s true that he’s paid far more than the average actor, it’s also true to say that he costs each actor almost nothing.

Let’s zoom out and compare his figure to other union bosses (all of whom do very different jobs, but it’s the closest we can get to a comparable job).

In fiscal years ending in 2025, 592 people at US unions were paid a gross salary of $300,000 or more. Crabtree-Ireland was fifth on that list by salary, and the four people above him all worked for players’ unions in sport.

Outside baseball, football and basketball, nobody in American labour was paid a higher salary.

Union leaders tend to point to the other side of the table instead. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates for the studios, files a tax return rather than an LM-2, and its most recent one shows its president (Carol Lombardini, who stepped down in April 2025) receiving $4,232,240 in pay in 2024 (including a $2,125,000 bonus), plus $43,548 of other compensation. Measured the same way, that’s about three times Crabtree-Ireland’s 2024 package.

Tax returns also cover other Hollywood bodies. The Producers Guild isn’t a union, but its return shows its chief executive, Susan Sprung, receiving $730,000 (including a $125,000 bonus) plus $39,500 of other compensation in 2024. The Academy’s chief executive, Bill Kramer, received $1,080,015 plus $60,727 in 2024. On the same basis, Crabtree-Ireland’s package that year was $1,366,117.

Is it only the top job?

In a display of true worker solidarity, it’s not just the top role that receives a high salary. In the year to April 2026, 34 SAG-AFTRA staff were paid a quarter of a million dollars or more, with four earning more than $500,000.

That’s up from eight being paid over $250,000 in the year to April 2013. Over the same period, active members grew by 7%, from 168,593 to 180,042.

None of this proves the pay is wrong. Running a union of 180,000 members through a strike, a pandemic and the arrival of AI is a serious job, and the board voted 98.3% in favour of keeping him.

But I think the gap between the people who run Hollywood’s biggest union and the people who pay for it has widened, for reasons tied to the health-cover row. Over the last decade, the union's top has done well. The typical member hasn’t.

The pay in Crabtree-Ireland’s new contract will appear in SAG-AFTRA’s filing at the end of July 2027. I suspect Drake Bell won’t be the only actor reading it.

Notes

Pay, membership and dues figures come from the annual financial reports (Form LM-2) that unions file with the US Department of Labor, published in its Online Public Disclosure Room. I used the bulk yearly files for 2000 to 2026, downloading 2024 to 2026 afresh on 27 October 2026 (the department’s listing was last updated on 25 October 2026). Unions were selected by their Department of Labor file number, not by name. Each union keeps its own fiscal year. SAG-AFTRA, IATSE’s international office, both writers’ guilds and Actors’ Equity have filed for fiscal years ending in 2026, and the DGA, the IATSE locals, the Teamsters and the musicians’ locals for calendar 2025. Key figures were checked against the department’s online report viewer and matched to the dollar.

By ‘the person running’ each union I mean the hired chief executive where a union has one (national executive director or executive director), otherwise the principal elected officer who runs the local (business agent, business manager, business representative or president). I chose each one by hand from the filing. In three cases someone else was paid more in the latest filing: the Motion Picture Editors Guild’s retiring director, the Art Directors Guild’s former director and a Teamsters 399 vice-president. Teamsters 399’s Lindsay Dougherty is also paid by the international Teamsters union, which isn’t included in her $171,159.

All pay figures are gross salary as reported on the LM-2, before allowances and expenses, unless I say otherwise. They exclude pension and health contributions. Years that included a one-off payment are left out of the year-by-year comparisons: SAG-AFTRA 2022 (accrued holiday on promotion), WGA West 2018 (a one-time bonus, according to the guild’s then president), WGA East 2009 and the Screen Actors Guild 2005 (both departures).

These are estimates, worked back from each guild’s dues income using the rates stated in its own filing for the year in question. SAG-AFTRA charged $241.32 a year plus 1.575% of covered earnings through April 2026 (its help centre now lists base dues of $246.14), with the earnings cap rising from $500,000 to $1 million over 2023 and 2024. WGA West charges $25 a quarter plus 1.5%, WGA East $40 a quarter plus 1.5%, Actors’ Equity $176 a year plus 2.5%, and the DGA $62.50 a quarter plus 1.6% of earnings above $10,000 (1% on residuals).

The results are means per voting member (active members at SAG-AFTRA and the DGA, current members at WGA West, members in good standing at WGA East), not medians. Earnings above each guild’s cap are invisible to this method, which pulls the averages down and the multiples up. Dues are recorded when paid, and work dues are billed on the previous calendar year’s earnings, so the timing is approximate.

The Department of Labor defines the dues line as “regular dues, working dues, etc.” and has fees reported separately, so I have treated initiation fees as falling outside it. The DGA figure counts all earnings-based dues at 1.6%, so it is a floor. Crew locals mostly charge flat quarterly dues, so this method can’t estimate their members’ earnings, which is why they don’t appear in the multiples.

Reasonable alternative assumptions (about initiation fees, dues relief and earnings above the cap) put SAG-AFTRA’s multiple anywhere between about 25 and 60, so 40 is a central estimate. The gap with the writers’ guilds holds under all of them.

WGA West’s count of current members fell from 11,799 to 10,338 in its latest filing, which pushes its per-member average up. SAG-AFTRA’s active count includes many people with no union earnings in a given year, which is part of the point.

The Producers Guild, the Academy and the AMPTP file IRS Form 990s instead of LM-2s, and SAG-AFTRA files one as well as its LM-2. Their figures come from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and report pay for the calendar year (2024 in the latest returns), including bonuses, pension contributions and benefits. The AMPTP’s return names its president only as “Ee No 1001 (President)”. Lombardini held that post until April 2025.

My stock answer usually starts with asking if they are looking for funding or financing.

• Funding is money given because someone believes in you or the project (crowdfunding, family, a friend who fancies seeing their name in the credits).

• Financing is money where the person putting it in expects to get it back.

Your first film will probably be funded. Your second will probably need financing.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gone deep down the rabbit hole of the paperwork behind movies. Along the way I’ve been talking every week with Phil Hunt. Phil co-founded Head Gear Films in 2002 and has executive produced more than 300 feature films. Few people have financed more independent films.

As a result, in January 2027, Phil and I are running Advanced Film Financing, a live course for producers and financiers on films over $1m, including producers stepping up to their first.

Join 'Advanced Film Financing' course

Today I am sharing five things I learned through this investigation that I couldn't have known by simply Googling or asking an AI to guess. They are:

1. How much do private investors actually put into a film?

2. How much does it cost to borrow money for a film?

3. Can you trust a sales agent’s estimates?

4. How much does a producer actually get paid?

5. Who gets their money back first?

1. How much do private investors actually put into a film?

Let’s start with private investors. When a US company sells shares privately, it has to file a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 15 days of the first sale. This reveals how much the company is trying to raise, how much it has sold and to how many investors. I found 757 film raises among them (2008 to mid-2026) and crunched the data.

The typical film set out to raise $1m. Three investors bought in, each putting in about $54,000, and the smallest cheque the company would take was $10,000.

Only 16% reached the amount they were looking to raise, and nearly three in ten raised nothing. The typical film reached just 10% of its target.

Whatever the paperwork calls it, much of this money looks more like funding than financing.

2. How much does it cost to borrow money for a film?

Another form of film financing is borrowing. The equity investors we saw previously take a much bigger risk (i.e., unsecured investment and a poor place on the revenue waterfall), but they take most of the upside if things go well.

By contrast, lenders are typically the last money in, the first money out and may have secured the money against the film or other assets.

Below are the rates I calculated from 160 real film loans across 137 films made since 2018, for three different types of film lending:

• A tax credit loan is lent against the tax relief a government has promised to pay once the film is made.

• A pre-sale loan is lent against a distributor’s signed contract to buy the film for its country.

• A gap loan is lent against the territories nobody has bought yet, based on the sales agent’s estimate of what they will fetch.

As in our normal lives, the riskier the lending is, the more the lender will charge you for it.

• A government’s promise is about as safe as it gets, so a tax credit loan costs 8 to 11% a year.

• A distributor’s contract is a little less certain, at 10 to 16%.

• An agent’s guess about countries nobody has bought yet is much less certain, so a gap loan costs 18 to 25%.

There’s a fourth kind that wouldn’t fit on the chart. A bridge loan tides a film over until its financing is signed, and it costs 75 to 200% a year, because if the deal never closes, the lender can lose everything.

Despite pre-sale loans being one of the most common loans in independent film, I couldn’t find a single lender that publishes its rate. The only way to know is to know someone in the business and/or ask for a quote on a case-by-case basis.

3. Can you trust a sales agent’s estimates?

Some lending and investment may be based on sales estimates. These are figures from the sales agent, guessing how much they think they can sell the film for to distributors worldwide.

Sales estimates typically list every territory with two prices.

• The ‘ask’ is the price the agent will open with.

• The ‘take’ is the price they expect to accept.

I crunched the numbers on 1,120 real territory estimates and discovered that the agent usually opens at double the ‘take’, and everyone knows it. The ‘take’ is the figure to pay attention to. Good sales estimates should be fairly accurate on a territory-by-territory basis, as the sales agent knows the market and the delay between setting the figures and trying to realise them is typically short.

However, there is a sting in the tail. The one-pager the sales agent gives you estimates prices for every territory in the world. But many territories never sell.

Of 80 independent films I had data on, the typical film sold 58% of what its agent expected to take in total. Only 11 of the 80 (14%) sold the whole sheet at the take or better.

This is one reason sales estimates are rarely accepted as loan collateral. When I spoke to Phil about estimates, he told me about arguing with talent agents who treated a sales estimate as loan security.

It’s not collateral because it’s not a promise to pay. It’s an estimate of what the film might achieve given the sales in any specific territory.

That’s why a gap lender cuts an agent’s numbers before lending against them, and why it still charges 18 to 25%.

(Phil also pointed out that most film lenders are spending other people’s money too, borrowed from banks, funds or their own investors. Those backers expect a return that matches the risk, measured against everything else in the world they could put their money into. If gap lending paid less than that, nobody would lend to the gap lenders).

4. How much does a producer actually get paid?

Of the independent films I studied from 2018 to 2025, the median producer’s fee was 8% of the budget.

The typical producer’s share came to $94,874. This sounds pretty healthy until you factor in time. Producers with careers of five years or more make a median of one feature every 2.2 years, which turns the fee into roughly $43,000 a year, before tax, before company costs, etc.

Oh, and before they are asked to defer their fee. This is where a producer agrees to be paid later, out of the film’s possible future income, so that the budget can close.

While that can sometimes mean they get their compensation, albeit late, in many cases that’s akin to forgoing the figure entirely. A 2025 Producers’ Roundtable survey found that 94% of UK producers who had deferred a fee never received it.

Deferred fees are paid near the end of the line, after almost everyone else, so in practice deferring a fee usually means giving it away.

5. Who gets their money back first?

Film financing is complicated, but if I had to boil it down to a few simple rules of thumb, one would be ‘Get paid back first’.

Easier said than done, so maybe I could tweak that to “Only do deals when you’re first”.

Money usually flows back from income in the following order:

The lenders near the top did well. Across the loans behind the rates above, they earned a blended 12 to 16% a year. Those loans were secured on government promises and signed contracts, and they were repaid.

The equity investors (the people who buy a share of the film, and are paid back after the lenders) did badly.

Adam Leipzig put it nicely in his 2015 book, Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers:

Investing in films is a crapshoot, and a film is generally not a good investment unless you’re a big movie studio or a seasoned production company. Individual investors rarely get their money back, and they should make peace with that reality.

It’s an odd way round for a business to work. In a 2007 article, producer Todd Wagner said in New York Times Magazine article entitled “When the Producer Came to Town”:

In any other business, the high-risk investor gets paid back first, or if the business fails, is paid the highest percentage of the leavings. In Hollywood the studios get paid back first, for their distribution piece and the p-and-a. In no other business is that the case.

(“P-and-a” is prints and advertising, the cost of releasing the film.)

Investors accept the risk of a big loss for the chance of a big profit. And most often, it’s the loss.

Financing a film means showing everyone who expects their money back exactly where they sit in that order, and what has to go right before their turn comes.

What are Phil and I teaching in January?

For well over a year I’ve been talking every week with Phil Hunt. He lends to and invests in independent films for a living, which puts him on the other side of the table from most producers.

Advanced Film Financing is the live course we’ve built from those conversations. It’s for producers and financiers on films over $1m, including producers stepping up to their first. It follows one fictional film, The Long Dark, a £3.2m UK horror-thriller, from its first finance plan to its final statement. Every problem it runs into has a real event behind it, and because it’s made up, we can open its books completely.

• There are six live sessions on Zoom, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 to 28 January 2027, at 4pm UK (11am New York, 8am Los Angeles), 90 minutes each and all recorded.

• You also get the workbooks and templates from the practicals

• Our recorded Foundations course as a reference.

• Access to an informal get-together with Phil and me in Berlin during the European Film Market.

Session 1 starts from your own project, so bring the one you’re working on. It won’t introduce you to investors or find you money, but it will show you how the deals work, so your conversations with the people who have the money go better.

It costs US$1,000 and enrolment closes on Friday 8 January. The details are at filmbusinessschool.com/advanced-film-financing.

Join 'Advanced Film Financing' course

Phil and I are running a free webinar called What you can’t look up about film finance, on Tuesday 8 December at 4pm UK (11am New York, 8am Los Angeles). Phil works through a realistic, fictional finance package and explains his thinking, and I show what my data says alongside it.

Everyone who registers gets the recording. You can sign up at filmbusinessschool.com/film-finance-webinar.

Join the free webinar

Kermode pointed out how strange it was that The Conversation lost out on the Oscar for Best Sound in 1975 to the disaster movie Earthquake. Murch laughed and said that, in his experience, the sound Oscar goes to whichever film has the most ordnance.

It’s a good line, but is it true?

To get to the bottom of this, I ran a sound-recognition model over 1,423 movies, tracking gunfire, explosions, and other sound elements (I used this previously to look at how action movies are changing).

It turns out that Walter is on to something, although if you do want to win the Oscar for sound, there’s one more thing you need to add as well as the explosions.

Do explosions get you nominated?

Yes, and they have done for a long time.

Each year I ranked the big films (every Best Picture nominee plus the previous year’s top 10 grossers) by how much gunfire and explosions they contain. Scoring 0 were the quietest movies, the noisiest scored 100, and the typical film got 50. The chart below compares 478 films ever nominated for a sound Oscar with the big films that were passed over.

Since 1980, the sound nominees have averaged 62 for gunfire and explosions, compared with 48 for the films that missed out. The gap was widest in the 1980s and 1990s (65 against 47), while before 1980 there was barely a gap.

So if your film is loud, low and violent, your chances of a sound nomination go up. This seems to be an open secret in the sound community. Oscar-winning sound designer Randy Thom told Animation Magazine in 2018:

A very high percentage of films that get nominated for sound Oscars are films with lots of battle scenes. We think loud sound, lots of sounds, that must be good sound.

And when director Taylor Hackford accepted an award from the Cinema Audio Society, he told the room of sound mixers:

When I watch the Academy Awards, the Oscar for Best Sound always goes to the ‘boom!’ movies. Boom! Boom! The sound effects that win always have the loudest explosions.

But a subtle difference between those quotes is the rub. Thom is talking about nominations and Hackford about winning. While it’s true that the level of explosions is a good indication of which films get nominated, but the test does not predict which one wins.

Within each year’s Oscar race, I ranked the nominees against each other, so the winner can score anywhere from 0 (the quietest film in its field) to 100 (the loudest). If the soundtrack's content made no difference, winners would average 50.

On gunfire and explosions, they come very close. Across the 46 Oscar sound races since 1980 the winner averages 54, which is well within what chance produces, and since 2000 it’s 49.

To pick winners from losers, we need another audio signature - bass. I tracked how often the low end of the soundtrack (below 120 Hz, the range you feel as much as hear) is nearly as loud as the film ever gets.

Since 1980 the winner averages 68 on loud bass, and in 21 of the 46 races the winner had more loud bass than any other nominee, when chance alone would give about 9.

In the 1980s and 1990s both measures pointed upwards, with gunfire at 61 and loud bass at 71. Since 2000 gunfire has fallen back to chance, while loud bass has stayed high at 66.

Before 1980, neither made any difference, which suggests that older ceremonies were a different contest, judged on very different soundtracks.

What does a winning soundtrack sound like?

The next chart shows every race since 2000, with each nominee as a blue dot and the winners as orange dots. The further right a dot sits, the more loud bass the film has per minute.

The winners lean right, and lately they sit at the far edge of their fields. Four of the last five winners had more loud bass than any film they beat (Dune: Part One, Top Gun: Maverick, The Zone of Interest and Dune: Part Two), and the fifth, F1, came second.

You might assume this effect basically rewards war films in disguise, but The Zone of Interest and F1 have no gunfire on my measure, and neither does Gravity, which had 10.5 seconds of loud bass per minute, while the next film in its race had 7.9.

When the winner is the film with the most gunfire, it usually has the most bass as well (10 of the 15 times this happened since 1980). But 11 winners topped their field on bass without topping it on gunfire.

Before the 1991 Oscars ceremony, The Academy sent members a booklet called Notes on Voting. It includes this wonderful quote:

The sound award should not necessarily go to:

• The loudest or most spectacular film, or

• The picture with the most popular music.

In summary, the sound award should go to the picture that most successfully integrates the dialogue, sound effects, and music to tell the story.

The fact they had to say that is interesting, and more so is that it seems that everyone ignored it!

One plausible reason for the split between nominating and winning is who votes. The sound branch picks the nominees, but every voting member of the Academy picks the winner (in 2016 that was 505 sound specialists against 6,856 voters in all).

Mark Mangini, who won for Mad Max: Fury Road, told Variety:

We fear we give away an award for most sound, not best sound.

My guess is that a cinematographer or an actor watching the nominees is less likely to count the gunshots than to notice which film made the room shake.

So why did The Conversation lose the Oscar?

The Conversation did well on the measure that predicts winners. It had 2.3 seconds of loud bass per minute, far more than Chinatown, The Towering Inferno or Young Frankenstein (between 0.2 and 0.5).

But it came second, because the race also had Earthquake. It was the first film released in Sensurround, a process MCA-Universal engineers developed for it, which added extended-range bass to the sound effects so cinemas rumbled along with Los Angeles.

American Cinematographer gave the film its whole November 1974 issue, and described the system like this.

... “Sensurround” system (patent pending), designed to give moviegoers the sense of being in the epicenter of a major earthquake.

Earthquake had 3.5 seconds of loud bass per minute, the most of any nominee that year.

The movie Murch was up against had literally been engineered to shake the room, and there’s no competing with that.

Notes

The sound-recognition model is PANNs (CNN14, trained on Google’s AudioSet), which scores 527 types of sound many times a second. I kept the highest score for each sound in each second of every film.

• A second counts as gunfire or explosions if explosion, gunshot, machine gun, fusillade, artillery, cap gun, eruption or boom scored 0.3 or more, and no engine, aircraft, vehicle, water, rain, thunder or static sound scored 0.2 or more (those were the commonest false alarms).

• A second counts as loud bass if the energy below 120 Hz reached within 6 dB of the film’s own 95th percentile loudness.

• Quiet scenes can’t qualify, and the volume of a particular copy makes no difference.

• Each soundtrack was mixed down to a single channel, and the standard mixdown leaves out the separate subwoofer channel that surround-sound copies carry. (Only 102 of the 1,423 copies had one, and re-measuring every film with the subwoofer included gives the same result).

The first 60 seconds of every film (studio logos) and everything after the end credits begin were left out. Credit start times come from my end credits study. For movies I didn’t already have end-credit data for, I dropped the final 6% of the running time, which is more than the credits take up in three quarters of the films with known times.

I calculated ranks within each race (or within each year, for the nomination comparison), so films are only compared with others of the same era.

From 1983 to 2020 the Academy also gave a separate award for sound editing (sound effects editing until 2000), until it merged them into a single Best Sound award in 2021. My main figures use the main sound award, one race per ceremony (Best Sound, or Sound Mixing from 2004 to 2020). Adding the Sound Editing races from 2005 to 2020 gives the same answer, but the effects editing races from 1983 to 2004, which usually had only two or three nominees, show no lean either way.

Sources for the quotes. Randy Thom, Animation Magazine, February 2018, pages 27 to 28. Taylor Hackford, Variety, 26 February 2011. Lon Bender and Mark Mangini, Variety, 12 February 2016. Notes on Voting, as reprinted in the April to May 1991 issue of the Moviesound Newsletter and in David E. Stone and Vanessa Theme Ament’s Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter (2017), page 70. American Cinematographer, November 1974, page 1287.

Nowhere is this truer than in the world of major film festivals. If you look at the people and companies behind the films selected and favoured by major festivals over the years, the same names keep coming up.

• Some of that is talent (i.e. the festivals are seeking the best new art and artistic talent is not spread equally across filmmakers).

• Some of that is down to the type of films (i.e. festivals heavily over-index towards certain types of films and so the people repeatedly making or representing those types of films are likely to be festival regulars).

• But some of it is also down to networks.

In order to get a handle on the scale of the effect of the latter, I looked at all 3,037 feature films selected by Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto in the five years between 2021 and 2025.

What counts as ‘cold’?

‘Backing’ is quite a vague word, so I broke it into five things that can each be checked against a record.

1. A public funder, foundation, or broadcaster among the listed companies behind the film. This could include national film funds, regional funds, Eurimages, Arte, the BFI, a Sundance Institute grant, or similar.

2. A lab or talent programme alumnus among the director, producers, or writers. Such as Sundance Institute labs, Berlinale Talents, the Cannes Résidence, TorinoFilmLab, Biennale College Cinema, etc.

3. A studio, streamer, financier or distributor as a production company. This was to look for films that were made for or with someone who already planned to release them.

4. A producer with a prior top-festival film. I defined this as a credited producer (not an executive producer) who had a film selected at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, Tribeca, SXSW or the BFI London Film Festival on a prior movie.

5. A sales agent attached before the festival announced its lineup. This is the company that sells a film’s rights to distributors around the world (I have previously studied how few films ever get one here).

I’ve called a film cold at selection when none of the five applies on the day the festival’s programme was announced.

Determining the situation for most films was easy as the data revealed that it had at least one of the above. But there were some vauge fringe cases. These were things like having a sales agent today, but not being able to determine if they boarded the film before or after festival selection. In other rare cases, I just couldn’t find out much about the film or filmmakers.

This means that rather than give a single figure, I’m going to give the low-end and high-end numbers. The lower figure counts only the films I am certain were cold, and the higher includes all the ‘possibly cold’ films, with the truth sitting between the two.

There are more details on my process and criteria in the Notes at the end.

How many films arrive cold at a major festival?

The short answer is somewhere between one film in 43 and one in 23.

Of the 3,037 selected features, 70 (2.3%) definitely arrived with nobody behind them at the moment the festival chose them. If every possibly cold film was in fact cold, that would double to 134 (4.4%).

Berlin is the outlier, with between 5.5% and 10.4% of its 617 features arriving cold (34 to 64 films). Sundance sits between 1.9% and 4.3%, Toronto between 1.6% and 2.5%, and Venice between 1.5% and 3.7%.

Cannes is at the bottom, on 0.9% to 1.6%. That’s between five and nine films out of 551 across five years. None of the five definite cases was in Competition or Un Certain Regard. Four played in the parallel sections, and the fifth was Revolution of Our Times, a documentary Cannes added to its Special Screenings in secret.

The ranking of these festivals won’t surprise industry veterans. Berlin has the Forum, a section built for exactly the kind of film that has no network around it, and the Forum accounts for about half of Berlin’s cold films. Cannes has nothing like it, and even its parallel sections are heavily pre-sold or pre-supported.

Which programmes at major festivals select unconnected films?

Over five years, Cannes Competition selected 110 films and not one arrived cold. The same is true of all 122 films in the Venice Competition and all 91 in Berlin's Competition, and of every film in Un Certain Regard, Cannes Critics' Week, Toronto's Galas and TIFF Docs.

Sundance is the one festival where a competition slot went to a cold film. Two did in the U.S. Dramatic Competition and one in the U.S. Documentary Competition, out of 206 competition slots.

For the five years of data I looked at it’s fair to say that the main competitions of the European festivals just don’t take cold films.

But there are routes open to unconnected filmmakers via curated sidebars built for first features and experimental work.

As the chart below shows, Berlin’s Forum is the standout, with 17 of its 131 features (13%) cold. Behind it are Toronto’s Midnight Madness at 9%, then Berlin’s Panorama and Encounters and Sundance’s NEXT at 5% or 6%, and Toronto’s Wavelengths and Discovery at 4%.

(The chart above is only looking at the confirmed cold films, so you should read it as the low-end, not the full picture).

What is behind a typical selected film?

Across the major festivals I studied, the data reveals that 78% of selected films had at least one producer who’d already had a film at a major festival.

• 55% had a public funder, broadcaster or foundation in the credits.

• 31% were made with a studio, streamer or distributor as a production company.

• 18% had a lab alumnus among the director, writers and producers.

• Only 23% had a sales agent named in the trade press before the announcement.

So the typical film in a major festival lineup has already been developed, funded and produced by industry veterans. That isn’t really what most of us would think of when we talk about festivals “discovering” talent. In this case, the festivals are not the first step in a new journey but rather the calculated outcome from a long, laid-out plan.

When does the sales agent turn up?

For every selected feature with a confirmed sales agent (2,091 of them), I looked at when they first linked to the film in the trades (i.e. Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, or Screen Daily).

Across the five festivals, the agent was on board before the festival announcement for 33% of films. For 39% of the films, the trades reported the link after news of the selection was released, and for the remaining 28%, the trade press never named the agent and film together (in these cases sites like IMDb, Cinando, CineEurope, etc. confirmed the link).

At Toronto, 46% of sales agents were documented before the announcement, which sets it apart from the other four festivals. It announces in late July (i.e. after Cannes and its market have been and gone), so more of its films arrive already sold.

What do the cold films look like?

As I got more familiar with the types of cold films which did manage to break into major festivals, I started to see patterns. They’re self-made, often by one person or a couple, often for very little, and produced outside of co-production systems.

I want to end by quickly highlighting just a few of the great filmmakers who did manage to get festival recognition from the outside. They include:

• Ryan J. Sloan’s Gazer (Directors’ Fortnight 2024) was shot at weekends over two years while he worked as an electrician.

• Kogonada’s Zi is a cold film at Sundance this year and was made by seven collaborators who paid their own way and own it jointly.

• Keren Cytter’s The Wrong Movie (Berlin Forum 2024) is an artist’s film made for USD 25,000.

• Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti’s It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This (Midnight Madness 2024) was made in small-town Missouri on minimal equipment and will never be released online.

• Takahide Hori’s Junk World (Midnight Madness 2025) is a stop-motion feature paid for by two crowdfunding campaigns.

• Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way (Toronto Discovery 2024) is from Nigeria and was written and produced by Blessing Uzzi.

• Nabin Subba’s A Road to a Village (Toronto’s Centrepiece 2023) is a community-funded project from Nepal.

• At Cannes 2024, Maisam Ali’s In Retreat reached ACID having passed through the Hong Kong project market as a work in progress and nothing else.

• Kiwi Chow’s Revolution of Our Times is the Hong Kong protest documentary that Cannes accepted in 2021 and kept secret until the day before the awards.

Notes

My dataset today includes every feature film in the official selections of the following festivals for the 2021 to 2025 editions, 3,037 films in all after removing shorts, restorations, series and compilations:

• Cannes Film Festival (Competition, Un Certain Regard, Out of Competition, Cannes Premiere, Special Screenings, Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week and ACID)

• Venice Film Festival (Competition, Out of Competition, Orizzonti, Orizzonti Extra, Venice Spotlight, Biennale College, Giornate degli Autori and the Venice International Film Critics’ Week)

• Berlin International Film Festival (Competition, Encounters, Berlinale Special, Panorama, Forum, Generation, Perspectives and Perspektive Deutsches Kino)

• Sundance Film Festival (all feature sections)

• Toronto International Film Festival (all feature programmes)

My rules for the five types of ‘backing’ were:

1. A public funder, broadcaster or foundation counts if any production company credit on sites like IMDb, Cinando, or Cineuropa, or the film’s press kit or funder listing, names a public or regional fund, a broadcaster, an EU or multilateral body, a collecting society or a foundation. Tax shelters, SOFICAs and regional incentives don’t count.

2. A lab alumnus counts if the director, a writer or a credited producer appears in Sundance Institute’s supported-project guides and festival-watch pages, Berlinale Talents’ alumni-at-festival pages (Cannes 2022 to 2026, Venice 2022 to 2025, Toronto 2021 and 2022, Berlin 2021 to 2026), the Cannes Résidence archive, TorinoFilmLab’s films list or Biennale College Cinema’s editions, or in a programme (the Korean Academy of Film Arts, the TIFF Talent Lab, Doha’s Qumra and the Hungarian National Film Institute’s Incubator among them).

3. A studio, streamer, financier or distributor counts when credited as a production company or named in the press as having financed the film.

4. A producer with a prior top-festival film counts if a person credited as ‘producer’ (not executive, co-, line or associate producer) had an earlier film selected at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, Tribeca, SXSW or BFI London.

5. A sales agent counts only if a Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline or Screen Daily article dated before the festival’s first lineup announcement names the agent alongside the film, or an equivalent dated source.

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

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

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

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

So which is it?

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

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

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

Let’s start at the beginning…

What is a greenlight model?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How close did Sony’s greenlight figures get?

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

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

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

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

Did the films earn what they needed to?

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

Sony calculated two levels for each film:

1. The worldwide gross needed to break even.

2. The gross needed to clear the return threshold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did anyone believe the numbers?

Not really!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pascal’s replied simply:

Get him I’ll will make it work

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

What about the films Sony passed on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can’t a comps model see?

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

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

Digger could also be described as:

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

That version is unlikely to pass any greenlight model!

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

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

The projections were insane.

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

I left out six films with a greenlight figure.

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

• Kitchen Sink (never released)

• Patient Zero (released straight to video in 2018)

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

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

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

It's not hard to find other examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do people suspect these accounts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which accounts post scores at all?

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

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

• DiscussingFilm (3.2 million followers)

• Film Updates (1.6 million followers)

• The Hollywood Handle (176,000 followers)

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

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

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

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

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

Do they ignore the bad films entirely?

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

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

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

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

Does it matter whose film it is?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working against their own interests

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Walter’s guess was 952. Was he right?

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

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

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

How many shots does a typical film have now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does it differ by director?

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

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

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

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

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho told Filmmaker Magazine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

How has the shot count changed over a century?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would dispute that concept.

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

Has the gap between fast and slow films widened?

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

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

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

Which genres have the most shots?

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

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

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

Do longer films have more shots?

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

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

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

Does money buy more shots?

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

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

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

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

Do award films cut differently?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time - how tall is Tom Cruise, really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is nothing new.

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

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

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

• Their audiences were a similar age, too.

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

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

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

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

That’s a gap of 4.4 times.

Who votes on IMDb?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How big is the gap?

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

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

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

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

Is it just IMDb?

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

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

• MovieLens: 45% fewer ratings

• Wikipedia: 41% fewer pageviews

• IMDb: 40% fewer votes

• IMDb: 40% fewer written reviews

• IMDb, US users only: 31% fewer votes

• Letterboxd: 25% fewer ratings

• TMDb: 20% fewer votes

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

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

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

Is it only that women vote less?

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

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

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

This means two things are happening at once:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus question - Does it change the score?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two ways to read that:

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

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

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

Can you correct for it?

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

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

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

• 40% women = multiply by 0.81

• 45% women = multiply by 1.00

• 50% women = multiply by 1.23

• 60% women = multiply by 1.88

• 70% women = multiply by 2.86

• 80% women = multiply by 4.36

Why does it matter?

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

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

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

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

So what is an IMDb vote count measuring?

Online engagement, mostly.

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What even is tracking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which films have the greatest margins of error?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are big films missed by less money?

No. They are missed by more.

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

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

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

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

How far ahead are these forecasts made?

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

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

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

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

What might be driving this?

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

Here are my best guesses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

And are conditions harder than they were previously?

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

How I measured it

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

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

What is the typical lifespan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When do distributors die?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are more distributors dying than before?

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

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

This chart says two things to me;

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

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

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

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

• EuropaCorp’s distribution department in France in 2018

• Mars Films in 2019

• Kew Media in receivership in February 2020

• Aviron in 2020,

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

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

• Belga Films in February 2026,

• True Brit a few days ago.

Where is it hardest to survive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did Paramount and Warner Bros actually release?

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

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

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

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

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

How to investigate a vague claim

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

• 46 were claiming the mid-budget movie has gone

• 12 said it is back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the published budgets show

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

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

Quite a bit, it turns out.

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

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

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

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

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

We have to find another way.

We’re going on a mid hunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 102 to 116 a year in the late 1990s

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

• 74 to 103 a year through the 2010s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which half went?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve learned three things:

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TL;DR - Do film festivals pay cash prizes?

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

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

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

Show me the money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do the big five festivals pay anything?

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

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

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

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

Berlin is the most generous of the three European majors. Its own juries hand out seven cash prizes worth €130,000 a year: €50,000 for the best first feature, €40,000 for the documentary award, €20,000 for the best short, and four prizes in its Generation strand for young audiences worth €20,000 between them. The Golden and Silver Bears carry nothing.

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

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

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

When does the money fall?

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

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

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

Who gets the money?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do they all demand a premiere?

Actually, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Melbourne and Sydney ask for an Australian premiere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other routes you may consider include:

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

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

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

Yeah, but does it ever actually happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about shorts?

Let’s end by quickly looking at short films.

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

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

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

Notes

I built my festival study list using:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• When Do We Stop Finding New Music?

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

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

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

Stat Significant

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

By Daniel Parris

Intro: Project Popcorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We Stopped Going to the Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: Time, Money, and Diapers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stat Significant

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

By Daniel Parris

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

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

He ended his polemic with:

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

AAAAAHHHHHHHH I can’t take it any more!

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

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

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

What is the look, exactly?

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

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

How do you measure it?

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

I then ask the data two questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But did they?

Yes. Oh, yes they did.

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

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

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

This is actually not about orange and teal taking over

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

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

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

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

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

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

So did it ever go away?

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

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

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

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

The colourist Dan Moran wrote in Mixing Light in 2018:

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Tied to certain genres

2. Limited to bigger budgets

3. Mainly an American thing

4. And which filmmakers and creatives use it most.

1. Which genres lean into it?

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

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

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

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

2. Is it a big-budget thing?

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

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

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

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

3. Is it still a Hollywood thing?

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

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

4. Who does it most?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epilogue

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. There was always a market in Toronto

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

One seller told Deadline:

We were already treating Toronto like a market

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. It looks well run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. It sits on top of a festival that works

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

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

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

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

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

4. It is North America without being America

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

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

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

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

…a little bit of a silver lining.

And a Quebec producer told CBC on opening day:

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

How much location filming does London host?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened to London’s location filming?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do the people who book locations say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How have the costs changed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does a unit base cost, anyhow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mars gave us this fictional example:

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

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

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

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

London’s location monopoly board

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else can be done?

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

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

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

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

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

Another asked for

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

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

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

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

The push from Whitehall

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the work going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Band 1 up to £1.25m

• Band 2 from £1.25m to £3m

• Band 3 from £3m to £8m

• Band 4 above £8m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s to be done?

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extra thoughts

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

Film London sent this statement:

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

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

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

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

Andrew Pavord, Founder and Chairman of FilmFixer, said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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