’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).

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

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

Rather than celebrate this achievement, some have decided that it’s just not possible and have built a fringe conspiracy theory that he did not actually direct the film. What a world we live in, eh?

Kane himself seems amused by the patently false rumour, and commented on it exactly how you might expect a 20-year-old to - via a pinned YouTube comment in which he said:

This is actually all true. They don’t tell you this, but 96% of all movies released in North America and Europe are actually directed by the same person. They call him ‘The Older Gentleman’. He has had all of Hollywood in a chokehold for decades now.

I looked at the directors’ ages behind 4,690 credits to see how old they were when their movie was released.

Rather than looking at all movies made, I focused on those with at least 50k votes on IMDb. This enables meaningful coverage (many early-stage directors have biographical data available) and lets us focus on professional, working directors.

For those wanting a sense of how famous a film has to be to be included, this filter just about includes the 1998 Very Bad Things starring Cameron Diaz, the 2007 horror film Teeth, and the 1995 Jackie Chan beat’em up Rumble in the Bronx.

Forties for the win

Across the dataset, the median director age at the time of release is 45. Half of all credits fall between 39 and 52. The distribution is right-skewed, which is a data nerd way of saying a few very old men are pulling up the average.

While this is interesting already, what's under the surface of these numbers is even more revealing.

Have directors always been this age?

You might have expected the headline average to have slowly drifted upwards, given that the UK and US working populations have aged over the past forty years, and many creative industries have aged with them. But that’s not what we see in the data.

The second-highest decade for directors’ ages was the 1950s, when the median age was 47. This is the tail end of the studio era, when the people running widely-seen films were largely those who had been running them since before the war. Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, John Ford and George Cukor were all in their 50s and 60s, and Cecil B. DeMille was directing into his 70s.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the median fell five years, from 47 to 42. This is the studio system’s collapse, the French New Wave’s influence on the Americans who noticed it, the rise of film school as a career route, and a New Hollywood generation who broke in early. Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and George Lucas were all directing widely-seen features in their 20s and 30s. Directors got younger because the gates opened.

This century, we’ve seen a reversal of the trend, and by the 2020s, the median director of a widely-watched film is seven years older than their 1990s equivalent.

So it’s true to say that film directors are getting older… but only if you compare now to thirty years ago. And we’ve now edged just past the old 1950s high, the oldest the director’s chair has ever been

The changing faces of film directors

As new types of people were being given command of commercial films, we have seen the director’s age change. But while one aspect evolved (i.e. ‘hippy types’ took over from the studio old hands), another did not - they were still mostly men.

The 1990s saw an increase in female directors, and in more recent years, we’ve seen another increase in diversity (albeit far from parity). You might reasonably ask how this change affected the average age of directors.

Male directors have got much older (from a 1980s mean of 43 to 50 today), but the average age of female directors has barely moved, hovering around 44 for the past two decades

This means we need to update the finding we stated earlier in the article. Rather than concluding simply that “Film directors are getting older”, we need to say instead that “male film directors are getting older”.

Women are pulling the overall trend down, not up. Without the male credits, the 2020s mean would sit at 50 rather than 49.

Are old people hoarding all the cash?

As with wider society, it is indeed true that most of the money is given to, and held by, the most age-challenged folk.

Joking aside, this actually makes sense. Bigger budgets are generally given to people who have proved their capabilities on previous projects, so they are more likely to be older. In addition, the types of films that can raise the biggest budgets are also those that tend to pick their key creatives from established networks.

Which genres are run by younger directors?

As well as Backrooms, last month also saw the release of box-office smash horror movie Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker. This is a slightly more common sight, as horror has the youngest average director age of all genres, at just 40 years old.

Some of this is a function of lower budgets, and it mirrors the audience demographic, in which horror has the youngest adult audience, whereas biographies and dramas have among the oldest.

Further reading

Here are other projects I’ve conducted on age demographics:

• Why are actors getting older?

• Is the over-50 action star boom peaking already?

• How old are horror movie audiences?

• Do older audiences want to watch older actors?

• How do movie genre tastes change with age?

• What films are older cinemagoers watching?

• Can the film industry halt the decline of young audiences in cinemas?

• What percentage of movies are written by women over 40?

Notes

Today’s research examined every feature film with at least 50,000 IMDb votes that was released theatrically since 1930. That gave me 4,690 director credits across 4,203 films, of which I could find reliable birthday years for 95%.

I worked out the age by subtracting the year of birth from the film’s release year. This is coarse (i.e. a director born in December releasing in January will be out by one year) but at decade-scale trends this does not matter.

Production budgets are from OpusData (The Numbers) and are nominal, not inflation-adjusted.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is directors and co-directors, not the second-unit, assistant, art, and casting directors.

For most of film history, people publicly identified with one of two genders, so I have mirrored this binary approach in reporting the numbers. The number of people this excludes is a rounding error, so not relevant to today’s topic.

Do you know the percentage of a film festival’s budget that comes from entry fees? I have heard that it was 9% - what have you heard?

Thirteen years ago, when I interviewed 523 film festival directors, the average was under 14.8% of income.

However, when the Raindance Film Festival opened its books to me three years later, its submission-fee income accounted for 35.6% of its total income.

So I didn’t have a clean figure to provide to Barton off the top of my head. I went digging around for data sources. In the US, most film festivals are non-profits, and non-profits file a public tax return, the Form 990. Buried inside it, on the Statement of Revenue, the festivals list where their money came from.

For example, in 2023, the Portland Film Festival took in $307,194 in income, 82% of which came from fees.

So, we can already see that the answer will differ widely between festivals. Let’s take a systematic approach, looking at the details of two sources of data:

1. 2013 Festival Director Interviews. The answers given by film festival directors in 2013. Each provided a single, self-reported figure for their festival.

2. 2026 Tax Records Analysis. The tax records of US-based non-profit film festivals. Most organisations lump all income into a vague bucket marked “programme revenue”, but a minority break it out into a separately labelled line item, “Submission fees” or “Film entry fees”. Out of around 2,500 candidate organisations, 57 itemised their fee income cleanly enough to use, giving 266 festival-years of data.

The short answer is “it varies enormously”

Using the new data, I found that three-quarters of film festivals earned less than 11% of their income from fees.

The smallest share from fees was just 0.2%, and we’ve already seen the largest, at 82%, for Portland.

The average percentage across these festivals and all the tax records was 10.7%. The median was 4.4%.

One thing worth noting is that the smallest festivals are the ones most likely to rely on fees, and yet they are also the least likely to have detailed tax records.

Has it changed much?

Using the tax records we can look back over the past decade. This reveals that the median festival has fluctuated between 3% and 7% over this period.

How are film festivals funding themselves?

At this point, you might be wondering how festivals stay afloat, if filmmaker fees are such a thin slice.

Festivals earn their money from three types of income:

1. Submission fees paid by filmmakers

2. Donations, grants and sponsorship

3. Commercial income, mostly ticket sales, but some do have merch.

Fees are the smallest of those three types. Below, I’ve broken it down by festival age and put both datasets side by side: the 2013 director survey and the 2026 tax records.

The oldest festivals rely on fees the least. Veterans take just 7% of their income from fees in both datasets because they’ve had the time to build donor and regular audiences that younger festivals are still chasing.

My reading of the data reveals four kinds of film festivals:

1. The donor-funded are the mainstream, getting the bulk of their income from grants and gifts and only a few percent from fees.

2. The sponsor-and-ticket festivals are the biggest, covering their costs with a mix of donations, box office and sponsorship.

3. The small-and-fee-leaning are tiny operations scraping a third from donors and leaning on fees for close to a fifth of their income.

4. The fee-funded are tiny, donor-less, and running on filmmaker money for three-quarters or more of their income.

The biggest of the “Donor-funded” cohort is Sundance. Its audited statements reveal that fees account for only around 2% of total income. Sundance processes roughly 15,000 submissions a year and earns far more from sponsors, donors, and ticket sales, so the $1 million it collects from submission fees is a rounding error on its books.

Cork International Film Festival, Ireland’s oldest, is a useful contrast as a public-arts festival rather than a US non-profit. Its published accounts have held steady between 8% and 11% over six years.

How much money are we talking about?

I have focused on the percentage of fees earned, rather than the dollar amount, for two reasons. Firstly, that was the focus of Barton’s initial question, but also because I think it’s a more meaningful number.

However, I’m sure I will be asked about the numbers at play, so here’s a quick overview.

Last year, I studied the cost of a single entry to a film festival, discovering that the average fee ranged from $30 (for an early-submitted short film) to $87 (for a late-submitted feature film).

In today’s new research on tax returns, the festival that reported the highest income from fees was Santa Barbara, at close to half a million dollars. But Santa Barbara is a multi-million-dollar operation, so that half-million is only about 4% of its income. (There will be many festivals earning more, but their tax reporting prevents us from knowing the figures).

The Dumbo Film Festival has a much lower total but is at the other end of the spectrum. They reported that in one year all of its $51,964 funding came from fees, and 72.7% was paid out to just three people.

Below are the festivals that had the largest declared income from fees.

So what of ‘scam’ festivals?

Filmmakers have been warning each other about ‘scam festivals’ for well over a decade. These are events that exist mainly to trick filmmakers into paying to submit, under the false premise that the festival is well-respected, useful, or even real.

The concern is neither new nor fringe. Back in 2019, Screen Daily reported calls for a festival regulator after a run of scam events, and noted that FilmFreeway had already delisted 42 of them. The Hollywood Reporter has documented how below-the-radar festivals prey on struggling filmmakers, including a horrifying story of a writer-producer who borrowed money to fly from New York to London for her ‘UK premiere’ and found a near-empty room. One Rhode Island showcase ended up branded the ‘Fyre Festival’ of film festivals.

It helps to picture a spectrum. At one end sit the outright frauds, which take your fee for an event that never happens. At the other side are the ‘award mills’, which are technically real but exist to manufacture laurels. They run rolling monthly deadlines, nominate almost everyone, spin up a dozen city-branded editions of the same event, and then sell you a certificate, a trophy or a ‘social media package’ once you’ve ‘won’. The laurel, not the screening, is the product.

Sadly, the tax data I’ve been using can’t really tell the difference between a ‘real festival’ and one that just farms fees. And to be fair to the small festivals at the top of my charts, a festival funded almost entirely by fees isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong. It may simply be a small event in a town with no arts money and no wealthy donors, funding itself the only way it can.

Similarly, the fact that most of the income goes to a small number of people is not automatically suspect. We have all met the person who makes a community event happen through sheer dedication and hard graft. If they secure venues, volunteers and resources for free, then paying them for their time is good value, not a red flag.

So how do you tell the two apart? The community has settled on a familiar set of warning signs: dozens of award categories, near-automatic nominations, vague or shifting venues, screenings that turn out to be ‘online only’, and a flurry of upsells the moment you’re selected.

There are good rundowns of the red flags from Noam Kroll, Submitting to Film Festivals and Show Me Shorts. The single most useful habit is to do your due diligence before you submit your film each time. Check that the venue exists, look for photos and press from past editions, and ask what will be screened if you’re accepted.

The platforms have, belatedly, started to respond. FilmFreeway now runs ID checks, demands venue proof, and holds a new festival’s first-year payouts until it can prove the event actually took place. Filmmakers have petitioned for more, and bodies such as the Universal Film Festival Organisation have launched specifically to stamp the practice out.

The voice of the festival directors

I don’t want to end on a negative note, as the vast, vast majority of film festivals are working hard and doing well.

A filmmaker who is starting to submit to festivals might be forgiven for initially decrying the amount of money it costs to submit to festivals, but once you dig into what it takes to put festivals on, the fees seem far more defensible.

Running a film festival is a lot like making a film. I.e., it makes no rational sense, so the only people who do it are those who are most passionate, most resourceful, and who really believe in the mission.

In preparing today’s article, I reached out to a number of the festivals in my dataset, especially those leaning most heavily on fees, to ask how it looks from their side of the desk.

Josh Leake, Executive Director of the Portland Film Festival, rightly pointed out that tax filings only capture cash, not the volunteer and community support that keeps a small festival running. He said:

The submission-fee revenue can appear larger on the filing than it would if one were looking at the festival’s broader support base as a whole.

Jeff Ross of SF IndieFest explained why a festival’s fee reliance can climb without anyone raising a single fee.

Before the pandemic, our revenue was mostly from ticket sales, with some grant money and submission fees making up a much smaller percentage. The percentage of revenue from submission fees has gone up, but that’s mainly because our revenue from ticket sales has declined so much. The overall event budget has declined about 50% since 2020. We don’t have sponsors, donors or a membership program. We are truly a grass roots DIY arts org.

At the other end, Leslie Raymond of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, whose fee reliance has actually fallen over the decade, said:

Submission fees are an important part of our funding mix, but our goal has always been to build a sustainable festival through a diverse range of revenue sources rather than relying too heavily on any single one.

And Kitty Boone of Aspen Film showed how one organisation can do both. Its feature festival is invitation-only, with no submission fees at all, whereas its shorts festival, Aspen Shortsfest, charges one, because:

…we receive well over 3,300 submissions, [and] it requires a lot to program a festival such as this.

The same themes came through thirteen years ago, in the anonymous answers to my original survey:

“It is a labor of love. No one is getting rich off your entry fees.”

“Generally, I think filmmakers believe that festivals have more money than they have… there usually is no ‘profit’ to share. The vast majority of film festivals barely get by.”

“There is very little funding, and small festivals like us rely on the nominal entry fees to let us run a festival.”

“We know people don’t like paying submission fees, but without them our festival (and I assume many others) would not be able to make ends meet.”

Notes

I built the festival list via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and the IRS Business Master File. That gave around 2,500 candidate organisations. I matched them to the IRS e-file index and read the underlying Form 990 XML directly. 57 festivals itemised submission or entry fees on their own line (Form 990, Part VIII, line 2), giving 266 festival-years across the 2015 to 2024 tax years. The denominator throughout is total revenue (Part VIII, line 12).

I only used a festival year where entry fees sat on their own labelled line. Where a festival bundled them into something mixed, like “Tickets and entry fees” or a generic “Festival fees”, I left it out rather than guess.

These are fees as booked (i.e. gross, not net), before FilmFreeway’s commission of around 12%, payment processing, sales tax or fee waivers. The cash retained is somewhat lower, so if anything, these figures slightly overstate reliance.

Organisations below the filing threshold submit a Form 990-EZ or a one-page postcard, neither of which itemises fees. Of 609 festivals that filed the short form, only about one in eighteen mentioned submission fees anywhere, and never as an isolable number. They are exactly the festivals most likely to live on fees, so the true long tail sits higher than this sample, not lower.

Sundance and Cork come from their own published accounts, not the IRS data. Sundance’s audited statements carry a “Submission” line and Cork’s accounts, filed as an Irish charity, carry a “Submission Fees” line.

A few readers reached out to ask whether I had taken the films’ quality into account. I had, but what stuck with me was how many people clearly assumed that a famous cast meant a better film. The cynic in me assumed the opposite!

Let’s briefly consider the two perspectives, and then see which the data reveals to be correct.

Fame = quality?

You can see why someone might think that famous actors would be in better films.

Famous actors are, on the whole, richer and far better supported than those still on the way up. They have readers, managers and agents whose job is to find good scripts. Not only can they seek them out, but they will also be constantly offered more of them because most filmmakers want/need a famous name in their film.

They also have power - Tom Cruise can pretty much star in almost any film he wants (if he is willing to be flexible on his fee, of course).

So it might be reasonable to conclude that more famous actors tend to make better films.

Fame ≠ quality?

But there is a counterargument that famous actors are not trying to make good films. They are trying to make films that are good for them. This can be a very different thing, tied to their brand and money.

When asked about his role in panned Jaws: The Revenge, Sir Michael Caine famously said:

I have never seen the film, but by all accounts, it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

It’s a reasonable assumption that the more famous the cast, the bigger a film’s budget will be, but I doubt many people instinctively believe that bigger budgets automatically mean better scripts.

Then we have to consider that the biggest stars tend to work on films with the most competing forces around them, such as marketing, release-date strategy, and merchandising.

None of these forces aims to improve the film, and some directly pull against it.

Scores ≠ quality?

One thing to note upfront is that we cannot actually measure whether a film is good. We can only measure whether people liked it. Today I’m going to be using two quick proxies:

1. Metacritic score, which averages professional critics’ reviews into a number out of 100.

2. IMDb user rating, which captures the general audience’s verdict out of 10.

So in truth, we’re tracking reception rather than art, but they are the best signals we have of how a film landed. At the very least, they let us see which factors correlate and which do not.

I crunched the numbers on 2,756 feature films released over the past quarter-century to see if there is a connection between how audiences and critics rate them and the cast’s star power. The details of my methodology are in the Notes section at the end.

A famous cast is a weak sign of quality

The core finding is that fame is a pretty bad proxy for whether a film is likely to be any good.

Films led by a top-tier name score ever-so-slightly higher than those led by a non-famous actor, with both audiences and critics, but the gap is small and only with the most famous names.

Top-tier-led films average 6.65 out of ten with audiences, compared to 6.28 for ordinary-led films, and a similarly modest step with critics. Once you account for the film’s budget, genre and era, the famous cast still helps, but only barely.

It depends heavily on the genre

That faint average hides a sharp split by genre. A famous cast is a meaningful hint of quality in some kinds of film and no hint at all in others.

In adventure, a more famous cast tends to go with better-reviewed films. Everywhere else, the link is weak, and in drama, romance, and horror it is essentially zero, even tipping slightly negative among critics. These are exactly the genres that live on concept, script, and word of mouth, where a familiar face adds little and can even raise suspicions that a film is relying on its casting.

Over the entire period, the cast-quality link has remained weakly positive, neither strengthening nor collapsing, hovering between +0.08 and +0.22 across eras.

Which actors are a good sign of quality?

The link is much stronger with some actors than with others. Some actors appear, again and again, in films that audiences and critics both rate highly. Others have built long careers in films that neither does.

The scatter plot below places each of the 2,730 famous actors I looked at on a chart of average IMDb and Metascore for their past films. They fall into four camps:

• Everyone’s favourites are in the top right, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Cate Blanchett, Denzel Washington, Christian Bale, and, among newer arrivals, Florence Pugh.

• Critical darlings are in the top left, and include Greta Gerwig, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, whose choices lean towards the kind of film reviewers admire more than the multiplex crowd.

• Crowd-pleasers sit in the bottom right, containing actors whose films are appreciated by audiences but much less so with critics, such as Will Smith, Ryan Reynolds, Sandra Bullock, Liam Neeson and Gerard Butler.

• The… er… others. In the bottom corner, we have actors whose films are poorly rated by both audiences and critics, such as Adam Sandler, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson, and Jason Statham.

Adam Sandler appears completely unbothered by how his movies are reviewed, saying in 2013:

I didn’t get into movies to please the critics. I got into it to make people laugh and have fun with my friends.

Others in that final quadrant draw a clearer distinction between the film and their contribution to it. When IndieWire asked Nicolas Cage about the run of films he made to pay off a multi-million-dollar debt, he said:

Even if the movie ultimately is crummy, they know I’m not phoning it in, that I care every time.

If you do want to seek out good films based only on the famous names starring in them, below are the people with the famous names who have the highest correlation with quality:

1. Leonardo DiCaprio

2. Andy Serkis

3. Florence Pugh

4. Philip Seymour Hoffman

5. Warwick Davis

6. Carey Mulligan

7. Viggo Mortensen

8. Clint Eastwood

9. Tilda Swinton

10. Helen McCrory

11. Benedict Cumberbatch

12. Tom Hanks

13. Andrew Garfield

14. Quentin Tarantino

15. Christopher Lee

16. Domhnall Gleeson

17. Brad Pitt

18. Tom Hiddleston

19. Léa Seydoux

20. Tom Cruise

Bonus Finding

As I had the data to hand, I took a quick look at what factors do seem to matter.

The strongest single signal is the film’s runtime, albeit we’re still not in a ‘usefully predictive’ space. R-rated, adult-aimed films score higher than gentler ratings, and films where the director also wrote the script score higher, especially with critics.

Everything I looked at sits in the shaded zone, where the effect is small. I have sorted them by signal strength, meaning that the cast’s fame is among the least predictive.

The fact that longer films score higher is pretty consistent, rather than just the average being pulled up by the canons of Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese.

Notes

Today’s research looks at 2,756 feature films released between 2002-24 with:

• A budget on record,

• A worldwide box office figure

• A lead whose fame could be measured before release

• Both an IMDb user rating and a Metacritic score.

The actor chart uses a broader set of 2,730 prominent actors, each with at least fifteen rated theatrical films released since 2000.

Cast fame is a relative score for each film’s lead, built from publicly visible popularity signals gathered across several websites in the year before release, ranked against films of the same era.

Quality is the IMDb audience score (out of 10) and the Metacritic critics’ score (out of 100). Both are gathered after release, so they describe how a film was received rather than some inherent quality fixed in advance.

To be featured on the scatter plot, the actors had to have been among the 1,000 most famous actors at some point and to have appeared in at least 15 films released since 2000 that had both an IMDb audience score and a Metascore.

The signals chart shows a regression of each score on cast fame, budget, runtime, producer count, franchise status, adaptation, rating, whether the director also wrote it, animation, genre and era. Bars show each factor’s strength on a standardised scale, allowing them to be compared directly. With several thousand films, even small bars are statistically real rather than chance, so the shaded zone simply marks effects small enough to matter little in practice. Runtime and budget are associations, not proven causes.

The actor chart leans towards prominent, mostly English-language leads with enough films to be measured. Films that neither audiences nor critics have scored are absent, which skews the set towards titles that got a real release.

The list of the highest correlated stars at the end focuses on actors (not pure voice actors) and the more famous names.

Further reading

I’ve written on the topic of quality a few times over the years, including:

• Whether film length signals quality,

• Which actors appear most in excellent and awful films,

• Whether fewer producers make better films,

• Whether writer-directors make better films,

• Whether the timing of reviews predicts quality.

It might be the oldest argument in the film business, and the two sides go like this:

• One camp says a famous face is the closest thing to insurance a producer can buy. Audiences seem to see them as consistent brands in which every film is a prototype and genre labels are fuzzy at best.

• The other camp points out that the famous names are only there to protect the risk-averse gatekeepers within the production and distribution supply chain. Once movies hit audiences, they just want it to deliver and be entertaining.

While Obsession may have provided a powerful visual, the plural of anecdotes is not data. I went back to the data, studying the box office performance of 3,052 films this century, in relation to the fame of their lead cast (more details in the Notes section at the end of the article).

Does having a star help your film succeed?

Given that we can’t know how much an actor is paid upfront (or how much of the income they also get), we can’t talk about true value for money. For every star, there will be a price at which their involvement is a net positive to the bottom line, and after which they cost more than they help.

But we can measure the difference in performance between films with famous, semi-famous and non-famous names. For this, I am using the worldwide box-office multiplier relative to the budget. Let’s not worry too much about the exact numbers; instead, focus on the difference between the cohorts.

Films led by an actor in the top 10% of fame for their era grossed a median of 2.54 times their budget worldwide. Films led by someone in the 50th to 75th percentile, the group I am calling ‘Low Fame’, grossed 1.91 times.

So we can see that fame does have an effect.

The difference between ‘not famous’ and ‘kinda famous, I guess’ is nothing. It’s only as we start to talk about actors in the top quarter that we see an uplift, with the largest impact on the biggest name.

Given that those are also the highest-paid actors, it’s fair to assume that some of that uplift doesn’t go to the producers, studio, or investors, instead ending up in the pockets of the actors (and their agents, managers, stylists, doctors, and spiritual gurus).

Are there other ways having a famous name helps?

So many of the decisions in the film industry are made in response to perceived risk. Some can be seen as professionals making smart, informed decisions, but in a large number of cases, it’s people acting instinctively, reactions rooted in fear. So it makes sense that having a famous name can feel reassuring.

So while the previous graph SHOULD be the most important one, I suspect the one below is more interesting to film professionals. It shows that having a famous name helps reduce the risk of an embarrassing box-office failure.

A star does not guarantee a hit, but the floor under the downside is noticeably higher.

Where fame pays, and where it barely matters

But these effects are not spread evenly across genres. Obsession appeals to a younger, horror-friendly crowd.

When we split our data by genre, we find that while an A-lister is associated with higher returns across every major genre, the size of the effect varies widely.

The biggest payoff is in romance, where top-tier-led films return a multiplier of 3.82 versus 2.08 for lower-tier leads. A romantic film is largely a question of whether audiences want to spend two hours in a particular person’s company, and a recognisable, well-liked lead is close to the whole product.

Comedy, drama, thriller and adventure sit in a tighter band of roughly half a multiplier.

The genre where fame does least is horror, where the gap is only about 0.25x. This is the same pattern that Bruce Nash and I found when we looked at 877 independent films and the odds of a theatrical release a decade ago. Horror was the genre least dependent on a name and most dependent on concept.

The franchise does most of the lifting

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I didn’t comment on the effect of action in the section above. Action had the second largest effect of a star, after romance. However, it is worth asking which famous leads those are actually appearing in. Increasingly, the answer is a franchise.

The share of top-tier-led action films that belong to an established franchise has climbed from around 40% early in the period to about 79% in recent years.

In top-tier action, films in a franchise return a median ratio of 3.47, while those that are not return 1.99. The famous winners are nearly all franchise instalments, from Spider-Man: No Way Home and Jurassic World to The Hunger Games and Aquaman. The famous flops are the films that asked a star to carry a brand-new idea on their name alone: Jonah Hex (less than a quarter of its budget back), Argylle and Mortdecai. The famous name and the franchise usually travel together now, and when you can separate them, the franchise is doing most of the lifting.

A study from 15 years ago concluded that the revenue gap between star and non-star films was driven almost entirely by those films having bigger budgets and wider releases, not by audiences turning up for the face. It is also why some people contend that intellectual property is killing the movie star, and why studios and actors openly disagree about who is actually generating the money, the person or the logo.

Two bonus findings

Before we go, I want to share two minor findings I came across along the way that I found interesting.

The first is that the value of a famous name is stackable:

• Films with no top-quartile fame grossed a median of 2.04 times their budget.

• Add one famous lead, and that rises to 2.30.

• Put two genuinely famous names at the top of the call sheet, and it reaches 2.91.

I hear a few people in Cannes this year complained that while they already had a famous name in their proposed film, sales agents and distributors were not interested until they added a second famous name. While I appreciate how frustrating that must be for the filmmakers, the data seem to support what these sales professionals have been saying.

Secondly, it’s not just how famous the actors are in the moment; it’s also about the wider story of their fame.

Among leads who were already famous, I split them by whether their public attention was rising, steady or falling in the year before release.

Rising stars outperform. At the same level of established fame, films whose lead was climbing returned a median 2.69, against 2.28 for steady names and 2.21 for those whose moment was fading.

Catching an actor on the way up, when audiences are actively getting more interested in them, beats booking an equally famous name on the way down.

Notes

Today’s research examines 3,052 films released between 2000 and 2025, each with a recorded production budget, a positive worldwide box office, and a lead actor whose fame could be measured before release.

Budgets and box office come from The Numbers. The sample leans towards English-language theatrical releases, because those are the films whose budgets are publicly reported. There is a growing (and worrying) trend of reduced budget availability, which I’ve written about before.

In addition, today’s research tracks the worldwide theatrical box office. This is a useful signal, but it doesn’t capture all of a film’s income, and over the period I studied, the industry's economics have shifted.

That said, given that my numbers are comparative rather than trying to be comprehensive, I don’t feel that either effect is skewing the overall findings.

For each film, I built a relative fame score for its lead actor from a blend of publicly visible popularity signals gathered across several sources, averaged over the year ending one month before release, so the film’s own launch could not inflate it. Each film took the score of its most famous lead, and films were ranked against others from the same five-year window, so ‘top 10%’ means famous for its time rather than famous today. Leads were also classified by whether that attention was rising, steady or falling over the same window.

The median ratio is used throughout because the average is skewed by the occasional billion-dollar hit. Some genre and tier cells are small, in particular top-tier horror (10 films) and romance (22 films), so those specific figures are best read as indicative. Stars are also cast into better-financed films in the first place, so part of any apparent star effect is really a selection effect, which is exactly why the franchise comparison matters.

Last month, YouTube took offence to one of my Film Data Scientist videos on the decline in sex on movies. I got it up, but YouTube couldn’t last 10 minutes, and the video went down.

But, like a jilted lover, I’m back. I have recut the video to make it a little less sexy, and (so far) YouTube seems to be okay with it.

So here’s my explanation of why sex is disappearing from modern movies:

If the video has made you want to explore the topic a little deeper, here are some past research pieces I’ve conducted:

• Why is sex in movies declining? This examines long-term trends in sexual content in mainstream cinema and examines how global markets, franchise economics, and changing audience incentives affect what gets financed.

• Are erotic thrillers dying out? An analysis of the rise and fall of the erotic thriller, including production volume, box office performance, and the industrial conditions that once supported the genre.

• Which countries care most about sex in movies? A comparison of international ratings systems and cultural responses to sexual content, and how these influence distribution and revenue potential.

• What is replacing love as the dominant theme of movies? An exploration of shifting narrative motivations in mainstream cinema, and how romantic and sexual storytelling has lost ground to other emotional drivers.

• Sexual violence in mainstream movies. A focused look at how sexual violence appears in commercial films, and how its treatment differs from consensual sexual content.

• The sex, drugs and violence contained in MPAA ratings. A breakdown of how the US ratings board classifies sex versus violence, and what that means for studios trying to maximise audience reach.

I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).

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

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

I have spent the past week talking with people, walking the Marché, dropping in on panels, and listening. My overall impression was that more is shifting under the surface than the official press releases reveal.

While Cannes 2026 felt a little calmer than last year, it wasn’t for reasons worth celebrating. Film professionals felt more focused, resigned to some changes, oblivious to others, and parts of the industry seemed thinner around the edges.

Here are the nine things I took away from this year’s festival:

1. Cannes got bigger and quieter at the same time. Record attendance, thinner buzz, fewer parties, shorter stays.

2. The word “strategic” was everywhere. Fewer meetings, more deliberate ones. Risk mitigation dressed up in a less scary-sounding word.

3. AI is regarded as an analyst, not an author. And unlike previous tech, it is not going anywhere.

4. Hollywood and streamers were nowhere. No studio tentpoles, and some key streamers felt less relevant in conversation and the press.

5. Japan was everywhere. Country of Honour, attendance up around 50% and a new Japan IP Market.

6. Private money and co-productions are the talk of the town. As pre‑sales have weakened, private equity has stepped in.

7. Europe is organising to protect itself. 4,700 film professionals signed a letter to the EU, Mubi launched a co‑financing pact, German auteurs revived Dogma.

8. The market is still trying to understand the kids. Gen Z is the only growth story, and the market is still deciding how to adapt.

9. And the Marché is trying to understand TikTok. First Creator Economy Summit, the largest virtual production stage at any film market, an AI for Talent Summit in its second year.

Let’s go through each in turn.

1. Cannes got bigger and quieter at the same time

By the headline numbers, this was the biggest Marché yet. Reuters and Variety reported 16,000 accredited participants from over 140 countries, up from 15,000+ in 2025. Deadline counted 1,700 buyers, 600 exhibiting companies, 250 industry events, and a festival‑wide footprint of around 40,000 professionals.

And yet the energy was thinner. I’ve noted in the past how an increasing number of industry veterans are choosing to skip expensive booths and passes in favour of just meeting in hotels and cafés. 2026 only seemed to accelerate this, with the Palais fighting a losing battle to remain the centre of the market.

Stays were shorter, schedules tighter, and the social calendar continued its decade‑long shrinkage with far fewer parties than ten years ago.

As the pandemic began to ease, many asked what would become of in-person events such as Cannes. I think we‘re starting to see the answer emerge. The time‑consuming bits of dealmaking can be handled by email, Zoom and screeners, so Cannes is where humans confirm in person what has mostly already been agreed.

So while I don’t doubt the 16,000 attendance figure, I suspect it doesn't mean the market is healthier, but just that the market has more spectators.

2. The word “strategic” was everywhere

If I had to pick one word that has run through my conversations this year, it would be "strategic." I heard it used by buyers, sellers, financiers, even the festival programmers used it, when describing why they had selected the films they had.

What people mean by it:

• Fewer meetings, but more deliberate ones.

• Fewer films, but more carefully packaged.

• Fewer parties, but the right ones.

• A market that has lost its appetite for discovery and instead follows a narrow checklist.

Roeg Sutherland, co‑head of CAA Media Finance, framed it as an opportunity, telling The Ankler:

The market is absolutely disrupted, but in that I always see opportunities. There are opportunities to build distribution companies. There are opportunities to make movies for the right price.

Fionnuala Jamison, managing director of mk2 Films, framed the new buyer brief in a Screen Podcast interview thus:

What we’re hearing from buyers is that they want the best films, great filmmakers on top of their form. Then we have to look at how difficult the subject is potentially and how demanding it might be on the audience in terms of filmmaking style. Then it’s factors like uniqueness, pitch, and whether there is an obvious marketing hook for distributors.

This is risk mitigation by another name, and it tracks with what I picked up at the EFM in February. The default setting for everyone in the room is now caution… even if they don’t use the word.

3. AI is regarded as an analyst, not an author

In Cannes 2025, it felt like AI was everywhere, but nobody knew what to do with it.

In 2026, it seems that people are comfortable saying out loud that AI is being used to analyse projects, such as simulating focus groups, profiling audience overlap, generating storyboards, and suggesting marketing copy, and panels openly discussed how AI agents can provide you with an “unfair advantage”.

Just an aside, I have genuinely lost count of how many people have pitched me their new start-up, which can turn your script into a storyboard or do pre-production work. I was trying to keep count for this article, but I foolishly didn’t write them down, and now all I can say is that it was more than twelve.

What remains unsayable in polite company is AI as creator. Steven Soderbergh’s John Lennon: The Last Interview, which uses Meta‑generated video of Lennon and Yoko Ono for around 10% of its runtime, sparked a lot of debate. Variety reported that Patrick Wachsberger’s Legendary‑backed sales company 193 has boarded the film, with Meta listed as the film’s technology partner. The Meta partnership at the festival itself, including the “Meta House” at the Majestic and Ray‑Ban smart glasses on a brigade of influencers, prompted a backlash captured by nss magazine.

Weeks before the festival opened, around 4,000 French actors signed an open letter in Le Parisien, including Bérénice Bejo, Léa Drucker and Swann Arlaud, describing AI as a “devouring hydra” engaged in “organised plundering”.

Demi Moore told Variety:

AI is here. To oppose it is to engage in a battle we are likely to lose.

Peter Jackson, accepting an honorary Palme d’Or, told The Hollywood Reporter AI was”

…just a tool like any other…no different from other special effects”.

The strangest case study sits just outside the festival. Gossip Goblin, the kitchen‑table AI filmmaking outfit run by Zack London from a Stockholm apartment with a team of eight, has clocked over 500 million views on its short satirical AI films. The Hollywood Reporter reported that LA agents, producers and studios are now flying to Stockholm to meet him (note that they are not coming to Cannes to pitch their wares).

Cannes often sees technologies come and go (3D, VR, NFTs, Metaverse, blockchain, etc.), following the same hype-to-bust playbook. But AI is not like others

I tracked mentions of new technologies in the Cannes trade‑press daily from 2019 to 2026 (Screen Daily, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety) and noted how often each technology was mentioned (my methodology is at the end of this article).

This reveals that AI is not just a new fad, neither in scale nor fleeting nature.

It’s worth noting that not all the ‘blip’ new techs are the same. While NFTs and VR are genuinely absent, blockchain technology is powering many of the startups in Cannes. It’s that the people have learned not to use certain words, and instead focus on the benefits, not the underlying technology.

4. Hollywood and streamers were nowhere

For the first time since 2017, no major Hollywood studio brought a tentpole to Cannes. In another life, we might have expected to see Cannes premiere Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, Nolan’s The Odyssey, the Cruise/Iñárritu Digger.

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No one says "Follow that car!" anymore... and there's a reason why.

I ran the numbers on over 72,000 films to find the most reused lines in cinema, revealing how movie clichés are born, spread, and die.

Chapters

• 00:00 - Movie clichés are good, actually

• 00:50 - The way you speak sucks

• 03:40 - Movies are talking to each other

• 04:57 - Bored yet?

• 08:09 - Word Salad

• 11:39 - Deja View

Further Reading

If you want to explore the research behind this episode in more detail:

• What are the most commonly used movie clichés? I ranked the most reused lines in mainstream cinema, with breakdowns by genre, decade and frequency.

• Has the way movies use dialogue changed? I looked at how line length, dialogue density and pacing have shifted over the decades, and what that tells us about how modern films deliver story through speech.

• Which genres dominate when movies blend styles? My study of how genres sound different from each other, including which films talk the most, which leave the longest silences, and how dialogue patterns travel when films mix genres.

I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).

If you want to know more about the channel, here’s a quick primer:

Winning a Palme will certainly give you a moment of fame, the adulation of filmmakers, and a chance to boost your next project. But will it help your movie’s chance at the box office?

All films which are ‘In Competition’ at Cannes have not yet been released to the public anywhere in the world. Some may have a release lined up, but most will deliberately leave negotiations open, just in case they can use the Cannes buzz to get a better deal.

But does winning help?

We can’t definitively prove cause and effect, but we can certainly look for patterns in the data. I built a dataset of every main competition film at Cannes, Berlin and Venice between 1990 and 2024. That gave me 2,159 competition slots across 35 years.

Do Cannes-winning films perform well at the box office?

Let’s start with the headline figure - yes, films which win the Palme d’Or do significantly outgross their fellow nominated films in commercial cinemas.

Cannes top-prize winners typically take roughly nine times the worldwide gross of the other films competing alongside them.

Berlin and Venice top winners do better than the rest of their slate, too, but the gaps are far smaller and not stable enough to build a business plan on.

Cannes has some standout winners:

• Pulp Fiction took $213m worldwide on the back of its 1994 Palme.

• Parasite took $254m in 2019.

• Fahrenheit 9/11 took $221m in 2004.

• The Pianist took $112m in 2002.

• Anora took $58m last year .

• Anatomy of a Fall $49m the year before.

Berlin’s top of the pile contains:

• Spirited Away ($396m)

• Sense and Sensibility ($135m)

• A Separation ($24m)

Venice has had three blockbuster top winners in the last seven years alone with:

• Joker ($1.1bn)

• The Shape of Water ($196m)

• Poor Things ($112m)

So the difference with Cannes winners is almost nine times and still a respectable 2.8 times at Berlin, and around 1.5 times at Venice. These three festivals are not the same!

But is it really the Palme doing the work?

There are two things we should take into account when considering this finding: quality and language.

Firstly, a film that wins the Palme is probably a better film, on average, than one that doesn’t. When we crunch the numbers, it turns out that, yes, festival juries at all three festivals select films that critics and audiences rate above average.

The second factor we need to consider is language. It’s worth noting that the Palme has tilted noticeably toward films with English-language distribution partners in recent years. Anora, Parasite and Triangle of Sadness all had US distributors locked in early.

To check whether the prize itself is doing the work, I compared like with like. I held the film's language constant first (English-language films earn much more, regardless of any prize), then held the IMDb rating constant on top of that (better films earn more, regardless of any prize).

So what we’re left with is data on how big the Palme bump is at each stage of stripping out those two factors. By the time you’re comparing Palme winners against other Cannes competition films with the same language and a similar rating, the bump is down to a bit under three times the typical gross.

That residual is the part the prize itself can plausibly take credit for; the rest of the headline gap is the prize tracking films that were already commercially advantaged.

When I did the same maths with the winners at Berlin and Venice, I found nothing survived. Once you compare like with like, neither festival’s top prize lifts a film above the rest of its competition in any way that the data can detect.

None of this means the prizes are worth nothing. Career legitimacy, future financing, critical standing, distributor curiosity, the right to put a laurel on a poster for the rest of your life.

But the specific claim, that winning a top festival prize equals a commercial bump, turns out to be a Cannes-specific claim, and less than it initially seems.

Bonus - Is the Cannes winner usually the best or biggest film of its year?

As a side note to finish on, I also looked into whether, when a jury awards a Palme, Lion or Bear, they are handing it to the highest-grossing or best-rated film in their year’s nominations.

For example, Parasite won the Palme d’Or and became the highest-rated film on IMDb in the entire 2019 Cannes competition. But it was not the highest-earning hit of the cohort, being beaten at the worldwide box office by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ($377m versus Parasite's $254m).

It turns out that Berlin and Venice juries find the top-rated films about a quarter of the time (not bad for a lineup of 20 to pick from), but Cannes lags behind at just 14%.

The top-prize winners are rarely the highest-grossing films in the cohort.

If you want to guess if a Cannes-nominated film will do well in cinemas with the public, just look for famous names. Or Shrek. Mostly Shrek.

Notes

Today’s analysis covers every main competition film at Cannes, Berlin and Venice between 1990 and 2024. Sidebar sections such as Un Certain Regard, Forum, Orizzonti and the Director’s Fortnight are not included.

I used 1990 as the cutoff because earlier years have patchier box office records and many older films’ totals are inflated by re-releases that no modern release would benefit from, which distorts comparisons.

To prepare, I have gone through the conference schedules for this year (as well as 2024 and 2025) to see what these 742 events reveal about the film business in 2026.

I’ll go through it in detail later in the article, but here are the key themes as I see them:

1. The conference is shrinking (slightly). The 2026 edition has fewer sessions and about 16% fewer programming hours compared to recent years, despite an increase in attendance.

2. AI is fully integrated. 2024 was about whether AI mattered, whereas 2026 is about what AI agents do for sales teams, how to license a synthetic voice, and how to plug an AI compositor into a virtual-production pipeline.

3. The streamers have stopped showing up. Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney have gone from nine speaker billings in 2024 to one in 2026. Whatever Cannes is for now, it isn’t appealing to streamers.

4. Co-production is the survival mode. When financing is tight and audiences are fragmented, splitting the budget across borders is how you keep working. 32 sessions in 2026 are explicitly about it.

5. Virtual production is going hands-on. It launched last year as a panel strand, but this year converted 13 of 17 sessions into workshops. The conversation has moved from “should we?” to “how do we?”.

6. The values agenda has thinned. Diversity and inclusion content has nearly halved. Sustainability is one event in 243. Mental health is two. Whatever the industry is talking about in 2026, it isn’t the values conversation it was having in 2024.

7. Creators are being grafted onto cinema… cautiously. The brand-new Creator Economy Summit on 17 May is six panels in one day with Scalable, Meta and YouTube. Cinema is now talking to TikTok-native creators on cinema’s terms, not theirs.

Let’s look at each in turn…

1. The conference is shrinking (slightly)

Despite the festival being the world's largest film market, its conference offerings are shrinking.

In 2024 the Marché ran 260 conference events totalling 379 hours of programming, but this year that’s dropped to 243 events and 318 hours. The mean event length has also shrunk, from 88 minutes in 2024 to 79 minutes in 2026. The schedule is doing fewer things, more briefly.

The Marché itself reports growing numbers of accreditations, and the side-strands keep multiplying so this isn’t a lack of willing attendees. Rather, it’s a curatorial set of decisions that has meant the schedule has been trimmed year after year.

Another such decision is that Cannes 2026 seems to have converged on a single format. 48% of all conference events in Cannes are multi-speaker panels. Panels are the only format that has grown across all three years. They went from 95 in 2024 to 116 in 2026, a 22% rise. Almost every other format is flat or shrinking.

My theory is that it is a mix of programming-equity question (panels can include four sponsors at once), and partly a product of market forces (a sponsor will pay to have its CEO on a panel, whereas it is much harder to sell a slot in someone else’s keynote).

So if you’re hoping to hear a single experienced voice speak at length about their craft, the Marché might disappoint. But if you want six middle managers from different companies offering carefully coordinated takes on what AI means for distribution, then you’re in for a treat.

2. AI is fully integrated

27 events mentioned AI in 2024, 21 in 2025, 31 in 2026. The 2025 dip looks like fatigue after the immediate post-ChatGPT bump. In 2026 it’s back, stronger, and at a higher share of the total schedule.

The framing of AI has also shifted. 2024 panels were “AI for filmmakers, what does it mean”, “Curious Refuge: case studies in AI cinema”. By 2026 the sessions are more like middle manager meetings:

• How AI Agents Give Top Sales Teams an Unfair Advantage

• AI Meets IP: Voice, Rights and Creative Control

• From Legendary Studios to AI Pipelines in Film Music

There is even an “AI for Talent Summit” running across two invitation-only sessions on Friday 15 and Saturday 16 May. AI in casting agencies is now its own conference-within-a-conference.

Two things missing from the 2026 AI line-up are notable. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has any speaker presence, despite 31 AI-related sessions. The companies on stage are AI-tooling startups serving film (Phonoma, Respeecher, Eros Innovation, Largo, Wonder Dynamics, Dreamina AI). The frontier-AI companies that drive the underlying conversation are not there. Make of that what you will.

3. The streamers have stopped showing up

Looking at who’s speaking, we get an interesting story of change. The three areas in decline are:

1. Festivals (39 in 2024, 24 in 2025, and 14 this year)

2. Streaming platforms (9 → 6 → 1)

3. Trade press (26 → 15 → 9)

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Predicting who will be the next James Bond has become one of the great communal conversations. Whether that’s via prediction markets, professional bookmakers, newspaper headlines, or just down the pub - everyone has an opinion.

I think it should be said loud and often that this is a deeply silly thing to bet on. Predicting the Bond casting is less of a science, more like forecasting the weather next Christmas (ie, will it be white).

There are real underlying patterns in the historical data, but the actual decision is being made in private by a small group of people working with information you and I do not have. Even the professional bookies are essentially trading on rumour, public sightings, agent gossip, and the occasional carefully-placed leak.

I hope the silliness of my video above conveys how seriously this should be taken. BUT… that’s not to say the topic lacks merit. A number of important ideas around casting, acting, and IP management emerge as we frolic through the data. So, let’s take a look with a view to gambol rather than gamble.

The current state of play

At CinemaCon 2026 a few weeks ago, Courtenay Valenti, Amazon MGM’s head of theatrical said:

Now, I know you’re all wondering when we’re going to announce who’s playing James Bond. Please know that we’re taking the time to do this with care and deep respect. It is the dream of a lifetime for all of us to bring audiences this next chapter, and it’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly.

What I can tell you is this: when you pair one of the most beloved franchises in history with a world-class filmmaking team… setting the stage for something that’s truly worthy of the Bond legacy. That film is coming, and when the time is right, we’ll have much more to share.

This means we all have a brief window in which to have fun speculating!

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the top Bond brass at Amazon. You have been handed the most consequential casting decision in commercial cinema. You don’t have a name in mind. You have a brief, a budget, a multi-billion-pound franchise, and a producer breathing down your neck. How do you build the shortlist?

The honest answer is that it is a series of cuts. Some hard. Some soft. Some defensible by data, others by gut feel and politics. By the end of the process, you should have a list of perhaps five names sitting on a desk in a building Amazon hasn’t shared with the rest of us.

Let’s see how far we can get with the public info we have...

The hard requirements

The hard requirements are the cuts you can defend with a sentence. Each one is a decision a producer would actually make in week one of the search.

1. Male

Bond producer Barbara Broccoli said only a couple of years ago that:

He can be of any colour, but he is male.

It’s not clear to what extent Amazon agrees, but the vast majority of the public does. A YouGov poll from 2023 asked Americans which traits a future Bond must have.

The public is conservative on gender (72% want a man) but genuinely open on race (only 39% require a white actor).

So when doing my first pass cut of names, I followed the majority on the male requirement, and left race open.

2. British (or convincingly so)

This is the cut where the data and the principle disagree.

The whole concept of acting is one about convincing people you’re something you’re not. Therefore, on the one hand, it seems absurd to place a birthplace requirement on the person who goes running around with a fake gun, fake-killing other liars in a fictional story we all know didn’t happen.

But now we touch on another aspect of casting - believability. The audience needs to be willing to suspend their disbelief and stop seeing the actor and start seeing a real superspy. And nationality plays a part in this shared public delusion.

Deadline reported in September 2025 that the casting brief for Bond 26 is:

British, male, unknown, late 20s to early 30s.

So whatever I think about national-flag accents, it seems like I need to keep it as a hard rule with which to filter our candidates.

(The rule I settled on was more accurately “The British Isles” than just “Great Britain”. The differences between all the ways people describe the islands is a massive rabbit hole. If you have two minutes, watch this; if you have two hours, watch this).

3. In their thirties

Amazon has to be hoping that they pick the right person now and get to ride that successful casting for at least a decade, maybe two. That places extra pressure on the person to be as young as possible, while still pulling off the role in their debut Bond (likely release date is 2028)

Broccoli told Variety in 2022

When we cast Bond, it’s a 10, 12-year commitment. So he’s probably thinking, do I really want that thing? Not everybody wants to do that.

The two most commercially successful Bonds were the youngest at debut. Connery had a nine-year run from 32. Craig ran from 38 to 53 across five films and $3.97 billion in box office. Moore made seven films but was visibly ageing out by the end.

4. A working professional with real films behind them

Playing Bond is a hard gig, both on- and off-screen. Long-press tours, multi-year shoots, action choreography, and the requirement to anchor a film against an A-list villain.

The clearest description of what this means in practice comes from Debbie McWilliams, the casting director who has been with the franchise since Roger Moore and personally cast Dalton, Brosnan and Craig. She told SlashFilm:

He has to look like a regular guy. You can’t be Dwayne Johnson. He has to have a great physique, but he shouldn’t stand out in any situation. You feel a very strong presence in the room with him, and I think that is incredibly important.

In my filtering, I opted to look at people with at least three feature film credits, although obviously, a real casting director can take a more nuanced view on who is able to take on the mantle.

The soft requirements

Once we apply these filters, there are fewer than 500 candidates left. We’re still at the point where we couldn’t call them all in for a casting session, but we could start a spreadsheet.

The hard requirements give us a list of professional actors, and now we can use soft requirements to surface people we might otherwise overlook.

Although data can give us pretty and definitive-looking charts and tables, we are firmly in the ‘Cosplaying as a Casting Director’ territory at this point. It’s a fun thing to make YouTube content with, but let’s not confuse this with hard science.

For example, acting ability is important here. Bond isn’t a dumb 80s action thriller where we can overlook the leads' acting because of the size of their quads or how often they can do the splits. A real casting director will know in seconds whether the actor is the worst thing in a good film or the best thing in a directionless one. But the data can’t see this kind of thing.

So let’s see what we can measure to reorder the candidates in interesting ways.

1. Has prestige

The actor who takes on Bond will need to have a certain amount of heavyweight prestige about them. They can’t be a silly Adam Sandler / Kevin James type.

Looking at the Metascore of the movies each of our Bond-wannabes has been in, surfaces Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, and Josh O’Connor.

When asked a couple of years ago about the role, Joseph Quinn said:

Yes, in fact I just did a Zoom with Barbara… It would be fucking stupid to say no that… But come on, it doesn’t even make sense to think about it.

2. Doesn’t often feel miscast

Another signal we might look at is how well the actor has convinced the public in their previous roles. I pulled audience reviews and tracked mentions of “miscast”, “wrong for the role”, “unconvincing”, “didn’t fit” with each actor.

This could just be a case of not being cast correctly in the past, or it could be a signal that audiences are unsure about them.

An actor flagged as miscast might be miscast for a specific film because the casting director picked the wrong vehicle. Or because the director did not get a performance out of them. Or because they have not yet found their niche.

Even with all those caveats, the fact that Callum Turner, the current bookies’ favourite, sits in the worst third of his peer group on miscast mentions might be a concern.

3. Lots of charisma

The third proxy is the strongest of the three because it is the one most directly about the actor. Using the same audience review corpus, I tracked counts of mentions of the actor alongside things like “charisma”, “magnetic”, “presence”, “star quality”, “commanding”, and similar euphemisms.

Jonathan Bailey and Aaron Talyor-Johnson came up top (with the latter having a long history of being linked to the Bond gig).

4. The right kind of famous

The perfect actor to play James Bond needs just the right amount of fame upon casting. Bond does not hire stars. Bond makes stars. McWilliams calls casting an unknown “a gift”.

For most lead roles, more fame is better as fame brings audiences, marketing, and secured financing. For Bond, fame above a threshold is a negative. They do need some basic level of fame so that audiences feel they have earned the role with a sense of gravitas (gone are the days of hiring a milkman to play Bond).

They also need to be affordable and controllable - two things that famous people are not. A famous star walks into the negotiation with leverage Amazon cannot compete with.

Bond casting is structurally closer to casting Harry Potter or Star Wars, in that you are not picking the actor someone is right now, you are picking the actor they are going to become.

For example, Tom Holland is a perfectly plausible Bond on every other criterion (except maybe height). He is also already in a Marvel contract that would constrain availability, already a household name, and already on his own profit participation deals. His audience is not Bond’s audience either. The studio loses leverage the moment they sit down with him.

The Daniel Craig Precedent (a.k.a. the Renée Zellweger Principle)

When Daniel Craig was announced on 14 October 2005, the internet had something close to a meltdown. He was blonde. He was 5’10”. His ears were “too prominent”. Two protest websites were launched within hours. Tabloids published photos of him in a life vest, struggling to get out of a speedboat. Den of Geek covered the backlash in detail.

Then Casino Royale opened to 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Craig’s five films grossed $3.97 billion. Skyfall became the first Bond film to cross a billion dollars.

The same thing happened five years earlier with a much less British example. When Renée Zellweger was cast as Bridget Jones in 2000, the British fanbase was furious. A Texan playing a national icon. Zellweger gained weight, mastered the accent, worked undercover in a London publishing house, and won the audience over. We do not now think of Bridget as miscast - we think of her as Bridget.

The rule has held for sixty years - Connery was not Fleming’s choice, Lazenby was not anyone’s choice, and Craig was too blond. You could argue that the audience does not know what it wants until you show it. And every time the producers have made a casting choice that contradicted public expectation, the franchise has thrived.

The $2.8 trillion elephant in the room

This is the part of the problem that the data cannot solve. The casting decision lies at the intersection of two shopping lists. The audience wants their Bond. Amazon wants their franchise. Those are not the same thing.

• Audiences want a Bond they recognise the moment he walks on screen, someone who feels like a continuation of the canon rather than a hard reset. He has to look the part, with the kind of bearing and physical presence the role demands, and light up a room the second he enters.

• Amazon wants someone cheap to sign, because the franchise is the star and the actor is replaceable. They want someone willing to commit to a TV universe of spin-offs, not just two films and out. They want an actor who’ll tolerate director-led work without demanding the final cut, and who’ll stay available and under contract for the next decade.

• The person who satisfies both columns is likely to be British, male, in his late twenties or early thirties, charismatic and properly trained, a working actor who isn’t yet a star, and someone who takes direction rather than fights it.

The true overlap among those people is no more than a handful. A source close to production told Deadline last year that:

99.9% of the names speculated online so far won’t make the cut.

Gun to the head….

I think it would be rather unsatisfying if I ended this article without proffering some names I think could be Bond.

Rather than making a subjective or artistic judgment, I’ll tell you what the numbers say.

At the time I was researching the video at the top of this article, the frontrunner was Callum Turner, with odds which imply he had already been cast. In my data, he scored pretty poorly. He has the third-highest miscast rate in the famous shortlist, and sits near the upper end of the casting age window.

If I had to pick someone who scores well but is priced badly by the bookies, it would be Tom Glynn-Carney. 31 years old, six foot one, a graduate of Guildhall, average film Metascore 65.2 and with a Wikipedia footprint of a quarter of a million pageviews (so known but a tenth of Tom Holland’s numbers). He has the shape of every Broccoli-era casting decision the producers have made.

Other top choices the data liked were Fionn Whitehead, Joseph Quinn, and Nabhaan Rizwan.

But any tweak to the criteria would massively change the order. Reweight charisma by even a few percentage points and Jonathan Bailey or Taylor-Johnson is on top. Decide that fame is a positive signal rather than a negative one, and Holland leads. Drop the British requirement, and Jacob Elordi is your Bond.

Bond casting is not really a maths problem. The producers are looking for the right unformed clay who walks into the room with the right ingredients, and who they can write a script for, build a film around, and brand for a decade. Oh, and who they can afford and control.

While data gives us fun candidates to consider, this kind of decision is only ever made by a small number of people over coffee in a private room.

Andrew Sarris, in his 1963 essay “The Auteur Theory and the Perils of Pauline” reflected on the emerging idea of a film auteur like this:

After a given number of films, a pattern is established, and we can speak of the Rays, of Ophuls, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Ford, Welles, Dreyer, Rossellini, Murnau, Griffith, Sternberg, Eisenstein, Stroheim, Bunuel, Bresson, Hawks, Lang, Flaherty, Vigo, as we speak of artists and authors in other media.

Thirteen years later, Hitchcock put it more pithily:

Self-plagiarism is style.

Both were saying the same thing from opposite ends of the room. Sarris saw the pattern across a director’s films as what earns them the title auteur. Hitchcock saw the same pattern as a method, chosen on purpose.

Either way, the claim is that a real director leaves a visible mark across the films they make. I wanted to see whether that was actually true.

So I took 2,970 live-action features, directed between them by 190 different people, and for each director, I measured how similar their films were to one another. Every director had to have at least four features in the sample, because below that, the score gets noisy and tells you more about the individual film than about the director. There are more technical details in the Notes section at the end.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not implying that being visually consistent is either good or bad. Sometimes a director is making very different films on purpose, and a new look is part of the point. Sometimes a director refines one look over a career, and the repetition is the point.

The directors whose films look most like each other

I used image embeddings of all shots in the movies to generate a Consistency Score. This is a single value per director which reveals how much more alike a director's films look than a random batch of films from the same genres and decades.

• A score of zero means the films are no more or less alike than a random batch.

• A high positive means they cluster tightly together.

• A negative means they scatter even more than the baseline.

At the top sits Taylor Hackford with a consistency score of +0.38.

Below him, the list mixes directors who lean into a very specific genre lane (horror, family comedy, franchise action) with a couple of names more familiar to cinephiles. Alfred Hitchcock sits at position 7. He is the only director in the top ten who is routinely called an auteur in the traditional sense.

Hitchcock storyboarded every scene in advance and arrived on set, treating filming as the execution of a finished plan so it iis not surprising that his films shared a visual language.

What happens when a director changes the cinematographer?

But directors do not work alone. The film’s final visual style is a collaboration with the cinematographer (also known as Director of Photography, or simply “DP”).

So I wanted to see what happens to the numbers when we narrow the list to directors whose films span at least three different cinematographers. The top of that filter is the same core names as before, because several of them were already three-plus-DP directors, but we lose Hitch.

The directors who reinvent their look for each film

At the other end of the ranking sits Mel Gibson, followed closely by Nimród Antal and Vincenzo Natali.

Most of the names in the bottom cohort are not the ones a reader reaches for first when asked to picture an auteur. Some are genre specialists working across horror, thrillers and action (Alexandre Aja, Jaume Collet-Serra, John McTiernan). Others are career directors whose filmographies happen to span wildly different territory (Brian De Palma, Niki Caro, David O. Russell).

What they share, by this measure, is that the films they actually made look strikingly unlike each other.

The directors who work this way are often explicit about why. Danny Boyle has made the case for reinvention as a creative discipline:

Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It’s a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence.

Steven Spielberg said of Stanley Kubrick:

He kept saying, I want to change the form. I want to make a movie that changes the form. And I said, Well, didn’t you do that with 2001? He said, Just a little bit, but not enough. I really want to change the form.

Consistency is not the same as distinctiveness

Our metric so far is good for answering the question ‘Does this director’s filmography repeat itself?’, but we can use the same underlying data to also answer another question. Namely, ‘Does this director look unlike other directors?’

A director’s filmography can be tight and generic, or, conversely, varied and unmistakable.

So I calculated a Distinctiveness Score, which measures how far a director’s average film sits from the nearest other director’s average film in the same measurement space. Higher means their work sits further away from everyone else’s.

If we plot both metrics on the same chart, we get to see four quadrants:

1. Consistent and distinctive (top right). The classic auteur zone. Films that look like each other, and like nothing else in cinema. Repetition that adds up to a signature.

2. Varied but distinctive (top left). Every film is a reinvention, yet every film still sits somewhere unusual on the map. The signature is in the ambition rather than in any single composition. You cannot mistake the filmography for anyone else’s, even if you cannot mistake one film for another either.

3. Consistent but generic (bottom right). Films that look like each other, but also like plenty of other directors’ films. Usually, a genre specialist working inside a narrow lane, where the commercial logic of the genre is doing as much work as the director is.

4. Varied and generic (bottom left). No through-line, no signature. Working directors taking whatever script the week brought them, inside a part of the map that is already well-populated.

This shows us that two commonly cited aspects of the auteur label (i.e., a director with a visual style and a director who presents unique work) don’t always go hand in hand.

In future research, I’m going to quantify the extent to which the key creatives affect the final film’s visual style.

Notes

For every director with four or more live-action films in the sample, I computed the average similarity between the films’ image fingerprints, then subtracted the average similarity of a matched random sample of films from the same genres and decades.

• A positive score means the director’s films hang together more tightly than a random mix of the same genre and decade.

• A negative score means the opposite.

• Near zero means a filmography is no more or less consistent than the matched baseline.

In the sample were 190 directors, 260 cinematographers and 2,970 live-action features. Documentaries and animation are excluded. Directors or cinematographers whose careers are primarily in animation are dropped, since animated films are a very different beast.

Each person needs at least four films in the sample to appear on the leaderboards; directors below that threshold are excluded because their scores would be noisier than meaningful.

Each film is represented by a summary fingerprint derived from stills taken at every detected scene boundary. The fingerprint captures overall composition, subject and palette, enough to tell apart a Wes Anderson frame from a Michael Bay frame at a glance, though not enough to know which lens was on the camera. Cosine similarity between two fingerprints gives a single number for how alike two films look.

When a director works with one cinematographer across every sampled film, their consistency score also carries the DP’s fingerprint. The three-plus-DPs chart is there to surface that.

Directors with three or more films inside a single franchise (for example Harry Potter or John Wick) score higher because the franchise brand enforces a look.

The measure captures composition, not dialogue, sound, music, editing rhythm or thematic preoccupation. Several directors whose signatures lie outside the frame, such as Lynch in texture and sound, or Tarantino in dialogue and shot-type idioms, appear lower than their reputations suggest.

For the scatter chart, each director has a centroid in a standardised feature space built from sixteen composition metrics. Distinctiveness is the distance from that centroid to the nearest other director’s centroid. Higher means further from everyone else.

Cannes Confidential

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The Raindance Guide to Navigating the Cannes Film Festival and Marché du Film

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Every spring, around this time, my inbox develops a particular shape.

Somebody emails to ask which badge they need. Somebody else emails to say they’ve been told Cannes tickets are ‘a lottery’ and is that really true? A first-time producer wants to know if they should bring business cards or a link. A publicist is panicking about the new dress code. And at least one person, every single year, asks me what shoes to wear.

The 79th Festival de Cannes opens on 12 May 2026, with the Marché du Film running 12 to 20 May. Around 15,000 market professionals from 140 countries will be there, and at least a third of them will be first-timers.

I’ve pulled together the questions I actually get asked, the ones people don’t ask until they land, and the ones they should ask but don’t. What follows draws on a survey I ran of 575 Cannes veterans, the festival’s own documentation, and the 2025 and 2026 rule changes that have caught several return visitors off guard.

Accreditation

Which badge do I need?

Six tracks, but most first-timers only need to worry about two.

If you’re a working industry professional who wants access to the Palais, Official Selection screenings, pavilions and panels, you want Festival accreditation. It is ‘free’, with an asterisk. A mandatory €24 (inc. VAT) environmental contribution, introduced in 2021, is non-refundable even if your application is rejected.

If you are a producer, distributor, sales agent or financier who wants access to the market, its screenings, Cinando and the Marché events, you want the Marché du Film badge. That is paid, and not cheap. Screen Daily’s 2024 reporting put it at €429 early-bird, €499 standard, €600 late. Marché director Guillaume Esmiol told Screen Daily that about 40% of badges go at the early-bird rate and only 1% at the late walk-up price.

The other four tracks: Press accreditation (tightly policed, returning journalists must submit prior coverage), 3 Days in Cannes (free, for cinephiles aged 18 to 28), Cinéphiles (for locals, via the mayor’s office), and SFC Rendez-vous Industry — formerly Short Film Corner — for short filmmakers with a project in the Market Catalogue.

One counter-intuitive fact: actors are not eligible for a Marché badge. They can only apply for a Festival badge. Producers, distributors, sales agents, exhibitors, financiers and film-industry service companies are eligible for the Marché.

When does the portal open?

For 2026: accreditation opened on 2 February 2026 and closes on 15 April 2026 for standard applications. A late fee of €224 (inc. VAT) kicks in from 1 April. Multiple attendee accounts confirm that February and early-March applications for 3 Days in Cannes got in while late-March ones were rejected on capacity grounds — the “rolling review” line is real.

The badge colour thing: is the caste system real?

Yes. And it is brutal.

For press, the ranking runs white (top), pink with yellow dot, pink, blue, yellow (bottom). For industry attendees there are also grey, orange and black badges for crew, photographers and technical staff. Euronews described the hierarchy as ‘Divergent-style segregations’, which is the most accurate line anyone has written about it.

Your badge colour matters because it dictates when tickets appear on your dashboard each morning. The higher-tier badges get first pick at 7 am; lower tiers wait until 8 am; and on J-2 and J-1 — two days and one day before each screening — unclaimed tickets are released to all categories without distinction. That is not a minor detail. It is the single biggest determinant of which films you’ll actually see.

Tickets

Is Cannes ticketing really a lottery?

No.

The myth persists mainly because the outcome feels random. The official explanation, buried on the festival’s own ticketing page, is explicit: when the ticket office opens four days before each screening, quotas are initially allocated to each accredited category, with professional accreditations prioritised. One minute before seats are released each morning, users connected to the site are moved into a waiting room and admitted “based on a random draw”. That is the only genuinely random element. In 2025, 90% of accredited users logged in to the site in under 2 minutes.

So it’s not a lottery. It’s an algorithm rewarding badge status and early access.

How does the 4-day rolling window work?

For each screening, reservations open between four days and 15 minutes before the screening (one hour before for Grand Théâtre Lumière gala screenings). New seats appear at 7am or 8am depending on your badge tier. On J-2 and J-1, unclaimed inventory is released without category distinction. That’s the window where lower-tier and cinephile badges have their best shot.

In 2024, 95% of tickets were gone within 15 minutes of opening. In 2026, reservations open on 8 May.

Why do tickets show ‘sold out’ when the theatre is half-empty?

Three reasons. Attendees hoard tickets and no-show. Algorithmic quotas under-allocate to whichever tier actually turned up. And for gala screenings, big blocks of seats are held back for artistic teams and invited guests until the last minute.

Since the 2024 ticketing revamp, if you no-show twice you’re auto-blocked from bookings for 48 hours. Cancel at least an hour before the screening to avoid penalty. It’s rumoured that journalists are exempt from this rule, but I couldn’t get confirmation either way.

What do I do if I don’t get a ticket?

The last-minute queue is where underdogs thrive. In 2025, 18,000 seats were allocated through those last-minute queues. Competition films screen at the Cineum in Cannes La Bocca up to four days after their Lumière gala, and the festival reinstated its fourth large theatre there in 2025. The festival itself reports that ‘a huge majority’ of badge-holders queuing at the Cineum get in.

Official Selection films also screen an average of 3 more times after their première. So if you miss your must-see on day one, you haven’t missed it.

Any screenings that are easier to get into?

Yes, and the festival tells you this itself. First screenings around 8:30 am and last screenings from 10 pm are the least oversubscribed. Early birds and night owls eat well at Cannes.

The Marché floor

I’m a producer with a film to sell. Should I spend my week on the Marché floor?

Largely no, and this is the single biggest first-timer trap.

The Marché is enormous. Roughly 15,000 professionals from 140 countries, around 600 exhibitors, over 4,000 films and projects, 250 industry events, more than 80 keynotes, panels and conferences, and 1,500 screenings. The booth floor in the Palais basement — ‘the Riviera’ — is vast, loud, and optically impressive.

It is also where sellers are, not buyers. The buyers spend their time in hotel suites and balcony offices along the Croisette. That’s where acquisition executives take meetings.

Their day is a rotation of Cinando-booked calls, poster walls at the Majestic terrace, and the occasional screening. Very few of them walk the Marché floor in any serious way.

So what actually is Cinando, and why does everyone whisper about it?

Cinando is the year-round B2B database underneath the Marché, launched in 2003. Companies, contacts, projects, screeners, market attendees, and screening schedules. It’s where pre-festival meetings get arranged and where buyers, sellers and producers look each other up before the first espresso.

A one-year Cinando subscription is included with every Marché badge. This is, by some distance, the single biggest non-cash benefit of paying for the Marché tier. If you’ve paid for a Marché badge and you’re not using Cinando to pre-book meetings four to six weeks out (i.e. now!), you have effectively rented a car and left it in the car park.

What’s the Croisette Package, and do I need it?

For sales companies, studios and film institutions operating from hotels or apartments rather than taking a Palais stand, the Marché now requires the Croisette Package.

In 2024, it was priced from around €2,100 to €2,400 for three badges for companies with turnover under €2m, and €4,400 to €4,900 for six badges for companies above.

Individual Marché badges on their own no longer unlock the same off-Palais operating rights. Practitioners read it as a roughly €1,000 premium per company; the Marché defends it as sustainability- and sales-company-eligibility-driven.

What about the Producers Network?

The Producers Network is capped at 370 producers each year. Eligibility requires a feature with commercial theatrical release or SVOD acquisition in the past four years. Its breakfast-meeting format (i.e. matchmaker rounds with other producers across territories) is one of the best single uses of your week if you qualify.

Dress code

Is the black-tie rule real?

For the 7pm and 10pm gala screenings at the Lumière, yes. The charter requires evening wear.

But the 2025 wording is more permissive than most people assume. A little black dress, a cocktail dress, a dark-coloured pantsuit, a dressy top with black trousers are all explicitly fine. Elegant shoes or sandals, with or without a heel. No sneakers. A dark suit with bow-tie or dark-coloured tie, including a plain necktie, now complies.

Daytime screenings and non-galas only require ‘proper attire’. Business casual works fine.

What’s the 2025 nudity and voluminous-dress rule?

Two new additions to the charter, both directly prompted by 2024. After ‘naked dressing’ appeared on the red carpet (Bella Hadid in Saint Laurent at The Apprentice, Naomi Campbell in Chanel at Furiosa) and an unusually high volume of train-heavy gowns disrupted seating, the 2025 charter reads:

For decency reasons, nudity is prohibited on the Red Carpet, as well as in any other area of the Festival. Voluminous outfits, in particular those with a large train, that hinder the proper flow of traffic of guests and complicate seating in the theater are not permitted.

Enforcement was real. Halle Berry changed her Gaurav Gupta train gown at the 2025 opening, saying “I had an amazing dress by Gupta that I cannot wear tonight because it’s too big of a train.” Heidi Klum tested the boundary with a blush-pink Elie Saab train that spilled more than two metres along the red carpet, “in direct contradiction of the new Cannes dress guidelines,” and walked it anyway. Some sheer styling still appeared but with nude underlays.

The ‘decency’ clause has legal teeth. Article 222-32 of the French Criminal Code sits in the paragraph on sexual exposure and harassment, and punishes “exhibition sexuelle” in a public place with up to one year in prison and a €15,000 fine. The festival is not bluffing.

Is the flats ban over?

Officially, yes. The 2015 ‘Flatgate’ era in which women turned away from Carol and other galas for not wearing heels is over… on paper. Current wording explicitly allows ‘elegant shoes and sandals with or without a heel’.

That said, enforcement remains a bit subjective. In 2019, then-Variety editor Claudia Eller was stopped on the red carpet for wearing flats before eventually getting in, and in 2022 Dene producer Kelvin Redvers was initially blocked from the Les Amandiers premiere for wearing traditional beaded moccasins. Veterans recommend packing slim flats in a clutch and changing at the foot of the red carpet.

And no tote bags or backpacks at gala screenings - small clutches only. There are lockers near Gare Maritime which stay open until 12:30 am.

Accommodation

How expensive are hotels, really?

My past research showed, a standard Majestic room runs €815 a night during the festival versus €205 a night the week before. Carlton, Martinez and the JW Marriott all show similar 3 to 5 times inflation. The Likibu Cannes rental index spikes 177% in May, from about $221 a night year-round to around $612. Apartment rentals near the Croisette start around €190 a night, but that is a floor, not a ceiling.

I missed the booking window. Where do I stay?

In rough order of convenience: Le Suquet (old town, walkable, moderate), La Bocca (cheaper, 10 to 20 minute bus), Le Cannet (4 km north, residential), Juan-les-Pins or Antibes (20 to 30 minutes by TER train), Golfe-Juan (10 minute train), Mandelieu-la-Napoule and Mougins (car required).

Staying in Nice is technically possible but the post-10 pm screening commute back is punishing and generally discouraged.

How do I avoid rental fraud?

The Marché publishes a warning every year about scammers using Festival or Palme d’Or logos and vanishing after payment. Use the Cannes Tourism Office hotel portal, or the Marché’s official partner Immosol for apartments, which offers accreditation-linked discounts.

Getting there and getting around

Which is the best way from Nice airport to Cannes?

Five options, ranked by value:

1. Local bus 620 (formerly 200)~85 min €2.10 single

2. TER train via Nice St-Augustin~35 min~€4.60 single

3. Express bus 81 (Zou!)~45 min€19.50 single

4. Taxi~30 min€88 flat (prefectural max)

5. Helicopter charter~7 min flight from ~€1,000 per cabin (5–6 seats), or €150–€210 shared per seat

The L2 tram runs directly to both Nice airport terminals. It was inaugurated in December 2018, extended to full airport service in June 2019, and extended to Port Lympia in December 2019. BlaBlaCar rideshare from the airport typically runs €15 to €20.

Do not rent a car. Parking is tightly restricted, the Croisette is closed for red-carpet setup, and most streets are narrow and pedestrianised. A car is only useful if you’re staying in Mougins or the villages and need real flexibility.

What will a day actually cost me?

• Espresso at a side-street café is €1.80 to €3.

• The same espresso on the Majestic terrace is €8 to €12.

• Baguette at Monoprix: €1.20.

• Casual lunch: €15 to €22.

• Mid-range dinner: €35 to €60.

• Beer: €6 to €9.

• Cocktail: €16 to €22, or €25 plus at luxury hotel bars.

• Taxi across Cannes: €15 to €25.

• The €50-plus restaurants can be largely avoided by heading inland to Rue Meynadier and the Marché Forville.

Carry €50 to €100 cash for market stalls and tipping, but cards work almost everywhere, including taxis.

Parties

How do I get into the famous parties?

You don’t. The A-list parties (amfAR Gala at Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Chopard Love Night, Vanity Fair at the Cap) are genuinely invite-only and concierge-brokered, at tens of thousands of euros per seat. Don’t waste energy on them.

Realistic targets for a first-time industry attendee: country pavilion happy hours (UK, Irish, Canadian sometimes offer drinks from 5pm), sales-company cocktails at the Majestic and Martinez (Cinando contacts are your way in as a plus-one), and (the one that genuinely matters) the Petit Majestic.

The Petit Majestic is the open-air late-night bar on Rue Tony Allard, alongside the Majestic hotel. From roughly 23:00 until 4 am, it is where the real industry gossip happens, where deals get sketched on napkins, and where you need good shoes and the right energy, not an invitation. Every Cannes veteran you’ll meet will tell you this, and they will all think they are the first to tell you. They are not. But they are right.

Where do coffee meetings actually happen?

• Majestic terrace is the status default, expensive and busy.

• Martinez terrace is calmer and very expensive.

• The Grand Hotel (as it used to be known) has been rebranded as The Mondrian and so might not be as affordable and relaxed as people think.

• The JW Marriott ground-floor bar is the workhorse for catch-ups between screenings.

• Gray d’Albion lobby handles mid-tier meetings.

Rule of thumb: agree the venue when you book the meeting. The hierarchy signal matters.

The mistakes veterans told me they wish they’d avoided

When I surveyed 575 Cannes veterans in 2016, five mistakes dominated the replies. They remain the five most accurate predictions of a wasted first trip a decade later.

1. Staying the full 12 days. Attendance drops sharply after the first Sunday, when over 80% of attendees are still there. Three to five days over the opening weekend is what works for most industry first-timers, not the whole festival.

2. Overbooking screenings at the expense of meetings. You can always catch the films later. If they’re good, they’ll find distribution. Pick one or two screenings a day and keep daylight free for meetings and pavilion events.

3. Hunting buyers on the Marché floor. Buyers live in hotel offices and balcony suites. Use Cinando to book them, not the floor.

4. Wrong shoes. Cobblestones, ten-plus kilometres of walking a day, plus formal evening footwear. Veterans carry two pairs.

5. Ignoring the no-show penalty. Two no-shows is a 48-hour ban. Cancel by an hour before.

Secondary misfires include:

• Not learning the minimal French greetings (Bonjour before every transaction is non-negotiable)

• Assuming Uber availability during peak hours (it collapses around premiere times)

• Skipping meals because screenings overlap (carry snacks)

• Wearing a white shirt that won’t survive the red-carpet photographers’ lights

• Sending half-finished pitch decks in the follow-up emails from the train.

Notes

The survey of 575 Cannes veterans was conducted by me in 2016. Some responses have aged; the core patterns have not. Pricing and policy details are drawn from Festival-Cannes.com, the Marché du Film‘s official rate card, Screen Daily reporting, Filmmaker Magazine’s independent-producer strategy guide, and the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, WWD, Euronews, and Deadline for dress-code and distribution reporting.

Some prices and policies move year to year. Where 2026 figures are confirmed (accreditation opening and closing dates, the late-fee regime), I’ve used them. Where a figure is a 2024 or 2025 number and hasn’t been updated for 2026, I’ve flagged that in the text. Hotel and apartment rates are approximations and shift week-to-week; the 3 to 5 times inflation multiplier is the more reliable figure.

A caveat I owe to attendees outside Europe: most of my practitioner sources are UK- or US-based. The pavilion and Producers Network routes for other regions work differently, and readers based in Africa, Asia or Latin America should go via their national film agency or the Marché’s regional liaison for the most accurate route in.

• Top Gun 3 with Tom Cruise at 63

• Highlander with Russell Crowe at 62 and Dave Bautista at 57

• The Beekeeper 2 with Jason Statham at 58

• Jackass: Best and Last, promoted with a tearful goodbye from a cast mostly north of 50.

To see what was actually happening beneath the headlines, I took every action-tagged film from 1980 to 2025 with reported box-office or budget (4,053 leads accross 2,171 films) and worked out the age at release for every actor.

The results tell us three things:

1. The over-50 action cohort is at a historic high.

2. It is broader than any previous era.

3. And, on the evidence of the last six years, it may already be narrowing again.

The scale of the shift

More than a third of action lead roles in the 2020s are going to actors who are at least 50. That share has more than doubled since the turn of the century.

The 1990s, interestingly, is the youngest decade of action cinema in the dataset. The 1980s had a handful of durable older leads, including Roger Moore, who finished the Bond run at 58, Sean Connery, still working, and Clint Eastwood, who pivoted to Firefox at 52.

By the 1990s, most of that cohort had aged out, and the newer generation (Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, Sylvester Stallone, all still in their forties) was genuinely younger on screen than what came before or after.

One claim often made is that just four names (Tom Cruise, Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves and Jason Statham) are stacking the deck. However, taking those four out of the 2020s drops the over-50 share from 37% to 35%. The cohort, in other words, does not depend on a handful of famous names.

How broad is the cohort?

One way to see the breadth directly is to ask how many actors you need to reach 50% of the decade’s over-50 action-gross.

In the 1980s the answer was two. Roger Moore alone was 30% of the decade’s over-50 action box office, and one other actor got you to half the total. By the 2010s, the answer was eleven. The 2020s, so far, is seven.

The names behind those numbers tell a parallel story.

The 1980s cohort was Roger Moore and Denholm Elliott (the latter thanks to Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The 2000s were led by Geoffrey Rush from the Pirates of the Caribbean films and Ian McKellen from The Lord of the Rings (perhaps they are “leads in action movies” but few would call them “action leads”).

The 2010s top ten was Marvel-adjacent, with Mark Ruffalo with the two Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame entries, Samuel L. Jackson across the Avengers: Infinity War run, Mark Hamill returning for The Last Jedi, along with Tom Cruise, Liam Neeson and Sylvester Stallone.

A second way to see the breadth is to subdivide the action tag by hybrid subgenre. The over-50 share is not evenly distributed across the family.

Action-Western (64% over-50 in the 2020s), Action-Crime (47%) and Action-Thriller (43%) have aged the fastest.

Action-Superhero is the youngest subgenre across every decade. The category most associated in the popular mind with the over-50 boom turns out, in the data, to be the part of action cinema where lead actors are most reliably in their thirties.

Two forces that actually built the 2010s

Pulling the rise apart, two mechanisms show up clearly in the numbers:

1. The late-bloomer wave

2. The franchise-retention effect

1. The late-bloomer wave

This includes actors whose first lead action role came at age 50 or older, such as Liam Neeson did with Taken at 54.

92 men made their first action-led appearance after 50 during the 2010s. Some were already famous actors pivoting into a new genre, such as Bob Odenkirk with Nobody at 58, Tom Hanks with Captain Phillips at 57, and Ben Kingsley with a parallel action career in his late sixties.

Others were international leads entering Hollywood distribution for the first time, from Rajinikanth to Anil Kapoor. The cumulative effect was to widen the supply of over-50 action leads far beyond the long-tenured Hollywood names.

The 2010s also produced the first meaningful cohort of women (17) making a first action-led appearance at 50+. Before that decade, the number was tiny.

2. The franchise-retention effect

The second force is the opposite of late-bloomer debuts. It is actors who started an action franchise young and are still in it over 50.

20 actor-franchise combinations in the dataset fit that description. The longest spans, by years between first and latest entry

• Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones - 38.9 to 81.0, five films, 41-year span

• Mark Hamill, Star Wars - 31.7 to 68.2, three films, 36-year span

• Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator - 37.2 to 72.3, four films, 35-year span

• Tom Cruise, Top Gun - 23.9 to 59.9, two films, 34-year span

• Tom Cruise, Mission: Impossible - 33.9 to 61.0, seven films, $4.14bn global

• Vin Diesel, Fast & Furious - 33.9 to 55.8, eight films, $6.12bn global

• Hugh Jackman, X-Men - 31.8 to 55.8, eight films, $4.65bn global

• Bruce Willis, Die Hard - 33.3 to 57.9, five films, 24-year span

• Keanu Reeves, The Matrix - 34.6 to 57.3, four films, 22-year span

These two forces (i.e. more actors starting late, more actors staying on) combined to make the 2010s the broadest over-50 action cohort in the data. Marvel ensembles expanded it further, even though the superhero subgenre itself skews young.

Why do I think the 2020s are the peak?

The breadth that defined the 2010s is already giving way. The top five over-50 actors’ share of the decade’s gross has risen from 31% in the 2010s to 41% so far in the 2020s. Eleven actors reached 50% of the 2010s over-50 gross; in the 2020s, that number is seven. The trend is narrower.

Several specific 2010s mechanisms are visibly weaker in the 2020s.

• The Marvel ensemble cast members who anchored the Avengers: Endgame run have fragmented or exited.

• The John Wick franchise is in a gap year with Ballerina‘s softer reception shifting the baton to Donnie Yen.

• Liam Neeson announced in August 2025 that he is stepping back from action at 73 (while, as he conceded, still having three action films in the pipeline).

• Bruce Willis has retired.

And the late-bloomer wave itself appears to be slowing, with the pace of first-action leads at 50-plus looks, based on partial 2020s data, below the 2010s rate.

Cruise alone accounts for 13% of the 2020s over-50 action gross, with Vin Diesel, Hugh Jackman, Antonio Banderas and Dave Bautista filling out the top five. The cohort is still enormous by historical standards, but it is narrower than that of the previous decade.

It is still early in the decade, and a single breakout late debut can shift the maths. Ma Dong-seok in Korea and Shah Rukh Khan in India are arriving in the dataset in ways they weren’t before, and Bob Odenkirk may yet produce a third Nobody sequel.

But the trajectory, based on the data to date, is downward in breadth even as the ageing itself continues.

Which generation takes over?

The 2020s over-50 cohort will be in their mid-sixties by the end of the decade. Cruise is 63, Jackman 57, Statham 58, Diesel 58. The pipeline question is real, even if the data does not support the strongest version of it.

The 1970s-born male cohort (as in, Cruise’s actual peers, plus Dwayne Johnson and the Chris Hemsworth generation) is the peak for men in the dataset. 60 men born in the 1970s have three or more action lead roles by age 45. The 1980s-born cohort has produced 45.

For women, each successive decade of birth is the highest. Five women born in the 1960s reach three action leads by 45; 21 for the 1970s; 27 for the 1980s. That is the female pipeline quietly growing, mostly under 50.

Among the 30- to 45-year-old names with an anchored action credit in the last two years

• Glen Powell (36) — The Running Man (November 2025) is his first proper action-headliner swing

• Michael B. Jordan (39) — Thomas Crown Affair directing and starring, unclear franchise ambitions

• Chris Hemsworth (42) — Extraction 3 in development, Marvel commitments winding down

• Dev Patel (35) — Monkey Man and follow-ups

• Jake Gyllenhaal (45) — Road House (2024) went streaming-only

• Ryan Gosling (45) — The Gray Man and The Fall Guy both underperformed

Although these are some heavy hitters, none have yet had what Cruise had in his thirties. Namely, five or six consecutive $200m-plus hits, building audience confidence in the actor as a franchise anchor.

It takes sustained output and sustained studio backing to produce that kind of brand. The open question is whether the industry has the appetite for a twenty-year bet on a single face, as it did in the 1990s.

Epilouge

Before you run to Polymarket to bet on the ‘End of Older Action Stars’, consider that the 2020s still have space to change course. Cruise, Statham, Diesel and their peers are still working and still selling tickets. Top Gun 3, The Beekeeper 2 and Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning are not under-performers. Older Bollywood leads (i.e. Shah Rukh Khan with Pathaan and Jawan at 58, Rajinikanth) are filling in from outside Hollywood. F1 at Pitt’s $30m Apple payday showed that an over-60 can still launch a new property.

But the breadth that made the 2010s feel unprecedented is narrowing. The ensembles that widened the cast have fragmented. The late-bloomer wave is slower than it was. The top of the cohort is concentrating again, with seven actors now reaching half of the decade’s gross, up from eleven in the 2010s. The generation coming up behind looks talented but not yet proven at the franchise scale.

Shah Rukh Khan, at 60, has been calling himself ‘the last of the superstars’. The data from Hollywood suggests he is slightly premature, but the bench behind him is thinner than the slate would suggest.

The over-50 action-star boom is real, but on current evidence, it is beginning to tip, with the cohort ageing in place and the ranks behind it thinner than they were a decade ago.

Notes

Today’s research examined every action-tagged film released between 1980 and 2025 with a reported budget or worldwide box-office figure. That gave me 2,171 films and 4,053 lead-role observations across 1,764 unique actors.

A ‘lead’ is anyone billed in the top three positions and credited as ‘Leading’ or ‘Lead Ensemble Member’ in the cast list, i.e. broadly, the actors whose faces end up on the poster.

I subdivided the IMDb ‘Action’ tag into twelve hybrid types (Action-Crime, Action-Thriller, Action-Superhero, Action-Sci-Fi, Action-Fantasy, Action-Comedy, Action-Drama, Action-Horror, Action-War, Action-Western, Action-Adventure and Pure Action). It is a slightly clumsy taxonomy, but it lets the genre-specific patterns surface.

Ages were calculated from each actor’s date of birth and the film’s release date. About 1,800 of the 2,200 lead actors matched cleanly; the rest are excluded from the age analysis.

All box office figures are in US dollars, not adjusted for inflation. I treat gender as binary because that is how the film industry has captured the data until very recently.

Data came from Opus Data, IMDb, OMDb, Wikidata, and trade reporting from Variety, Deadline, and The Hollywood Reporter for the 2026 CinemaCon slate.

1. Hope (호프) is Na Hong-jin’s big-budget sci-fi thriller that marks his English-language debut and his first film in a decade. It stars a mixed Korean and Hollywood cast, including Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender and Hoyeon.

2. Colony (군체) is Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie thriller about survivors trapped in a building during a viral outbreak, notable largely for the return of Jun Ji-hyun to cinema screens after an eleven-year absence.

Six years after Parasite (기생충) became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Korean cinema’s place at the top table feels established.

This got me thinking about what the ‘Parasite Effect’ was. When a film wins an Oscar, does it have a lasting effect on the perception of that nation’s cinema? Or is it more of an isolated incident with no lasting impact?

So I crunched the numbers on ten years of international winners and their effects.

Is there a halo effect for national cinema?

I took the Best International Feature Oscar winner from 2015 to 2025 and pulled their country’s entire film back catalogue i.e. every film from that nation with a Wikipedia page, minus the winner itself.

I then compared the monthly Wikipedia pageviews in the 12 months following the Oscar ceremony with those in the 12 months preceding it.

To control for global trends (including a rather large pandemic), I divided each country’s change by the average of all other tracked countries in the same window.

This reveals that South Korea is the only winning country that generated a meaningful lift for its national cinema. On Wikipedia, the South Korean back catalogue beat the global average by +24%.

Everyone else came in at or below the peer average.

• Mexico’s back catalogue fell roughly 20% after Roma.

• Chile’s halved after A Fantastic Woman.

• Germany managed a modest +8% after All Quiet on the Western Front (albeit Netflix released that film globally a month into the measurement window, so streaming distribution is doing some of the work the Oscar cannot claim credit for on its own).

It seems that in most cases, an Oscar win does not help a national cinema’s output, but that Parasite was an outlier.

What did the South Korean lift look like?

To show this Parasite Effect in practice, let’s look at the Wikipedia data in more detail.

On the chart below, the orange line is per-film monthly Wikipedia views for 1,301 Korean films (Parasite excluded). The blue line is the comparison group, covering films from France, Japan, Germany, Spain and Italy (10,966 films in total). Both are indexed to 100 at January 2019, so what matters is the shape.

Through 2018 and 2019, Korea tracks its peers almost exactly. From February 2020, they split. Korea rises more sharply and remains 45 to 60% above its pre-Parasite baseline by mid-2020. The peer group gets a bump too (the COVID effect of people locked indoors looking things up on Wikipedis more) but drifts back down.

I have marked Squid Game’s September 2021 release to illustrate that the South Korean lift began a full 18 months earlier. So Squid Game wasn’t the trigger, even if it later reinforced the effect.

Did more people watch South Korean movies after Parasite won the Oscar?

This Wikipedia data is useful for tracking whether people were curious about South Korean cinema, but I also wanted to look at who was watching the movies. So I ran another analysis, this time using almost 10 million audience reviews with submission dates.

The pattern across countries is even more striking in the review data. South Korea is again alone at +52%. Iran shows a positive number too, but that is based on just too few reviews in the pre-win window to be a reliable signal.

Every other country with a robust sample came in flat or negative. Mexico and Chile both fell by roughly half. Denmark, Japan and Hungary all ended up well below their peers.

Was it South Korea or was it Bong?

When Parasite won, was global curiosity pulled toward Korean cinema as a whole, or specifically toward Bong Joon-ho? Hulu bundled Mother, The Host and Barking Dogs Never Bite alongside Parasite in April 2020, which gave an obvious reason for a director-specific spike.

The data says national, not personal. Bong’s five pre-Parasite films moved +43% on Wikipedia in the 12 months after the Oscar. The broader South Korean catalogue moved +46%. On user reviews, Bong’s back catalogue barely shifted (+8%) while the wider South Korean catalogue almost doubled (+86%).

So it’s fair to say that this film’s Oscar win contributed in a big way to reshaping how audiences thought about an entire national cinema.

So why South Korea and not the others?

This kind of data can reveal the pattern but not the reasons behind it. Here are my first thoughts as to why this moment played out as it did:

1. The movie is outstanding. No, really. It’s a cut above most films, even at the Oscars that year, and watching art that good can be exhilarating in a way that makes you want to chase that high. The film was infused with a number of South Korean elements, characters, and tropes, which made viewers keen to learn more.

2. The speech. When Bong picked up his Golden Globes, he said something widely reported: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films”. It made the whole thing feel more like a moment in history than just a single film winning a vote.

3. Streaming was ready. Neon’s deal with Hulu put three Bong films on a major US platform in April 2020, exactly when lockdowns sent viewers looking for something new. By February 2021, Netflix had committed $500 million to Korean content in a single year, on top of $700 million already spent between 2015 and 2020. That commitment later grew to $2.5 billion through 2027.

4. Korea had a deeper bench. Iran, Chile, Denmark and Hungary do not have Memories of Murder, Train to Busan, Oldboy and The Handmaiden queued up and ready to reward a curious viewer. When Parasite opened the door, there was somewhere for the audience to go.

5. The timing was extraordinary. Parasite won on 9 February 2020, which was roughly five weeks before the world went into a global lockdown. People confined at home with streaming subscriptions and an appetite for novelty are the ideal environment for a back catalogue to catch fire.

Epilogue

For most filmmakers, reaching the heights of winning the Best International Feature at the Oscars is a personal honour. But once in a while, it is also a moment when you get to help your peers and increase a lasting interest in your nation’s cinematic output.

Parasite was a rare case where not only was the film exceptional, but the collision of a compelling argument, a ready infrastructure, a deep catalogue worth discovering, and a world that was about to be locked indoors with nothing to do but watch.

Notes

I tested every Best International Feature winner from 2016 to 2023 (eight films, eight countries). For each, I pulled the winning country’s entire film back catalogue from metadata databases, excluded the winner itself, and compared Wikipedia pageviews and written review volumes from several major review sites in the 12 months after the Oscar ceremony with the 12 months before.

To strip out global trends (such as the odd pandemic) I measured each country’s change relative to the average of all other tracked countries in the same window. The comparison group for South Korea is France, Japan, Germany, Spain and Italy, which I chose for coverage density. The 2015 winner (Ida, Poland) was excluded for insufficient pre-win data, and the 2025 winner (I’m Still Here, Brazil) has not yet completed its post-win window.

Both Wikipedia and the review data skew toward English-speaking audiences, so this measures global cinephile curiosity as expressed in English, not South Korean domestic viewership.

Co-productions can appear in more than one country’s catalogue, which inflates the numbers slightly for Germany and France but is a minor issue for South Korea.

Ted suggested I synthesise them into a series of meta-lessons that recur across the films.

You can read all of Ted’s collected case studies here Distribution Case Study Masterlist v1.0

The case studies span four decades, from Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 to Union in 2024. Budgets range from $2,000 to $2.5 million. The films include micro-budget narrative features, impact documentaries, festival darlings, and a few that no distributor would touch.

What follows are the nine patterns I kept seeing recurring in the firsthand accounts of filmmakers who went through it.

1. Build your audience before you need them

The single strongest predictor of distribution success across these case studies was whether the filmmakers had built a relationship with their audience before the release.

Sharon ‘Rocky’ Roggio made 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, a documentary about a Bible translation that shifted attitudes towards homosexuality. Netflix passed, but rather than scramble for another platform, she built her own distribution model from scratch, starting while the film was still in production. She identified her core audiences (faith communities, LGBTQIA+ allies, scholars), ran Zoom focus groups, sent regular newsletter updates, and converted super-fans into volunteer ambassadors.

Don’t just make it available — make it matter.
Sharon ‘Rocky’ Roggio, director of 1946 (via Jon Reiss’s case study)

They had over 500 watch parties across 25 countries, net virtual screening revenue of $118,000, a TikTok following of 201,000+ and the whole time she retained all rights and viewer data.

The Wisdom of Trauma directors Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo distributed the film exclusively through their own website, using Vimeo. They grew their email list from 60,000 to 900,000 subscribers during the campaign. Four million views in the first seven days. First-week revenues exceeded the entire film budget and fully financed their next project. Crucially, 50–60% of views came from word-of-mouth, not paid advertising.

Sandi DuBowski, director of Sabbath Queen, has been collecting email addresses at screenings with physical clipboards since releasing Trembling Before G-d in 2001. Twenty-four years of audience data, one clipboard at a time.

Cryptopia director Torsten Hoffmann, whose Kickstarter campaign reached its goal in nine days, found that 70% of funds raised came via email. His was:

The modern filmmaker is more of an entrepreneur who has to create a “product” for a “market”. Audience building and branding are part of this process.
Torsten Hoffmann, director of Cryptopia (via The Film Collaborative case study)

There were also some examples of filmmakers who didn’t do this and later regretted it. Daresha Kyi, director of Mama Bears, reflected that she ‘should have collected audience emails more systematically’.

Julia Kots of Inez & Doug & Kira found that without a pre-existing audience or clear niche, options narrowed fast.

In short, if you haven’t started building your audience by the time you lock picture, you’re already behind.

2. Reject inadequate deals - self-distribution can outperform

Across these case studies, filmmakers who rejected disappointing traditional distribution offers and chose to self-distribute frequently outperformed what they would have earned through conventional deals.

Hundreds of Beavers is the standout. Traditional distributors offered maximum guarantees of $30,000 for a film that cost $150,000 to make. The filmmakers refused and pursued what they called ‘hybrid self-distribution’, splitting rights across theatrical, TVOD, international, and physical media.

Hundreds of Beavers:

• Budget $150,000

• Total revenue ~$800,000 (as of October 2024).

• Distribution cost ~$135,000

• Plus an estimated $150,000–$250,000 of unpaid social media labour.

Had they accepted the $30,000 offer, they would have earned roughly 4% of what they ultimately made.

(In the UK, they partnered with agency Times One Hundred, which has a case study on its site about the UK release).

Union premiered at Sundance, won a jury award, appeared on multiple ‘Top 10 Films of the Year’ lists, and screened in 23 countries. Yet every major distributor passed, and the producers chose to self-distribute.

Distribution is part of making a film and needs to be just as strategic, creative, and contextual to your film as its team, artistic vision, and style.
Samantha Curley, producer of Union (via Distribution Advocates case study)

Their Black Friday TVOD launch through GATHR (a five-day window with the tagline ‘This Black Friday, don’t order from Amazon. Watch UNION’) generated 2,000 rentals and netted as much revenue as the ‘entire theatrical run’ with, as they put it, ‘way less money, time, and resources’.

Burn provides the founding text for this model. After winning the Audience Award at Tribeca in 2012, the best offer was ‘low-ball offers, in the mid five-figure range’. Co-director Brenna Sanchez’s response:

Don’t believe someone else can do it better than you can. And certainly don’t wait for them to do it. Be nimble.
Brenna Sanchez, co-director of Burn (via Film Independent case study)

They four-walled theatres across America. The 25-city northeast tour alone grossed $375,000 and eventually played in 170+ cities. Tom Putnam’s advice:

‘Plan on releasing the movie yourself as part of budgeting; look at distributor pickup as happy accident if deal makes sense.’

Columbus faced the same dilemma. Despite Kogonada’s feature debut receiving ‘exemplary reviews’ at Sundance with John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, the best all-rights offer was $150,000 against a $700,000 budget. A $550,000 shortfall. They chose creative distribution instead.

None of this is to say that self-distribution always wins. But the default assumption (i.e. that a traditional distributor will do better) is, based on these case studies, increasingly unreliable. Particularly for documentaries and films without a recognisable cast.

3. Eventize every screening

If there’s one tactical recommendation that appears more consistently than any other across these case studies, it’s this: don’t just show your film. Make every screening an event.

Yes, I hate the word ‘eventize’ too. But the concept behind it is the closest thing these case studies have to a universal principle.

Sabbath Queen’s Sandi DuBowski pursued a year-long eventized theatrical model. Nearly every screening was transformed into what he described as a package:

‘It was like a package experience. Oh, the Sabbath Queen Cruise is coming to town — you see the film, then you have a ritual feast, then a deeper discussion.’
Sandi DuBowski, director of Sabbath Queen (via Jon Reiss’s case study)

His screenings included partnerships with houses of worship, restaurant-hosted Shabbat dinners, and ‘Soul Spa’ events. Box office: over $110,000.

Hundreds of Beavers took a different approach: mascots, wrestling, merchandise, and a fur red carpet at the LA premiere, which generated coverage in Variety. They staged a 14-city Midwest road show with Q&As. The events were fun but also provided footage that could be repurposed as paid advertising content.

Eno, Gary Hustwit’s generative documentary about Brian Eno, pushed the concept furthest. Custom software creates a unique version of the film for every screening, so each showing is genuinely unrepeatable. Premium event screenings (where Hustwit performed the film ‘live’ on stage) commanded $25-$40 tickets, with 100% of the proceeds retained by the filmmaker.

There is a reporting issue here that I found particularly interesting (I know that, as a data nerd, numbers will always jump out at me, but in this case, I think it’s worth noting for everyone). Eno’s total theatrical gross was over $1 million. But the standard box-office reporting showed only $298,989. The remaining $400,000+ came from event screenings and partnerships that trades don’t count. The gap between reported and actual revenue was enormous, and invisible to anyone reading the trade press.

It makes you wonder what else we’re missing.

The Twin Seas Media case studies demonstrate this model at scale for impact documentaries. In the Whale reached 10,000+ viewers across 72 screening partners in 13 states over 12 months, with ‘sold-out screenings and encore requests’ described as ‘frequent occurrences’. A Reckoning in Boston reached 10,000+ people through 65+ partners across 28 states, generating $100,000 in licensing and speaking fees. Same model every time: screening + Q&A + community conversation + local partner.

Even at the micro level, Guacamole Yesterdays organised a multi-city tour pairing screenings with Q&A sessions and community events. They eventually secured placement for Apple TV pre-orders while retaining control over pricing and audience engagement.

Overall, it seemed to me that a screening people attend generates more revenue, more word-of-mouth, and more downstream value than a screening they merely watch.

4. Constraints are creative fuel, not limitations

We should acknowledge at this point that with any list of micro-budge case studies, there is survivorship bias. By their very nature these are the success stories, and for every Clerks there are hundreds of micro-budget films nobody ever heard of.

The case studies are only of films that beat the odds. But what’s interesting is how they beat the odds. In almost every case, the budget constraints produced a visual identity that audiences celebrated rather than forgave.

Read more

It’s a question I’ve looked at before on this site, most recently in 2019, but a lot has happened in the past six years. One pandemic, two strikes, three Spider-Men, a four-hour Justice League and a flood of streaming.

A recent poll of 2,000 Americans found the ‘ideal’ movie length is 92 minutes. Only 2% said they were comfortable with films over two and a half hours. And yet nine of the ten highest-grossing films of all time run over two hours, and three of them cross the three-hour mark.

So what’s going on? Let’s look at the numbers…

The headline paradox

If you look at every film produced worldwide, the average running time has barely changed in decades. It has hovered around 100 to 103 minutes since the 1980s. In 2024, the average film was 103.6 minutes long.

If this doesn’t match your experiences, that’s because this is all the films released, not the ones people actually watch.

Wide theatrical releases (the films that open in hundreds or thousands of cinemas across North America) averaged 106 minutes in the early 2000s. By the 2020s, that figure had risen to 114 minutes.

This means that if you’re a regular cinemagoer, you are now routinely sitting through films that are around ten minutes longer than they were a generation ago.

And the biggest-budget films ($100M+) have pushed even further, pulling the theatrical average up with them.

By the way, pre-show trailers and adverts have ballooned too. Most major chains now run 20 to 30 minutes of material before the feature starts, meaning that your cinema trip has got longer at both ends.

The two-hour film is taking over

Averages can mask what’s really going on underneath. So I split every wide release into runtime buckets and compared the decades.

In the 1980s, around 14% of wide releases ran over two hours. In the 2020s, it’s 32%.

At the other end, the ‘short feature film’ (i.e. a commercial feature film, rather than a “Short Film” which students and early stage filmmakers might make for practice, showcase or ego) has all but vanished from mainstream cinema.

In the 1980s, roughly 13% of wide releases ran under 90 minutes. In the 2020s, that’s down to 7%.

Initially, I thought this might be short films sneaking into the data, but no, it seems shorter feature films are dying out. The vast majority are 75 to 89-minute features. Animated family films like The Land Before Time at 69 minutes, the odd Woody Allen at 79, that sort of thing.

The whole distribution has shifted upwards. While there are some outliers dragging the average up, it’s more the case that the entire middle ground has moved. The 105-to-119-minute film is now the most common runtime bracket for a wide release, and the two-hour-plus film is no longer unusual.

Very long films have proliferated dramatically. In the entire 2010s, only a handful of mainstream Hollywood films crossed the three-hour mark.

In the past couple of years, we’ve had The Batman (175 min), Oppenheimer (180 min), Avatar: The Way of Water (190 min), Killers of the Flower Moon (206 min) and The Brutalist (215 min).

Which genres are responsible?

Not all genres have inflated equally. Action films have grown the most (hence why Matt invited Todd to speak about it on the show).

The average wide-release action film ran 103 minutes in the 1980s. By the 2020s, that had increased to 128 minutes, up 25 minutes.

Comedy and horror have crept up too, but not to the same degree. Wide-release comedies held steady at 99 minutes from the 1980s through the 2000s, then nudged up to 107 minutes in the 2020s. Horror went from 97 minutes to 103. C

Overall, we can see that runtime inflation is concentrated in genres with the highest budgets and set-piece costs.

This makes sense. A comedy needs to land its jokes and get out, and a horror film needs to sustain tension, not test endurance (like Get Out). When I last looked at horror runtimes in 2019, It: Chapter Two at 169 minutes was longer than 99.78% of all horror films made in the prior 20 years.

Even animation has crept up. Disney Renaissance films in the 1990s typically ran 83 to 95 minutes (The Lion King is 88 minutes, Aladdin 90, Beauty and the Beast 84). Modern Disney and Pixar features cluster around 100 to 118 (Moana 113, The Incredibles 115, Incredibles 2 118).

The franchise escalation effect

The obvious suspect is the franchise machine. Surely it’s all those Marvel sequels and cinematic universes bloating the schedule?

Kinda. In the 1980s and 1990s, franchise films were actually shorter than standalones by about three minutes. The typical franchise entry was a tight, efficient sequel like Lethal Weapon 2 or Home Alone 2.

That changed during the 2000s and has been widening since. By the 2020s, franchise films averaged 121 minutes versus 112 for standalones (i.e. a nine-minute gap).

The crucial point is that both have got longer, with standalones going from 105 minutes to 112 minutes, and franchise films from 102 to 121.

What the franchise data does reveal is a pattern of escalation within individual series. Each instalment tends to run longer than the last, as though runtime is part of the promise that each sequel will be bigger than its predecessor.

• The Star Wars sequel trilogy averaged 143 minutes per film, compared with 125 minutes for the original trilogy (18 minutes more per film).

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (142 min) ran 27 minutes longer than Raiders of the Lost Ark (115 min).

• No Time to Die (163 min) was the longest Bond film in the franchise’s 60-year history, more than 50 minutes longer than Dr. No.

• The Fast & Furious franchise hasn’t had a sub-two-hour entry since 2009. Every film since Fast Five has run 130 minutes or more.

Follow the money

Budget turns out to be a stronger predictor of runtime than franchise status, genre, or almost anything else.

Films made for under $10 million have barely changed in length over four decades. But films budgeted at $100 million or more now average about 130 minutes, up from around 122 minutes in the 2000s.

My read on this is that a studio spending $200 million on a film wants every set piece on screen and for the audience to feel they got their money’s worth from a premium-priced cinema ticket. Cutting twenty minutes might make for a tighter film, but it doesn’t make for a bigger event.

There's a strange quirk in how film exhibition works. In most cinemas worldwide, the ticket price is unrelated to the runtime. A three-hour film consumes 50% more screen time than a two-hour film, but the ticket costs the same.

There are exceptions:

• Germany has a formal surcharge system (Überlänge) used by major chains, with fees kicking in at 120 minutes and rising in brackets.

• Kinepolis in Belgium adds €1 for films over 130 minutes.

• Viewshow Cinemas, Taiwan's largest chain, charges a tiered premium starting at NT$20 (about a dollar) for films over 150 minutes.

But these are outliers. The global norm is flat pricing, regardless of runtime. A three-hour film consumes 50% more screen time than a two-hour film, but tickets tend to cost the same.

From the audience’s perspective, a longer film is arguably a better value. From the exhibitor’s perspective, it’s a structural subsidy for long films that nobody has ever corrected.

So what’s going on?

I don’t have a single neat answer, but there are a number of things worth pointing to.

1. Digital projection removed the practical ceiling. Until 2017, most cinemas projected from 35mm film reels. Now they don’t, and a digital file can be any runtime. A standard reel held roughly 11 minutes of footage, so a movie like Avengers: Endgame at 181 minutes would have required 16 reel changes.

2. The economics of theatrical cinema have changed. Cinemas need each screening to justify a premium ticket price, and maybe a longer film can feel like a better value.

3. Studios want their big releases to feel like events. A three-hour epic signals importance in a way that a tidy 95-minute film doesn’t.

4. Shorter films have migrated to streaming. Between 1995 and 2009, Hollywood’s major studios averaged roughly 112 theatrical releases per year. Between 2010 and 2023, that fell to about 83.

5. The dual-window model has given directors a release valve. Ridley Scott delivered a 157-minute theatrical cut of Napoleon for Sony, followed by a 205-minute director’s cut for Apple TV+. The theatrical version plays the multiplexes while the extended version lives on streaming.

6. Directors with leverage are using it. Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Martin Scorsese. These are filmmakers with the clout to deliver a three-hour cut and have the studio release it. In an earlier era, the studio might have insisted on cuts. Today, a long runtime from a prestige director is a selling point, not a problem.

7. And audiences keep showing up. Oppenheimer ran three hours and grossed $952 million worldwide. Avengers: Endgame ran 181 minutes and crossed $2.7 billion. Avatar: The Way of Water ran 190 minutes and made $2.3 billion. If audiences were punishing long films at the box office, studios would have course-corrected by now.

I looked at that penultimate point a few years ago in an article titled "Do more experienced directors make longer movies?" In a word, yes!

Epilogue - The intermission question

If films are going to keep getting longer, should cinemas bring back the intermission?

Intermissions were standard in cinema for decades. Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, The Sound of Music all had built-in breaks. The last major wide release to include one was Gandhi in 1982. After that, they disappeared from Western cinemas entirely because exhibitors calculated that dropping the break would squeeze in one more screening per day.

Then in 2024, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist brought it back. At 215 minutes, the film includes a 15-minute intermission designed into the script at a narrative pivot point. The reception was overwhelmingly positive and sparked a conversation about whether more films should follow.

Not everyone agrees. When an independent cinema in Colorado added an eight-minute break to screenings of Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes), Paramount and Apple contacted them and told them to stop. Scorsese reportedly made it clear that an imposed intermission was an insult to the film.

In India, of course, intermissions never went away. Every Hollywood film released in Indian cinemas gets a mandatory interval, including 84-minute animated films. Concession revenue during intervals accounts for 30 to 40% of Indian cinema revenue. Christopher Nolan has pushed for his films to be shown without breaks, but many Indian chains simply ignore him.

It’s a tension that isn’t going to resolve itself. Directors see the intermission as a violation of their artistic intent. Audiences (and their bladders) increasingly need one. As films push past three hours more and more regularly, the pressure will only grow.

Notes

The raw data for today’s research came from the OpusData/The Numbers database, which covers 36,431 films with runtime data. ‘Wide releases’ are defined as films with a wide release pattern in North America, as classified by The Numbers. Budget data is available for roughly 30-40% of theatrical releases and coverage drops to around 20% for the 2020s, so budget-based findings should be read with that caveat in mind.

For most of movie history, a movie had one producer.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the vast majority of movies credited just one producer. Even through the 1970s, producer teams were small and stable.

That world is gone.

In 1940, almost three-quarters of films were produced by a single producer, whereas by 2025, that had fallen to barely a quarter.

Today, films average 4.5 producers per credited film, up from 3.0 in 2000. This is a 50% increase in just over two decades.

Not all producers' credits are created equally. There are six major types of producers:

1. Producer is the (or one of the) overall project lead(s), akin to a CEO.

2. Executive Producers operate at a high level, not day-to-day work.

3. Co-Producers help get the film made, likely with a single focus.

4. Line Producers are all about the mechanics of the film shoot.

5. Assistant Producers are the most junior of the producing credits involved with the making of the film.

6. Associate Producer is a nebulous term of diminishing value.

I’ll go through each in a little more detail as we come to their data.

The “Producer” credit

When someone gets a “Producer” credit, they are rightly seen as a key creative and managerial lead on the project.

Regardless of whether it's one or multiple people receiving this credit for a movie, it signals that they were key to making the film. This will most likely include developing the project, assembling the key team, securing financing, and overseeing the film from development through release.

The “Executive Producer” credit

An Executive Producer is traditionally a senior figure who helps secure financing, studio backing, rights, or the attachment of major talent to the film. Their contribution is most likely to be at a high level rather than in day-to-day production management.

The number of Executive Producer credits has more than doubled since 2000, up 111.9% over the past century.

Other producing credits

Three of the remaining major producing credit types are more directly tied to the making of the movie.

• Co-Producers are supporting producing partners who share responsibility for delivering the film, often managing a specific part of production or representing a collaborating company or production entity. So if you film in France for some of the scenes, then you might have a French Co-producer who was the lead on that part of the shoot (or financing).

• Line Producers are responsible for the practical execution of the film, including budgeting, scheduling, hiring crew, and ensuring the production runs on time and on budget.

• Assistant Producer credits are an entry-level producing credit, often given to someone stepping up into producing for the first time or taking a big leap in their career. It will be assumed they worked hard on making the movie.

That leaves us with the Associate Producer credit. I understand that in the middle of the last century, this credit often did the job we now use “Co-Producer,” i.e., a partner for a particular aspect of the production.

However, in modern parlance, it’s all too often regarded as a variety credit, given to placate someone who needed to be brought onside (e.g., access to money, talent, or location). In David Mamet’s brilliant film about filmmaking, State and Main, they describe the Associate Producer credit as being “what you give your secretary instead of a raise”.

Interestingly, Line Producer credits have not changed much in recent years (a 16.8% increase between 2000 and 2025). This is likely because filmmaking has not changed in ways that would require additional Line Producers, but also because they’re not seen as attractive credits by those looking for a title bump.

Not so the other three.

• Co-Producer credits increased by 36.9%

• Associate Producer credits are up by 59.9%

• Assistant Producers have almost doubled, up 80.8%.

How the scale of production affects the number of producers

Generally speaking, films grow in complexity as their budgets increase. It’s not linear, nor universal, but a film costing over $100 million will have more moving parts than a micro-budget production. Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that the number of producers increases with budget level.

Films costing over $50 million have, over the past quarter century, averaged 10.2 producers (of all types).

The greatest increase is among Executive Producers as we move up the budget levels. On average, a film costing over $50 million will have more than twice as many Execs as a film costing under $20 million.

How do you get to be a producer?

In the simplest terms, you produce a movie, and you slap your name on it. That means you:

• Find a script (i.e. write one, buy one, or hire a writer)

• Raise the money from investors, tax credits, and loan sharks.

• Spend the money hiring people to plan, shoot, edit and finish the film.

• Hopefully, do deals to release the film in festivals, cinemas and home entertainment.

• You submit your credit to IMDb. Voilà - you are now a producer. (Technically, you were a producer the whole time, Dorothy, as the act of producing is what makes you a producer, but this is the point at which you get the show off at parties).

• ???

• Profit

However, in the real world, things get a lot more complex. On most films, a vast number of people and companies work together to make a film happen. Who exactly has the right to anoint someone with a producing credit will depend on the exact contractual relationship between the parties.

Receiving a producing credit is one of the levers that people have to close a deal. I.e., you might say to an investor that they will get an “Executive Producer” credit if they invest money in your film.

And in other cases, credits are awarded in exchange for securing scripts, IP, talent, money, distribution deals, locations, and more. Anytime a real producer wanted to sweeten a deal, they could offer some form of producing credit.

Which meant that people started demanding it, seeing it as a shortcut to status, respect, and showing off at their high school reunion.

Acting like a producer

One aspect of this inflation is the growth of major actors also receiving producing credits. There are a number of notable actors who are also prolific producers in their own right. Few members of the public realise that some of their favourite stars, such as Danny DeVito, Robert Redford, or Clint Eastwood, are also respected producers.

Even if they did not start out producing movies, sometimes an actor can gain so much power that they rise above their ‘acting’ label to become the main driver of a franchise. Rather than saying “Tom Cruise acts in Mission Impossible”, it’s fairer to say that “Tom Cruise IS Mission Impossible”. His work behind the scenes of the franchise is producing at its purest.

In the 1940s and 50s, it was rare for an actor to be credited as a producer of any type. The rate of actor-producers rose sharply in the 1960s and 1990s, nearly doubling between 1986 and 2009.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen this level off to the point that about one in eight people with a producing credit on a movie also receive an acting credit.

As well as the rise of genuine hyphenates, part of this huge growth has been the trend of major actors demanding more status and attention by also securing producing credits.

Amanda Seyfried recently admitted that she had no idea she was an executive producer on The Housemaid until she spotted it on the call sheet three weeks into filming, saying that her agent had negotiated the credit without telling her. She said:

It’s one of those vanity credits… I didn’t do shit to make that movie. I only acted in it.

To be fair, I give Seyfried credit for admitting publicly that it was an empty title (great, now I’ve added to the problem by giving her another credit), although she could have done what Scarlett Johansson did and asked to have her Exec Producer credit removed when she didn’t think she earned it on Thunderbolts*.

As credits were given away freely, inflation took hold

This fragmented, power-based, bespoke credit system is why we’re seeing such credit inflation. Put simply, no one is regulating it. Anyone can make anyone else “a producer” at any time for any reason.

This is very different to most other major roles in Hollywood. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) determines writing credits, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) determines directing credits through formal arbitration systems, but producers are typically classified as management rather than labour. This historically left the assignment of producer credits largely in the hands of studios and financiers.

The writers’ and directors’ crediting rules arose because creators felt that producers were abusing their positions to give themselves credit. (This is a time in which arrogant producers stole writing credits for themselves, while the humble producers stole writing credits under a pseudonym). However, with producers, there is no third party - they’re doing it among themselves.

On a film-to-film basis, this wasn’t a problem, but as credit inflation took hold, it was devaluing the whole idea of a credit. This came to a head at the Oscars in the late 1990s.

The first “Academy Award for Best Picture” were given to a film’s production company, but starting in 1950, the rules changed so that it went to the individual producers. Anyone with a “Produced by” credit was considered a winner and received a statuette.

When Shakespeare in Love won in 1998, five producers collected the award, even though later accounts said only two of them (David Parfitt and Donna Gigliotti) had done the traditional producing work. Of the other three:

• Harvey Weinstein had taken a producer credit despite limited on-set involvement.

• Marc Norman’s producer credit had been negotiated by his agent.

• Edward Zwick retained his producing credit despite leaving the film.

In response, the Academy introduced a new rule limiting the number of producers eligible for the Best Picture award to three. In order to be counted as an Oscar winner, producers now need to be one of up to three people who have an on-screen credit of “Producer” or “Produced by”, and have “performed the major portion of the producing functions”. If the producers of a movie can't agree among themselves who the three chosen should be, then the Academy’s Producers Branch steps in to make a ruling.

The Academy is not the only Hollywood body trying to determine the difference between real and variety-producing credits. The Producers Guild of America (PGA) introduced the “p.g.a.” Producers Mark in 2012, certifying which credited producers actually performed the core producing functions. Despite this, the “p.g.a.” mark is voluntary and does not prevent studios from adding additional producer credits.

Both bodies are trying to fight the tide from their little beacheads. In both cases, the rules are clear, defined, and fair. Yet producing a movie is messy and busy, and there will always be fringe cases, including:

• Bob Yari assembled the financing for Crash and received a full on-screen “Producer” credit, but when he was excluded from Oscar recognition, he launched a series of lawsuits against the Producers Guild and the Academy. He argued that their opaque process had reduced him to a mere “money man” and cost him both prestige and financial upside. He lost on appeal.

• Long‑time producing partners Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger developed Little Miss Sunshine from an early script, championed the writer, and helped pick the film’s first‑time feature directors. Five producers were certified by the PGA, but the Academy picked the other three producers as the only official nominees. The pair were gracious at the time, but have since been more open about their frustration in feeling like the Academy’s arbitrary cap was erasing years of their work. The backlash led the Academy to soften its rules to allow more than three producers in “rare and extraordinary” cases.

• Boyhood took 12 years to make, and over that time, Jonathan Sehring and John Sloss provided long‑term financing, logistical support, and protection so that Linklater could shoot for a few weeks each year and retain creative freedom. They both received full “Producer” credits on screen, but the PGA ruled that only Richard Linklater and on‑set producer Cathleen Sutherland qualified for the “produced by” mark.

Why are there more Executive Producers today?

While these efforts to regulate the full “Producer” credit are imperfect, they are at least trying. Until very recently, there has been no comparable movement to regulate Executive Producer credits.

And because of this, the most acute form of this credit inflation is among Execs. As noted at the start of this article, the average number of Executive Producers on movies has increased by 112% since 2000.

This is down to a number of factors, including:

1. Indie financing comes from more sources. Independent films often assemble budgets from multiple investors or financing partners. Each party expects recognition, and Executive Producer is the credit most commonly used.

2. Studio movies are assembled as packages. Modern Hollywood projects are built by attaching talent, rights, and financing before production begins. People who help secure one piece of that package are often rewarded with an Executive Producer credit.

3. Producer credits are unregulated. As we’ve learned, there is no check on studios awarding credits to anyone for any reason. Things like the “p.g.a.” mark and the Oscar limitation add some friction to the wording of “Producer” credits, but not Executive Producer credits.

4. Actor contracts increasingly include Exec Producer titles. Agents have realised it’s something they can demand on behalf of their client, and in many cases, it’s an easier win than actually getting more money. Amanda Seyfried put it best when she said, “I didn’t do shit to make that movie. I only acted in it“.

5. They’re free. Exec Producer credits are used to compensate people without increasing salaries. The industry is in a major state of fear and flux, so giving away credits in lieu of money feels like an obvious solution.

So what now?

With credit inflation becoming rampant, industry efforts to push back are hardening.

In 2024, a group called Producers United launched with around 80 established producers (currently 281) and has since pushed for clearer standards on who actually qualifies for a producing credit.

They want studios to tie “Producer” credits to specific duties, such as participating in prep, sharing budget responsibility, and approving key hires, and to stop using Executive Producer titles as negotiation currency.

Variety neatly summed up their fight with the headline “Hollywood Career Producers Are Battling Actors, Greedy Managers, Penny-Pinching Execs and Stolen Credits to Survive“.

Time will tell how effective they will be. The history of Hollywood is one of people having to fight tooth and nail to protect their rights, credit and value. Nothing is given for free.

What’s new here is that typically, the producers were regarded as the people you need to fight, not the victims.

Notes

It’s worth noting that all of this applies only to movies. Television production has a whole different relationship with producer credits, and especially Executive Producer credits. TV is more of a writer-led industry, so many forms of producer credit relate to writing and showrunning (i.e., managing overall production and the other writers).

The 2025 Argentine film Death of a Comedian cited 10,123 Associate Producers. I excluded this title from the statistics as I thought it was heavily skewing the real picture. I don’t like manually excluding titles, partly for data-science reasons and partly because film is a business of outliers. However, here it swamped the overall picture, and I thought it did a disservice to the reporting of reality to include it.

Despite removing it from the average calculations, I wanted to highlight it here because it is a good example of another way people use producer credits. Thousands of fans purchased small investment bonds that helped fund the film, and each investor received an Associate Producer credit in return. The model was organised through the Comunidad Orsai collective and raised roughly $1.85 million from more than 10,000 micro-investors.

The sheer scale of the credit list created an unexpected technical challenge. IMDb normally requires credits to be entered individually, so manually uploading over ten thousand names would have taken months. Instead, a community programmer wrote an automated script that bulk-submitted the names to IMDb’s system, allowing all investors to appear in the film’s official credits database.

Industry rule = One page of screenplay equals one minute of screen time.

It’s one of those pieces of received wisdom that gets repeated so often it starts to feel like a law of physics. Screenwriting books state it as fact. Coverage readers rely on it. Studio executives glance at page counts and mentally convert to runtime.

But is it actually true?

I first looked at this question back in 2018 when John August reached out to ask me to investigate the rule. Today’s research has a substantially larger dataset of 2,520 scripts, and I’ve been able to dig much deeper into whether the one-page-one-minute rule holds up.

A quick primer on film screenplay formatting

The formatting of a modern film script is extremely exacting, including predefined margins, layout, headings, capitalisation, and font (12-point, 10-pitch Courier). The key elements are:

• Scene heading - Setting out where the upcoming scene takes place, and sometimes a time of day/night. INT is used for interior scenes and EXT for exterior.

• Action - Descriptions of what is happening in the scene, how the characters are moving and anything else the reader/viewer needs to know which is not contained in the dialogue.

• Character - The name of the character who is about to speak.

• Dialogue - The words the character is speaking.

• Parentheticals - A few words in brackets between the Character and Dialogue, giving guidance on how the line is to be spoken. Writers are normally advised to keep these to a minimum and only to use them when vital to understanding, such as “(sarcastically)” or “(to the dog)”.

There are other elements and formatting rules, but I’m focusing on those that affect our investigation of the one-minute-per-page rule.

Is the rule correct?

For this study, I gathered screenplay PDFs for 2,520 feature films and matched them against the film’s actual theatrical runtime from IMDb.

To measure how well the one-page-one-minute rule works, I calculated a simple ratio of pages to runtime (in minutes). Perfect adherence to the rule would yield a ratio of 1, a ratio above 1 means the script had more pages than the film had minutes (i.e., the script ran ‘long’), and a value below 1 means the script was shorter than the film.

Across all scripts, the average ratio is 1.1, meaning that the typical screenplay has about 9% more pages than the film's runtime in minutes.

One page does not equal one minute - it equals about 55 seconds.

This is a much bigger deal than it might seem at first. The median script is 119 pages long and produces a 108-minute film. That’s eleven extra pages, or roughly ten minutes of ‘overshoot’ if you took the one-page-one-minute rule at face value.

Is the rule useful?

No.

There are a number of problems with using this rule in a real-world setting, including:

1. It doesn’t work for four out of five scripts

2. Screenplays are normally longer than movies

3. Different genres have very different screenplays

4. The rule falls apart for long and short scripts

5. It’s designed for Hollywood… where it’s least effective

6. Taking end crawl credits into account makes it worse!

Let’s go through each one in turn…

Problem 1 - It doesn’t work for four out of five scripts

Only 18.2% of scripts have a ratio between 0.95 and 1.05.

To put this another way, if you write a 120-page screenplay and assume it will produce a 120-minute film, there’s roughly a four-in-five chance you’ll be wrong by more than six minutes in either direction

Problem 2 - Screenplays are meant to be longer than movies

Even if the rule was true, it wouldn’t withstand the uncertainty of the journey from page to screen. A film will go through a number of stages between the first draft and the final movie.

The list below is not a strict chronology but more of an example of the many phases that can shape a film’s contents:

1. The writer(s) create multiple drafts of the script

2. Directors, producers, studios (and sometimes powerful actors) will suggest changes.

3. Changes will be made to accommodate the budget, schedule, locations, weather and force majeure.

4. The actors and director will work together to craft a performance, sometimes changing the lines.

5. The editor will edit the final scenes from what was shot.

6. “A final” cut can be affected by the requirements of censors, exhibitors, airlines and broadcasters.

Each film will have a unique set of factors affecting the final running time - very few are predictable at the script stage.

The scatter plot below shows each script as a point, with page count on the horizontal axis and runtime on the vertical. If the one-page-one-minute rule held perfectly, every point would fall on the diagonal line.

The individual variance between projects is large, as the scatter plot below illustrates. If the rule were useful, we would want the vast majority of dots to be on the dotted line.

Problem 3 - Different genres have very different screenplays

Not all genres have the same relationship between page count and runtime, to quite a large degree.

Musicals and War films are the only ones with a ratio under 1 (0.9 for musicals and 0.99 for war films). This makes sense as musical numbers eat up screen time without requiring much script space (a direction line like ‘Sarah performs the number’ can cover four minutes of screen time), while war films tend toward long, dialogue-light action sequences.

At the other end, Comedy comes in highest at 1.15. The reason that comedy scripts tend to run about 15% over on pages relative to runtime is that they rely on dialogue to a greater extent than any other genre. A rapid-fire exchange between two characters can fill a page in seconds of actual screen time, and physical comedy happens faster than they read.

The data reveals that the one-page-one-minute rule works best for action-heavy, visually driven genres and worst for dialogue-heavy ones. If you’re writing a comedy, you might want to think of it as ‘one page equals about 52 seconds’.

As a side note, I love how the genres are arranged along a spectrum from ‘visual storytelling’ to ‘verbal storytelling’. Genres that trust the camera to tell the story have lower ratios, whereas genres that rely on words have higher ones.

Problem 4 - The rule falls apart for long and short scripts

Shorter scripts tend to produce more screen time per page, while longer scripts tend to have more ‘excess’ pages.

Short scripts (60–89 pages) have a median ratio of just 0.798. These scripts consistently produce films longer than their page counts would predict. A 75-page script in this bracket typically produces a 94-minute film.

Scripts in the 90–109 page range come in at 1.0 i.e. nearly perfect, and right on the money.

The 110–130-page range (the ‘Goldilocks zone’ that most studios aim for) has a ratio of 1.093, meaning these scripts average about 9% more pages per minute.

And scripts of 151+ pages have a median ratio of 1.361, roughly a third more pages than minutes of runtime.

Longer scripts tend to be dialogue-heavy (dramas, character pieces), which we’ve already seen pushes the ratio up. They’re also more likely to undergo significant cutting in post-production, so a 160-page script was probably always going to lose material. And there’s likely a formatting effect in which writers who write long may also tend toward more verbose scene descriptions.

So if you’re writing a lean, sub-100-page script, don’t assume it will produce an equally lean film. You’ve probably got more screen time in there than the page count suggests. Conversely, if you’ve written 150 pages, the film will almost certainly come in at well under 150 minutes.

Problem 5 - It’s designed for Hollywood… where it’s least effective

When I hear about the rule, I almost never hear anyone take into account that there is no single global paper size.

In Hollywood, scripts are formatted on US Letter paper, but much of the world uses A4 paper, which is slightly narrower and slightly taller than Letter.

A4 allows for fewer characters per line but more lines per page, resulting in different page counts for identical content.

The data I have shown you thus far was only those scripts on US Letter. I also looked at a smaller subset of 351 scripts formatted on A4, where the final ratio was 1.02 - much closer to the 1.0 ratio the rule promotes.

The median A4 script is 110 pages, compared to 119 pages for Letter. That’s 7.6% fewer pages for roughly equivalent content.

If you’re a UK-based screenwriter submitting to American companies, your 100-page A4 script might produce a film of about 98 minutes - bang on target. But that same content, reformatted to US Letter paper, would come out to roughly 107 pages, making it look like it’s running seven minutes over.

Ironically, the rule of thumb works better for the paper size that didn’t invent it.

Here’s a helpful tip - if you’re writing on A4 and someone asks for a page count in ‘Hollywood pages’, multiply by roughly 1.07.

Problem 6 - Taking end crawl credits into account makes it worse!

When generating the headline data we’ve already seen, I swithered over how to account for end crawl credits. In the end, I figured people most often use the rule to describe a whole screenplay rather than any one individual page. Therefore, the data we’ve seen uses raw IMDb running times, which include credits.

I am working on a larger study of credits that will be released in the coming months, but right now, I could sample 837 movies to get a rough length for crawl.

The median end credits length across all the movies I studied is 4.3 minutes.

They’re getting long - much longer! In the 1970s, credits averaged 2.0 minutes. By the 1990s, that had risen to 3.7 minutes. In the 2020s, it’s 5.2 minutes. Credits have roughly tripled in length over fifty years, and every extra minute of credits is a minute of runtime that has no corresponding page in the screenplay.

What happens to the one-page-one-minute rule when you strip credits out and measure pages against story time only? The rule is even less accurate than the main analysis suggested. One page equals not 55 seconds of film, but closer to 54 seconds of actual story.

Does the rule help or hurt screenwriters?

Both.

The rule is obviously a quick and easy way to see if you’re roughly in the right ballpark when it comes to the total running time of your screenplay.

In addition, if you’re hoping to hit certain story beats by a particular moment in the film, then knowing you’re reaching it by page [x] can help you focus your writing.

Finally, as a writer primarily concerned with crafting good characters, stories, and emotions, the exact running time is largely irrelevant. I’ve seen 90-minute movies that have dragged and three-hour ones that flew by.

The problem comes when the rule is used against screenwriters, not by them.

I have heard no end of stories of writers being told to cut their scripts based purely on page count. Hollywood screenwriter John August puts it like this:

Unfortunately, too many folks in the film and television industry have internalized one-page-per-minute as an axiomatic Truth. So any script that is longer than 120 pages is automatically perceived as being too long.

Indeed, some studios’ contracts specify that the writer may not deliver a script longer than 120 pages. Screenwriters waste time making tiny edits with the goal of moving page breaks to bring their scripts under this artificial limit. It’s pointless busy work.

Ultimately, running time is a factor of film editing. Scenes get dropped in post, and it’s very hard to anticipate these changes when looking at a script in preproduction.

Interestingly, I think we can see the effect of the rule in action.

Scripts from the 1930s averaged about 45% more pages than the film had minutes. Early screenplay formatting hadn’t been standardised; scripts tended to include much more scene direction and camera instructions, and the relationship between page and screen hadn’t been fully understood.

The ratio has been on a remarkably steady downward trajectory ever since. The 1960s at 1.14. By the 1980s, it had fallen to 1.13.

The 1990s saw a significant step down to 1.08, and the 2000s landed at 1.110, while the 2010s came in at 1.064.

The 2020s represent the first decade in our dataset in which the median ratio has fallen below 1.0, at 0.99.

I put this down to a few factors:

1. Working to rule. As the rule became law, deviations from it were incrementally punished. In response, writers would aim to meet these requirements as closely as possible, saving the odd word here and there.

2. Screenwriting software was a huge leap towards better formatting standardisation (Final Draft was first released in 1990), and increasingly rigid studio expectations about script length.

3. “Show, don’t tell”. Modern screenwriting advice encourages leaner, more visual writing. ‘White space on the page’ has become a mantra in screenplay workshops, and the verbose, novelistic screen directions of earlier decades are frowned upon.

4. Something something streaming. Many films produced for streaming platforms are shorter than traditional theatrical releases, which intuitively suggests they would have some effect.

Conclusion

The one-page-one-minute rule is not a bad starting point. It’s certainly more useful than having no rule at all. And it’s become more accurate over time, as formatting has standardised and screenwriting conventions have converged.

But it’s also very imprecise. Fewer than one in five scripts actually hits the target range. Genre, era, page count, and even paper size all shift the ratio in predictable ways. The ‘rule’ is less a rule and more a midpoint around which the industry ends up, with substantial variation in every direction.

If I had to offer a revised rule for 2026, it would be this:

One page of a properly formatted screenplay equals approximately one minute of screen time, give or take 20%, depending on genre, era, and paper size.

Sure, it’s not as catchy as the original, but it’s a good deal more accurate.

And if you’re writing a comedy on A4 paper, you can safely ignore everything I’ve just said, because your experience will be entirely different from someone writing a war film on US Letter.

Notes

Today's research looked at 2,520 movie screenplays in US Letter format and 351 in A4 format. There are plenty of guides online on how to format a screenplay. It’s also worth noting that film scripts are formatted differently from TV, radio and theatre plays.

I tried to find the “final” script version of each movie, but this is inherently imprecise as I couldn’t check every line against the final film.

Page counts are taken from the PDF. Some scripts include title pages, cast lists, or appendices that inflate the number. I cleaned these where obvious, but some noise will remain.

Runtimes come from IMDb, which typically reflects theatrical runtime, including credits. Some scripts may correspond to different cuts (director’s cut vs. theatrical release). This is a known source of noise, but is unlikely to affect the overall patterns.

Genre assignments come from IMDb, meaning that each film can belong to multiple genres (a film might be both ‘Comedy’ and ‘Romance’). Some genres have small sample sizes. Musical (19 scripts) and Western (30 scripts) should be interpreted cautiously, though their ratios make intuitive sense. The bigger genres, such as Drama (1,422), Comedy (849), and Action (608), provide much more statistical confidence.

Decade sample sizes. The 1930s (23 scripts), and 1940s (33 scripts) have relatively small samples, so those figures should be treated with caution. The patterns become much more reliable from the 1970s onwards.

Correlation vs. causation. The genre and decade patterns show correlation, not causation. A comedy doesn’t have a high ratio because it’s a comedy - it has a high ratio because comedies tend to be dialogue-heavy, and dialogue is dense on the page. The underlying driver is the type of content, not the genre label.

I should note that this isn’t a perfectly random sample of all films ever made. It skews toward well-known titles with publicly available scripts, which means big studio releases are over-represented, and low-budget independent films are under-represented. That said, it’s a large enough dataset that the broad patterns should be reliable, even if the exact numbers might shift with a different sample.

Also, in past research projects, I have reviewed over 12,000 screenplays from aspiring writers, and I don't see any differences in formatting between the two datasets.

Epilogue

I’m always learning and getting access to better tools and data. I first tackled this topic in 2018, analysing 761 scripts. I was pleased to see that the results were very similar. My 2018 study found 22% of scripts within the ‘perfect’ range, and this 2026 update finds 18.2%. The median page count has held steady at 119.

The main addition in this study is depth, with genre breakdowns, decade analysis, page-count brackets, A4 comparison, and a larger sample size, all of which add nuance that the 2018 study couldn’t provide.

Despite more than tripling the sample size, the core numbers have barely shifted. This gives me confidence that the one-page-one-minute rule, while imprecise, is at least a stable imprecision. It’s not fluctuating wildly from sample to sample, i.e. the typical script really does run a little longer than its film, and the ‘overshoot’ is consistently in the range of 9–10%.

I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).

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