Fortunately, in most cases both choices are valid and I can just go with whichever seems contextually relevant without thinking too hard. One of the two just feels right.

But behind that snap decision is a whole bunch of semi-subconscious connections, correlations and prejudices, and I want to understand them a little better.

I have previously looked at which is most commonly used in the film industry (answer = film), on Reddit (movie), and how it changes around the world (USA is Team Movie, Italy is Team Film, and unsurprisingly the UK can’t pick between the two).

Today I am turning to a data from over five million reviews written by film fans online.

I looked to see what percentage of the reviews used either word (reviews could contain both, hence why the figures add up to more than 100%)

Over such a large dataset, some clear patterns emerge.

Which is used more often - film or movie?

When referring to films that were first released before the late 1970s, the word 'film is preeminent. For films released from the 1980s onward, movie takes the lead, and doesn’t let go.

Note: You might have spotted the strange dip for both words around the pandemic. It’s intriguing but I don’t think it’s relevant to today’s topic of film vs movie. Something for later research, me thinks.

What kinds of movies are films, and what kinds of films are movies?

If we focus on movies released since 2000, and split them by genre, the true nature of the two words is revealed.

The projects most likely to be referred to as a ‘movie’ are those set around spectacle and light fun. Action. adventure and sci-fi top the list.

And if we look at the genres most likely to use ‘film’ we see almost the complete inverse.

The genres most likely to be called films are war, biographical, historical and dramas. The least are the ‘popcorn fare’ of adventure, animation and action.

Note: I flipped the order on the chart above, with the greatest number of uses of the word to the left, rather than the right as it was for the ‘movie’ chart. I did this as it makes the inverse similarity between the two words abundantly clear. The same kinds of genres sit to the left and to the right.

So we could say that the more fun a genre appears to be, the greater chance it has to be a movie.

Or as legendary film director Alan Parker put it in his superb book Will Write And Direct For Food…

The difference between a ‘movie’ and a ‘film is that one is scared to death of boring you for a second and the latter refuses to entertain you fort a moment.

Who prefers films over movies?

When I tracked the average Metascore of the genres against how often they are referred to as a ‘film’ we see a neat corelation.

The pattern mirrors what I found in 2016. People in the film industry preferred using “film” while the public default to “movie”. Here we see audiences reach for “film” when they feel a title sits in the high‑prestige lane, and “movie” when it reads as entertainment.

Who makes films vs who makes movies?

Given that most directors have a strong creative voice and a narrow set of types of films they choose (or are hired) to make, we can look to see who should be the poster child of each term.

The top directors most like to have their work described as a ‘movie’ are those making crowd-pleasing, formulaic, popcorn movies:

1. Raghava Lawrence

2. Anubhav Sinha

3. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer

4. Aanand L. Rai

5. Keenen Ivory Wayans

6. Rohit Shetty

7. S.S. Rajamouli

8. Malcolm D. Lee

9. Tyler Perry

10. Adam Shankman

Whereas those most likely to be producing ‘films’ are the people behind awards-bait high art:

1. Michael Haneke

2. Stephen Frears

3. Roman Polanski

4. Steve McQueen

5. Woody Allen

6. Paul Thomas Anderson

7. Terrence Malick

8. Lars von Trier

9. Fernando Meirelles

10. Park Chan-wook

Notes

The core data was gathered from a number of public sources, with the aim to sample what real people (well, people who spend their time adding reviews online, so at the very least ‘real-adjacent people’) say about projects. This obviously isn’t a precise tool but even so the patterns which naturally make sense have emerged in the data.

It’s worth having a read of my past article on the topic and geography plays a roles here. Online English language writing pulls towards “movie” in part because of the US dominance on publishing and audience.

The “top 250 directors” were selected on the basis of who had the greatest number of reviews in the dataset, and had made at least five films.

Before you’ve read the title or registered the actors, your brain has already clocked the palette and filed it against a lifetime of genre expectations.

Over the past century, marketing teams have shifted from painterly illustration to photography and from saturated Technicolor hues to today’s more controlled, strategic colour use.

I wanted to take a data-led look at colours on movie posters, so I gather a few (well, 58,687) and analysed how different kinds of movies make use of each colour.

Before we go colour-by-colour, let’s get a general sense of colourful movie posters are.

How colourful are movie posters?

The first measure I tracked was a ‘Colourfulness score’. This measures how intense and varied the colours are in a poster. Higher values mean the image contains more saturated and diverse colours, while lower values indicate a more muted or monochrome palette.

The image below shows a sample of images on the scale from 'low colourful scores on the left to highly colourful ones on the right.

With this we can track how movie posters have been changing over time. Movies posters cover the whole gamut but there has been a consistent trend of the colour coming out of posters.

Not very bright?

Next we can add a second calculation, that of the Brightness Contrast score. This measures the difference between the lightest and darkest areas of a poster. Higher values suggest stronger visual separation and bold contrasts, whereas lower values indicate a softer, more uniform brightness across the image.

When we put these two measures together we get a fascinating reflection of the types of genres which are similar (or more accurately marketing to audience in similar visual styles).

• Mystery, thriller and horror movies sit moodily in bottom left, reflecting low brightness and low contrast.

• War, historical and biographical movies are in the top left, with low colour but high contrast.

• Comedy, family and musicals are in the top right, with lots of colour and contrast .

• The bottom right is a little sparse, with the closest genre being animation, perhaps reflecting that this includes both animations made of children and those made for adults.

What colours dominate movie posters?

It might come as a surprise to some of you that the most frequently used colour on movies posters is orange. (well, technically black is more frequent but it’s not a ‘colour colour’, and some of that is down to text so I’ve decided to ignore black).

Lets have a look at each of the colours in turn.

Orange - The MVP of the colour spectrum

Orange grabs your attention in a non-alarming way, it radiates warmth and amplifies human presence.

Comedies, adventures and family films are the biggest users of orange heavy palettes, often pairing it with sunny yellows to convey warmth, fun and accessibility. Action, sci fi and thrillers also rely on orange, especially when contrasted with blue, to signal spectacle, high stakes and elemental conflicts like fire versus ice or humanity versus technology.

Horror, thriller and mystery movies don’t tend to use much orange, save for things like firelight, sodium lamps and warning glows.

Orange if often used when:

• Sun, dust or fire define the movie’s world(s). Deserts, sunsets, torches, explosions.

• Historical texture matters. Sepia light, parchment, wood, brass and smoke.

• Warm and approachable tone. Comedies, family travel, food stories, summer settings.

• Post‑apocalyptic wastelands. Rust and ochre surfaces with cool tech accents.

Among the reasons orange has become such a go-to for poster designers is that:

• The complementary contrast makes the poster readable at a glance.

• Human skin sits on the warm side so orange brings faces forward.

• Global campaigns favour a single look that survives as a thumbnail and matches the trailer.

Orange also partners cleanly with the cool side of the spectrum, which is why orange and blue have become the dominant blockbuster palette for posters in recent years.

The pairing maximises contrast, makes faces “pop” because skin lives on the orange axis, and signals action or sci‑fi at a glance. (Plus movie poster design is a space free from derivative trend following).

Red – A movie’s loudest signal

Red is one of the most arresting colours in poster design. It demands attention before the viewer has processed the title or the imagery. It carries a dual message that can pull in opposite directions – love and passion on one side, danger and aggression on the other.

The most common types of films to rely on a red-heavy palette are:

• Horror, where red is almost always a stand-in for blood and mortal danger. It often appears in black-white-red schemes or as a sharp accent on a dark field.

• Action and thrillers, where red signals energy, speed, urgency and conflict. It works well alongside black and white or within the blue-and-orange blockbuster palette.

• Romance and drama, where red means passion, desire and emotional intensity, but can also hint at jealousy, turmoil and loss.

• Comedy, where bold red typography on a white background has become a genre shorthand for high-energy fun.

• Science fiction sometimes borrows from action and thriller conventions, using red as a flare of danger or a warning light within cooler palettes.

As you can see - red has many uses and meanings. The chart below shows the genres’ use of red and you’ll notice that there is very little variation between genres. This means that just using red is not enough to significant a clear genre.

This contrasts with more polarising colours such as blue, purple and pink which convey more meaning.

White – A cinematic clean slate

White is the most flexible colour in the designer’s kit. It can be warm and hopeful or cold and isolating, depending on what sits around it. It creates space, strips away distractions and puts the subject front and centre.

The most common types of films to rely on a white-heavy palette are:

• Romantic comedies, especially those built around relationship dynamics. White backgrounds with bold red type and large character cut-outs are a visual shorthand for freshness, warmth and accessibility.

• Horror, where white is flipped from safe to unsettling. Sterile backgrounds recall morgues, hospitals and isolation, making any splash of red or disturbing object more shocking.

• Science fiction, which uses white to suggest minimalism, technological precision and futuristic worlds. It can be utopian or menacing, signalling both advanced design and the void of space.

• Action, where white often appears in typography or as a high-contrast element against black, orange or yellow for maximum clarity and punch.

Blue - Calm, collected and occasional

Blue earns its place when the story world demands it. Seas, skies, ice and neon tech all push it to the front. Animation and family films use it as the go-to backdrop for big skies and open water. Sci-fi and adventure thrillers lean on it for space, steel and the cool glow of screens. Crime, horror and mystery bring it in for night scenes, cold light and the suggestion of surveillance.

It’s largely absent among period, war and western movies where earth tones dominate.

When blue is used heavily, it’s usually because the whole environment is blue, such as an ocean crossing, an arctic wasteland, a story set under neon skies.

In design terms, blue with cyan keeps things modern and clean. Blue with white feels airy and bright. Blue with black signals night and unease. Add orange when you need faces, fire or typography to punch out. Pink and purple work as playful accents in musicals or animation.

Brown - Grit, ground, and grain

Brown is frequently used when a poster wants to feel rooted – in history, in labour, in the land itself. War and westerns lean on it for mud, leather, smoke and endurance. Historical dramas use it to strip away gloss, replacing polish with patina.

In horror and folk-thriller territory, brown turns cold and airless. It signals decay, rot, a world where life has drained away and the earth itself is hostile. Dystopian and post-apocalyptic films take it further, with brown as ash, ruin and the last scraps of a dead world.

Fantasy and quest adventures use warmer browns alongside green to ground their worlds in something tactile. In the right shade it’s homely and human, in the wrong one it’s the colour of despair.

Green - Home or hell

Green sits low in the averages but swings wildly depending on context. And when a poster goes green, it usually goes REALLY green.

You see green dominating in lush, nature-driven animation, family and adventure films, where fields, forests and canopies wrap the whole frame. Also among pastoral comedies, romances and dramas, where leafy colours read as wholesome, calm or human.

At the other end of the spectrum, neon, toxic and night-vision greens define pockets of horror, sci-fi and thrillers (think slime, radiation, code, alien glow), and often paired with black or cyan for maximum unease.

Creature features and swampy survival stories lean into murky greens for jungle menace, while in crime and mystery it turns olive or desaturated, signalling moral rot or sickness.

Historical, war and biography films rarely go heavy green unless landscapes, uniforms or documentary realism demand it.

Purple - A rebel with a hue

Purple is the iconoclast of poster colour. It rarely leads a palette, but when it does it signals something outside the mainstream.

In animation and musicals it leans whimsical or magical. In fantasy it can feel regal or mystical. Crime, sci fi and neo noir use it for sleaze, danger or otherworldliness.

Its scarcity makes it stand out, so a purple heavy poster often reads as a deliberate statement that the film sits apart from genre convention.

Pink - Showing up to make a statement

We’ll end of the loudest and most confident of the colours - pink.

Pink is one of the most loaded and shape shifting colours in poster design. More than any other hue, its impact comes from the cultural baggage it brings into the frame.

• In romance and romantic comedies, pink works as shorthand for affection, optimism and warmth. Soft blushes and pastels promise lightness and happy endings.

• In teen films and high energy comedies, hot pinks and bubblegum shades flag youth, friendship, hyper femininity and social drama.

• Certain period pieces and auteur films such as Marie Antoinette or The Grand Budapest Hotel use muted rose tones to add nostalgia, whimsy and ironic prettiness.

Pink can also be wielded as contrary message, such as being used in genres where it is not expected:

• In horror and thrillers it becomes unsettling, using sweetness to create unease.

• In crime dramas and neo noirs, a single pink element can destabilise expectations such as the cursive title on Drive suggesting tenderness inside a violent story.

• Action and sci fi sometimes adopt neon pinks to tap into 1980s tech noir aesthetics or to build stylish tonal blends such as Baby Driver.

Pink also comes in a number of subtle-but-important variations. Pastels soothe but can signal naivety. Hot pinks are energetic and assertive but can feel shallow or abrasive. The Millennial Pink wave brought dusty, gender neutral sophistication, often tied to indie or art house positioning. In rare cases such as Barbie, pink becomes the brand, saturating the campaign so completely that it is the entire message.

Notes

Todays research looks at the colour and contrast values of the main poster for 58,687 feature films released over the past century. This is a bit of a simplification as movies typically have many posters, not least in different regions. In this case I will have got the most widely cited one, such as displayed on the Wikipedia page.

When referring to ‘sub-genres’ I mean the pairing of two major genres, such as ‘Action Comedy’ or Family Drama’. If a film was an Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi then it would appear in the following sub-genres:

• Action Comedy

• Comedy Sci-fi

• Action Sci-fi

The order doesn’t matter, with ‘Horror Comedy’ being the same as ‘Comedy Horror’ given that I had no way to weight the two elements. (For more on which genres dominate in sub-genre pairing you might enjoy my research article entitled Which genres dominates when movies blend styles?).

In discussing variation within a colour, I used coefficient of variation which calculated as the standard deviation divided by the mean. In other words, it’s a way of showing whether the data is tightly clustered or widely spread, regardless of the overall scale.

And, yes, I know that black is a colour. I just don’t think it fits with the colour analysis I had above. But to appease your noir nerds, here’s a dark montage for you.

In some cases it’s because the filmmakers have an agenda they wish to advance, but for the most part it’s because moral storytelling is what audiences respond to.

Producer Ted Hope calls movies “design for living”, in that they are structured to test values, model choices, and let us rehearse what it means to be good, brave, honest, or kind.

That doesn’t mean they’re all preachy. Producer Samuel Goldwyn famously said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” But even the films that avoid direct statements usually land on some version of right and wrong.

I wanted to see what were the most common messages in modern movies so I analysed the plots and coverage of almost 6,000 movies released in the past decade.

High horses on the big screen

Some moral messages are easy to spot. For example, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes centres on power, consequences, and deception. Others are more ambiguous. Is Barbie a story about being true to yourself, or about rejecting rigid moral categories altogether?

It’s also true that while actual films themselves are static works of art, our appreciation and understanding of them are not. The same film may convey a different meaning to modern audiences than it did at the time. This can happen due to:

• Changes in society, such as shifting attitudes toward authority, gender roles, or mental health meaning that Dead Poets Society, Fight Club, or As Good as It Gets now land very differently than they did on release.

• Us as viewers changing, such as growing up enough to realise that Robin Williams played the villain in Mrs Doubtfire, not the hero #PierceBrosnanDidNothingWrong.

In early cinema, moral lessons were often explicit. Silent films and early talkies leaned heavily on themes like temperance, chastity, and justice, partly because narratives were simpler, but also to avoid backlash to the new medium.

The 1930s Hays Code formalised this, requiring that virtue be rewarded, crime punished, and authority respected. But by the 1960s and 70s, those rules collapsed. Filmmakers began to embrace ambiguity, letting stories explore doubt, corruption, and moral failure without clear resolution.

I chose to study the data behind last ten years of movies, as I am most interested in what we’re seeing our screens today.

Which morals show up most?

Out of all 5,931 films I studied, the most common moral message was courage in the face of fear or injustice. It appeared in 40.6% of titles. That includes everything from war epics to school bullying dramas to stories of quiet resistance inside broken systems.

Next came teamwork and community, followed closely by perseverance and resilience. These three formed a consistent top tier across almost every year in the sample.

Let’s take a brief look at the most frequently seen moral lessons.

Don’t be scared, go to the movies

The most common message overall was telling tales of people doing the right thing, standing up to bullies / corruption / prejudice, and overall finding the courage within themselves to do what they know needs to be done.

Physical movies are the most likely to feature this moral lesson, such as war films (74.3%), adventure (66.3%), and action (64.6%). These genres show people being rewarded for risk, sacrifice, and moral clarity. The threats are often physical, but the films frame them as tests of character.

1917 and Dunkirk frame survival as secondary to duty, The Woman King blends physical courage with political defiance, and all the many Batmen has taught us that courage is open to anyone (well, any buff billionaire with a backstory).

Teamwork makes the dream work

The second most common moral lessons were that of working together, supporting one another, and pooling strengths achieves more than going it alone.

It was most common in animated movies, featuring in three-quarters of the animations I studied. A good example is Disney’s Encanto, centres on a family whose powers only work when they stay emotionally connected.

It’s also common in adventure, family, and sports stories, where ensemble casts are central and collaboration is built into the plot. These films tend to end with group resolution, such as a restored family, a team victory, a community uplifted.

It’s far less present among the genres which deal with the dirtier sides of life, such as crime (26.7%), thrillers (24%), and romances, at just 20.9%.

Don’t give up (unless in a horror movie)

Almost 37.7% of all films are encouraging you to have perseverance and/or resilience.

The shape it takes can significantly alter between genres, For example:

• In sports dramas like King Richard or Creed III, perseverance is physical and repetitive and the effort becomes spectacle (i.e. training montages, injury recoveries, comeback arcs, etc).

• Whereas, in biopics like Lion or The Theory of Everything, it’s psychological. The characters push through memory, illness, or trauma.

• It changes again in sci-fi or survival films, where it becomes technical, such as The Martian (although given this, Interstellar and Saving Private Ryan, one could argue is that the moral messages is ‘Matt Damon is always going to need rescuing, but he seems nice, so let’s try’).

• In family and animated films, perseverance usually pairs with identity. Moana, Turning Red, and Soul all show protagonists learning to keep going without knowing where they’ll end up.

What these versions have in common is that often the character(s) can’t avoid the hardship but can decide what to do next.

It’s interesting that message is least present in horror and crime films - almost like those two genres are encouraging you to just give up.

Honesty is rising. Acceptance is fading.

The moral lessons I’ve covered so far have been fairly omni-present over the decade of films I studied. However, there are morals which are on the rise, and others on the wane.

Acceptance and inclusivity (i.e. don’t judge by looks, status, or stereotypes; differences are strengths, etc) has declined significantly. It’s hard to say to what degree this is related to criticisms over woke ideas and themes (I researched an adjacent topic a few months ago, in the article entitled Can we measure if movies have become "too woke"?).

By contrast, honesty and integrity has risen (well, stories of honesty and integrity - I don’t think anyone would claim it has risen in the wider world!)

Films that once emphasised identity and inclusion now lean more on personal ethics and individual truth. Barbie contains both but frames integrity as the harder choice. The Holdovers makes decency its quiet centre. Even large-scale stories like Oppenheimer or The Batman reward characters for owning their failures.

The trend may also reflect broader fatigue. After years of industry-led messaging around representation, audiences may be more responsive to internal moral choices than to external validation.

Most moral films aren’t dramas

One last thing I spotted which I thought was interesting. The films which most frequently cover moral lessons to do with honesty, integrity, empathy and kindness are not dramas - they are the ‘lighter’ fare of family films and musicals. They both push characters to tell the truth, and reward them for doing so.

Musicals sit at the top right of the chart above, topping both axes. Their structure leaves space for emotional resolution. For example, The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen, and In the Heights all demand character growth and then make the final number hinge on it.

Family films often pair personal honesty with emotional repair. Paddington 2, Luca, and Turning Red each centre on characters learning to say hard things with compassion. These morals are rarely subtle, but they land.

At the other end, horror and thriller rank lowest on both empathy and honesty. That’s not surprising. These genres rely on fear, mistrust, and emotional isolation. The stories may still have internal logic, but the moral framing is darker or more ambiguous.

Notes

For today’s research I studied 5,931 narrative feature films released between January 2016 and June 2025. Only fictional, narrative-driven feature films were included. Movies could have more than one moral lesson, with the average movie in my dataset having 3.9. Messages had to be central to the outcome, not incidental to tone or dialogue. The genre classifications were from IMDb.

It is worth stating upfront that this is a topic that has a high degree of subjectivity. I tried to be objective and use a defined criterion but it’s not as simple as just counting numbers. The aim was to identify the presence of clear moral messages expressed through plot resolution, character development, or thematic emphasis.

I tried to apply my criteria objectively and evenly, meaning that the results should be familiar to any movie fan. If you think I left out a common moral lesson you see in movies, please do add it in the comments and I’ll go back and study it.

Finally, movies don’t HAVE to have a moral message. In my opinion, The Wolf of Wall Street is fascinatingly devoid of any moral lessons or growth, despite its length and breadth. Quite the cinematic achievement.

Specifically, that the names of actors across the top rarely sit over the heads beneath. Once you start looking, you cannot unsee it. Even two-handers manage it.

I saw it again recently and wanted to find out just how common it is.

So I gathered posters for over 4,000 movies released in US theatres since 2000 and got to work. I focused on the ones which had both names of actors prominently displayed and closeups of the actors' faces. (There’s more details on my criteria and methodology in the Notes section at the end of the article).

What’s going on with names on posters?

At face value (pun intended) it doesn’t seem hard. The studio will be working on a movie poster for months, with a large number of marketing and movie experts poring over every detail. So how do they end up with getting the most basic thing wrong, such as matching famous names to famous faces?

To be fair, sometimes it’s done for comic effect. The movie Twins has one-sheets with one of their actors standing below the name of the other. This was clearly playing on the premise of the movie. Another movie along those lines was the body-swap movie Freaky Friday, which could also claim some narrative reason for the incorrect attribution.

But those are rare, fun, fringe cases. In most situations there is no link to the movie’s plot and therefore seemingly no excuse.

How common is it?

After going through over 4,000 posters, I can confirm that it happens about half the time. So close to half the time, in fact. 50.8% of the posters where there were both names and faces, placed them in a different order.

“Genre' movies” were the most likely to get the billing correct (70% of horror movies, and 69% of sci-fi), whereas musicals were the worst offenders (only 36% were correct).

This has been a fairly consistent trend over time, albeit with a bit of change in the last couple of years. Rather than this signifying a big shift, this is due to the style of poster falling out of fashion and therefore a smaller number of fringe cases skewing the data.

Why on earth is this happening?!

Given how commonly it happens, you won’t be surprised to hear that there a few key reasons behind it:

1. The order of names in text is contractual. Getting your named first (or at the very least ahead of that upstart co-star we’re worried will steal the limelight) is a top goal for any agent worth their salt. Contracts define the presence, size and location of a top actor’s billing on all marketing, especially the poster.

2. Marketers lead the design process. Unlike text, the placement of the photos are more about what will sell the movie best. They will want to create something that will grab people’s attention, quickly convey the plot / characters, and make people eager to see the movie.

3. The best billing in text is the left, but in the middle for images. The most bankable face is likely to be placed big and central, with the rest arranged on either side.

These few factors are enough to cause half of all posters to get the name / image match up “wrong”.

What happens when two actors demand top billing?

The billing will be a key part of the early contractual negotiations and offer, so in most cases it’s hashed out way before poster design starts. However, in a few notable cases producers have found themselves in a pickle with promises they’d made.

The Towering Inferno’s billing disagreement was settled by a slightly diagonal placement to the two lead stars’ images. It’s present on all the variations of the movie’s posters I could find (see below). Apparently this was enough to convince both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman that the other didn’t have better billing than them.

When securing Bette Midler and Shelley Long for the 1987 comedy Outrageous Fortune, the studio promised both actors top billing. In the end this was solved by splitting the US in two, with Midler getting top billing east of the Mississippi river, and Long to the west.

And finally, a quick shout out to the posters for Legend and Gemini Man which may or may not have got it right - I couldn’t tell.

Notes

I looked at all movies which grossed at least $1 at the US box office since 2000 for which Wikipedia had a poster image. I focused on posters that:

1. Display recognisable faces; and

2. List cast names in text (outside of the credit block).

I excluded those which placed faces (or names) vertically on top of each other as I want to look at the most obvious examples of “Are those names in the right order?!” question.

Epilogue

I often get asked if I use AI in my research. The answer is yes, a lot, but not in the way you might think. Today’s piece is a good case in point.

I did initially try to build a workflow which used a mix of image processing, OCR and AI to detect faces, recognise people from celebrity libraries, read the names and consider the two sets of name orders. But it fell at so many hurdles that it wasn’t viable for the time and resources I have to apply when looking to publish two new research articles each week.

But what AI was very useful for was writing the python code to make a lightweight tool which took in a list of posters and showed them to me one at a time. A quick key press logged how I categorised each image, meaning it took only a few seconds to either disregard or tag each poster.

So AI didn’t do the research nor write the article, but it was essential in this research being feasible. Interesting times we live in.

First, the topic. A reader forwarded me a recent article by Ben Child in The Guardian entitled “There are no new superhero movies for the next six months – is Hollywood up to something?“ The article claims for the first time in over a decade, audiences face a six-month stretch without a single caped hero or comic book universe taking over the multiplex. The reader asked me if this was true.

Secondly, I have been speaking to a company called Talarian who have a plugin called GPT for Work. Their tool allows you to access all manner of AI model direct from Excel and Word. In return for free research credits I agreed to conduct a piece of research only using their tool and Excel, without any existing datasets. I'll publish a tutorial video showing how I did it in the next few days.

Are superhero movies dying?

I started by building up a dataset of the top 50 highest-grossing films for each year going back half a century. I also gathered a list of every film scheduled for theatrical release over the remainder of 2025. These were the only inputs with all the rest of the work being conducted in Excel.

I tracked how many fit the definition of a superhero film. In the 1970s and 1980s, superhero titles turned up only occasionally, with spikes linked to releases like Superman or Batman. Even into the late 1990s, the percentage rarely climbed above 15 or 16 percent.

Things began to shift in the early 2000s, with titles like Spider-Man and X-Men leading the charge. By the late 2000s, this share rose again, driven by the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The real boom arrived in the 2010s, with superhero movies sometimes taking up 40% of the market’s top earners.

We can also see that for the first seven months of 2025, there has been a below average superhero prevalence (second worst year since 2007).

Am I a superhero?

While charting this rise, I ran into an immediate question: what actually counts as a superhero movie?

Genre boundaries are more flexible than they appear on the surface. A good test case for me was Kill Bill, where Uma Thurman’s The Bride character has extraordinary abilities and a signature look, but she doesn't quite fit the classic “costumed hero” mould.

To help focus the research, I set three criteria:

1. A superhero must have either superhuman powers or access to clearly science-fiction-level technology (so peak human skill alone is not enough).

2. The character needs a coded or costumed identity linked to heroism or vigilante justice, not just a nickname or job description.

3. Lastly, the story should clearly take place in a heightened world with other powered beings, secret organisations, or threats that push beyond everyday reality.

Applying this set of rules ruled out some famous edge cases but caught others that don’t usually get grouped under the superhero label.

So are we facing a superhero drought?

Turning to the 172 movies expected to be theatrically released between August and December 2025, we can see that the last majority are not superhero movies. But a few stick out.

There are a number of movies that really test the above criteria:

1. Avatar: Fire and Ash. Jake and Neytiri lead their grieving family into conflict with a hostile Na’vi tribe, with superhuman abilities and advanced tech on display, but no clear superhero identity. So I’m going to say no.

2. Mortal Kombat II pits Earth’s fighters against Shao Kahn in an interdimensional martial arts tournament. Several characters have powers and distinct personas, though it blurs action and superhero codes. This one I think is superhero-adjacent but if I had to pick, I’d say they couldn’t Finish it.

3. Predator: Badlands tells the heart-warming tale of a young Predator outcast who teams up with an android to battle across an alien wasteland. The Predator is not a hero in the sense of fighting for justice or public good, and there’s also a lack of the coded alter ego central to superhero storytelling. This is more sci-fi quest and action adventure than superhero cinema.

4. Wicked: For Good is the second half of the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical, Wicked. Both Elphaba and Glinda have magical powers, coded identities and operate in a heightened, conflict-filled setting. The story centres on choices, reputation, and standing up to corrupt authority. In short, this is firmly in the territory of many superhero narratives. The only thing keeping Wicked from being called a superhero film is tradition. It happens to be a musical, focuses on friendship, and stars women in the key roles. There is no story logic barring musicals from the genre, or women from leading. If we are strict about powers, persona, and a world of consequence, Wicked fits just as well as any comic book property. Whether it gets the superhero label says more about our cultural habits than the content itself (and maybe a dash of sexism?).

5. The Toxic Avenger has a janitor transformed by toxic waste becomes a grotesque vigilante, fighting villains as a costumed antihero. It was first screened at Fantastic Fest in 2023 but it’s official US release is late August 2025. While a little less polished or conventional as the standard Marvel superhero movie, this is solidly a superhero movie.

Sooo… at the most conservative accounting we have one superhero movie for the second half of 2025, but personally I would include Wicked and Mortal Kombat.

Ben Child’s article got it right. For the first time in years, the big screen will spend six months without a single Marvel or DC superhero release. Only a handful of borderline cases prevent this from being true in the strictest sense, and none are the tentpole events audiences have come to expect.

His wider point stands, in that the superhero assembly line has slowed, studios are scaling back, and a long-overdue reset is underway. For now, the capes really are out of sight.

Why have all the heroes left us?

• Production halts from the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes pushed many Marvel and DC titles out of the year. Blade was pulled from the schedule, Thunderbolts barely started filming before the stoppage, and The Batman Part II was bumped to 2027.

• Studios are making fewer superhero films on purpose. Marvel is moving from three or four movies a year to a leaner two or three, with leadership focused on quality over volume after several costly misfires.

• DC is in full reboot mode, launching a new universe under new management. Only Superman was ready for 2025, with the rest still in early development.

• Sony has paused its Spider-Man spin-offs following weak box office and negative reviews, and their next big projects are not yet ready.

• Audiences are now pickier, and middling superhero releases are no longer automatic hits. Studios want to space out films, not overload the audience after a decade of near-constant capes on screens.

• The titles that do remain are being saved for later years. Studios are choosing to leave the back half of 2025 almost empty while preparing bigger launches in 2026 and beyond. That includes

  • Avengers: Doomsday

  • Avengers: Secret Wars

  • Clayface

  • Masters of the Universe

  • Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse

  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day

  • Supergirl

  • The Batman Part II

Notes

Today’s raw data came from IMDb, and First Showing.

I gathered the list of movies from the websites but then did everything else in Excel. This was a fun challenge which the makers of GPT For Work set me. I am going to record a video tutorial to show the whole process shortly. They gave me research credits but didn’t affect the content of the piece.

GPT For Work is a set of AI add-ins for Microsoft Excel, Word, Google Sheets, and Docs.

It integrates models like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity/Sonar, and Gemini to automate data research, content creation, translation, summarisation, sentiment analysis, and more directly within spreadsheets and documents.

It enables bulk web searches inside a sheet, batch processing of queries, and automated generation or rephrasing of text, making tasks like market research or cleaning large datasets significantly faster and more efficient.

Even with the criteria I detailed above, we’re still left with a few edge cases on superhero identification. It created three rough groups:

1. Definitely superhero – Characters like Iron Man, Robocop, Hellboy, and Deadpool all pass with ease. They have powers or advanced tech, a costumed identity, and operate in worlds full of larger-than-life threats.

2. Not superhero – Others clearly fall short. The Bride from Kill Bill, John Wick, and Sherlock Holmes in most versions don’t have powers or a superhero persona, even if they’re distinctive, skilled, or fighting evil.

3. Questionable – Then there are the edge cases. Elsa from Frozen has powers but no costumed identity or vigilante arc. V from V for Vendetta and Catwoman in some versions come close, depending on how you interpret their world and intent. Neo from The Matrix has powers and the right kind of world but no alternate persona. Also, it could be argued that Neo wasn’t a superhero in the first Matrix movie but become one in the later sequels.

The vast majority fell into groups 1 and 2.

And just for completeness, here are few movie contenders from 2025 which I considered but rejected:

1. Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is an animated feature due for release this September in Japan, featuring a devil-human hybrid hero known as Chainsaw Man. It passes all the tests (i.e. Superhuman powers, a costumed alter ego, and a narrative built around larger-than-life powered conflict), but although it might come out in the US in 2025 but is very unlikely to set the box office alight.

2. Ne Zha 2 is a Chinese animation about a reborn boy-hero joins dragons and gods in mythic battles; transformation, powers, and coded identity place this firmly in international superhero territory but I have the same scepticism of its US box office potential.

3. I don’t think re-releases should count, thereby relieving us of having to work out if ParaNorman (2012) or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) feature superheroes.

That specific date was announced in June 2023, a whopping 3,109 days in advance of release.

The fact that Avatar 5 was going to be made was announced in December 2009, just a week ahead of the first Avatar hitting the big screen - over 8,000 days before the current expected release.

Announcing movie release dates is nothing new but this feels like a more extreme case. But is it?

I built a database of 11,560 announcements for the US theatrical release dates for movies over the past 15 years to learn more.

What are they announcing?

Let's start by understanding what a release date announcement can look like. My full dataset includes three types:

• Just year. This is the vaguest of announcements, often reported by trade papers based on a comment or remark made during an interview with someone close to the production.

• Month and year. Other announcements come with an estimated month as well as a year. In reality, this isn't giving a whole lot more information away, as movies are typically released in fairly well-defined slots within the year. (More on release patterns here and here).

• Exact date. This is the studio or distributor announcing the specific date their movie will open domestically.

Nearly four out of five release date announcements are in the form of an exact date.

For the rest of this article, I'm going to focus on the 79% of announcements which specify a particular day in the calendar.

How far in advance are release dates announced?

Almost a quarter of films announce their exact US release date to the public less than a month before opening. These tend to be smaller releases or titles with limited marketing spends, where there is little benefit to a long build-up. For these films, most ticket sales happen in the final few days anyway.

At the other end of the spectrum, 15.1% of release dates are announced more than a year ahead. 1.2% are announced more than three years in advance. These are nearly always studio event movies or franchise instalments. In between, the majority of dates are made public between one and twelve months ahead of release.

The effects of the pandemic on movie release dates

The Covid-19 pandemic hit the film industry hard, with cinemas closed, productions paused, and almost every big movie moved. Top Gun: Maverick was delayed six times, and No Time to Die shifted by 18 months.

We can see this is release data. In 2021, the average delay between first announced date and actual release jumped to over 500 days. Studios kept making new announcements, only to shift dates again as the pandemic dragged on.

But now that we’re a few years beyond the pandemic, the release data pattern has neatly returned to what it was during the 2010s.

How it differs by genre

So far, I have been treating all movies equally, however, there is a huge difference between a big budget studio tentpole and a small indie flick with a limited release. If we subdivide the advance notice data by genre, we can see some very clear patterns.

Adventure movies and Animations have the longest lead time - an average of 651 days and 638 days respectively. This is due to a mix of factors, include the size of the budgets requiring the claiming of a prime release spot and the long lead times to make such movies.

The genres with the shortest time between the announcement of a specific release date and said date were westers, war films and documentaries. These types of movies typically don't have big budgets, a large marketing spend or an existing support base, thereby reducing the utility of an early announcement.

Sequels are announced earlier

One other factor to bear in mind is how anticipated the new movie is. The easiest way of seeing this is with the announcement of release dates for sequels. Sequels are only created because the first movie was a financial success, meaning that it's fair to assume that sequels, on average, command more public interest than non-sequels.

This is reflected in how early release dates are announced. In all genres (which had enough sequels to made the results meaningful), they are announced earlier than non-sequels, on average. In the case of comedies, it's more than twice as early, with non-sequels being announced an average of 307 days before release whereas it's 622 days for sequels.

Are early dates often correct?

Given how far in advance some movies are confirming their exact release date, you may wonder how many of these dates turn out to be correct. If so, good news - I checked!

Unsurprisingly, the nearer the release date, the more accurate the information ends up being. Dates announced within a month are correct 97% of the time, compared with just 45% of the time with dates announced a year out.

Less intuitive is the flattening of the curve once we get past one year. This is a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of movies with such early announcements come from major studios. This is because:

• Studios have the infrastructure to plan this far ahead;

• They have the clout and money to scare off rivals who were previously eyeing up the same date; and

• They actually have a very small number of possible dates to pick from. In the case of Avatar 5, they are claiming the pre-Christmas slot which big budget movie franchises covet (i.e. Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Star Wars, etc) and so there were only maybe one or two other dates within that year that they could have selected.

Are they over- or under-estimating dates?

Finally, when movie release dates change, which direction do they tend to move in - sooner, or later?

In three-quarters of cases, when revised release dates are announced they are later than the previous date.

Further reading

I have studied the topic of release dates a few times before, and so you may enjoy the following articles:

• Does Hollywood use the same movie release pattern every year?

• Are January and February Hollywood ‘dump months’?

• How far in advance are film trailers released?

• Three major ways movie release patterns are changing

• How long between UK and US movie release dates?

• How long does the average Hollywood movie take to make?

Notes

The data for today's piece came from IMDb, Movie Insider, Wikipedia and The Numbers / OpusData.

Avatar: Way of the WTF

I thought I’d spare you this list in the main article but it’s useful to have down here to illustrate how (and by how much) movie release dates change. Here are some of the public release dates each of the Avatar movies have had over the past 15 years:

Avatar 2

1. Oct 27, 2010 – December 2014

2. Late 2013 – December 2016

3. Jan 14, 2015 – December 2017

4. Apr 14, 2016 – Christmas 2018

5. Apr 22, 2017 – December 18, 2020

6. May 7, 2019 – December 17, 2021

7. Jul 23, 2020 – December 16, 2022

8. Released – December 16, 2022

Avatar 3

1. Late 2013 – December 2017

2. Jan 14, 2015 – 2018

3. Apr 14, 2016 – 2020

4. Apr 22, 2017 – December 17, 2021

5. May 7, 2019 – December 22, 2023

6. Jul 23, 2020 – December 20, 2024

7. Jun 13, 2023 – December 19, 2025

Avatar 4

1. Late 2013 – December 2018

2. Apr 14, 2016 – 2022

3. Apr 22, 2017 – December 20, 2024

4. May 7, 2019 – December 19, 2025

5. Jul 23, 2020 – December 18, 2026

6. Jun 13, 2023 – December 21, 2029

Avatar 5

1. Apr 14, 2016 – 2023

2. Apr 22, 2017 – December 19, 2025

3. May 7, 2019 – December 17, 2027

4. Jul 23, 2020 – December 22, 2028

5. Jun 13, 2023 – December 19, 2031

Now, I know what you’re thinking - How can they possibly justify that title, given that:

• Of the nine featured dinosaurs, six were from the Cretaceous period (Aquilops, Mosasaurus, Quetzalcoatlus, Spinosaurus, Velociraptor, Titanosaurus, and the trusty T-Rex), two were fictional (Distortus Rex, and Mutadon) leaving just one that was actually “Jurassic” (Dilophosaurus).

• It didn’t take place in a “Park”.

• Nothing was “Rebirthed”.

While this may be true, I was annoyed long before the movie actually started.

Among the trailers which played before the movie, three stuck out. Each one felt like it went on forever, packing in nearly every action beat, joke, and spoiler they could.

After about 30 seconds, I was convinced I’d see the films… and then they kept going. One trailer even managed to actively put me off due to explaining too much of the plot.

This got me thinking - have movie trailers always been this long, or am I just becoming a grumpy old man?

Let’s turn to the data to find out.

How long are movie trailers?

I tracked down 6,926 movie trailers from over 4,000 top-grossing films between 1930 and 2025.

Across all movies, the average trailer was 122.8 seconds, a hair over two minutes long.

War films, biographies and historical films have the longest trailers, with Documentaries, family films and westerns keeping it shorter.

A short history of long trailers

What we now call a movie trailer started in 1913 as a bit of promotional footage for a Broadway show. By 1914, film exhibitors were copying the format for cinema, but they screened these shorts after the feature (hence the name, as they trailed the movie), which quickly proved a mistake as audiences headed for the exits.

When the National Screen Service took control in the 1930s, trailers got a makeover. Their template: overblown taglines, stentorian narration, cast roll calls, and visuals designed to impress.

Gone with the Wind in 1939 ran nearly three minutes and promised “the most memorable event in the annals of the motion pictures.” Frankenstein in 1931 ran 1 minute and 40 seconds.

The late 50s and 60s saw directors get hold of the format. Hitchcock’s Psycho trailer is famous for running more than six minutes, despite featuring absolutely no footage from the movie!

Kubrick’s campaign for Dr. Strangelove cut together rapid-fire stills with no voiceover, steering away from plot recaps and towards spectacle or mood.

Blockbusters in the 1970s put trailers front and centre. The Jaws trailer from 1975 ran for 3 minutes 21 seconds and pretty much reveals everything about the movie.

So it seems that long trailers are not a wholly new invention.

But are they happening more often?

Have movie trailers got longer?

I charted the three-year rolling average for trailer length from 1940 to 2025. For much of the mid-twentieth century, the average was well above two minutes, often edging toward two and a half minutes.

That trend reached its highest point during the late 1960s and early 1970s. At this time, event films and roadshow releases routinely used trailers that topped 140 or even 150 seconds.

Starting in the early 1980s trailer lengths fell quickly. The late 1980s saw the shortest averages in the dataset, sometimes under 100 seconds.

Through the 1990s, trailer length crept back up but did not return to the heights of earlier decades. The blockbuster cycle of the 2000s and 2010s added more seconds, but even now the average remains below previous peaks.

Since 2010, trailer lengths have stabilised, with most years sitting just above two minutes.

So the answer to the core question - “Have movie trailers always been this long, or am I just becoming a grumpy old man?” I’m afraid to say that it’s the latter.

Long in the tooth

And it seems that my grumpiness is also not new. Folk have been complaining about overly-long trailers for almost as long as trailers have been around.

Many online articles cite an MPAA rule that movie trailers cannot run longer than two minutes 30 seconds, but I have struggled to find an official source for this. The only time limitation I can see in their official rules relates to the five seconds the pre-tailer card has to be on-screen.

In 2014, the National Association of Theatre Owners (recently rebranded as Cinema United) responded to audience complaints by pushing for a stricter two-minute limit for trailers shown in cinemas. Their argument was that shorter trailers would improve the moviegoing experience and allow for more screenings per day. Studios pushed back, claiming that two minutes was too short to set up story and spectacle.

Both the MPAA and Cinema United guidelines are voluntary, without real penalties. This is reflected in the data, in that many trailers exceed this limit but also that the 2014 decree did seem to have a very slight dampening effect.

So there we have it - trailer length today is not at some historic high. In fact, trailers used to be even longer for most of the twentieth century.

The drop in length during the 1980s and early 1990s, and the slight dip after the NATO guidelines, mean the average trailer is shorter than it was during the eras of Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, or Jaws. Bah humbug.

Notes

Today’s research is based on the running time of 6,926 movie trailers, covering 4,004 of the top-grossing films for each year from 1930 to 2025. I sought trailers of the 50 highest grossing films of each year (the 2025 crop are the 50 highest grossing so far, as of mid-July 2025) using a variety of sources including YouTube, IMDb, Wikipedia, The Numbers, Movie Insider, and Letterboxd.

I excluded TV promos, sizzle reels, and extended clips. Some trailers in the dataset were made for digital release, whereas the rules I mention are all aimed at theatrical trailers.

Further reading

If you enjoyed this exploration of movie trailers then you may enjoy a research I conducted a few years ago entitled How far in advance are film trailers released?

It may be time for me to revisit this research, though, as one of the trailers I witnessed over the weekend was for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey which comes out in over a year.

Unlike that article, there are no spoilers in today’s piece. (I figured that ruining 59 movies in the previous piece was quite enough for now).

I’m going to answer two of the best questions I received, namely:

1. What types of movies are most likely to feature a plot twist?

2. Does the presence of a twist improve a movie?

As a reminder, I went through the plots of 26,710 movies, identifying the 984 which contain a major plot twist.

1. What types of movies are most likely to feature a plot twist?

Some genres are far more likely than others to pull the rug out from under the audience.

Thrillers are the most twist-happy, with almost one in seven containing a major narrative reversal. Horror, Mystery and Sci-Fi follow close behind. These are all genres where uncertainty and surprise are part of the appeal, so it’s not a huge shock to see them leading the charge.

At the other end of the scale we have Biography, Sport and War - all genres which are likely to be telling true-life tales that the audience will already have some awareness of. Consequently, these are less likely to lie to the audience and more likely to play things straight.

2. Does the presence of a twist improve a movie?

To explore the link between twists and quality, I looked at all 26,710 movies and compared the average IMDb score for those with a major plot twist to those without. It’s not a perfect measure, but with this many titles, it gives us a useful baseline.

Across the full dataset, the average score was 6.26. Films with a twist averaged 6.13 and those with no twists were marginally better rated at 6.27.

But this hides the detail which matters - genre.

Among those which saw the most uplift from adding a twist were Music, Fantasy, Animations and Sci-Fi. Those which didn’t like the surprise were Sport, War, Family and Drama.

Notes

Today’s research was based around movie plots as described on Wikipedia and IMDb (if Wikipedia was too short).

We should remember that correlation is not causation, and in some cases we’re talking about a handful of movies (across the entire dataset, only 3.7% of films had twists). A twist doesn’t automatically make a film better or worse, it’s how it’s carried out that matters. The data today shows the link, but can’t explain why.

I really must impress upon you just how much this article will ruin a bunch of movies for you.

Seriously.

This article reveals the endings of 59 excellently crafted movies.

I can’t even give you a trigger warning as to which ones as to do so spoils that they have a twist.

So unless you are one of those weird people whose curiosity and love for data is somehow more important to them than respecting the hard work of filmmakers and their own chance of narrative fulfilment, close the tab and walk away.

.

.

Still here?

Good. Me too.

I love a movie with a twist

A well-executed twist becomes part of a movie’s identity.

But how often do they actually occur?

To find out, I analysed the plots of 26,710 movies, identifying 984 that contain a major plot twist.

What is a twist, anyway?

What counts as a true plot twist is never going to be something everyone agrees on.

In conducting this research I got ever-deeper down the rabbit warren of twists. Here’s what I learned:

• Some twists are obvious and without much debate. Psycho is defined by its material reveal, Planet of the Apes has its Statue of Liberty and The Others holds back its spooky truth until the final beat.

• Some twists completely change how a movie works, making the first re-watch a wholly new viewing experience. I’d put The Usual Suspects in that category, along with The Prestige, Oldboy, Shutter Island, and Primal Fear.

• There are controversial twists. The end of The Thing leaves us with uncertainty, not a revelation, and in The Haunting they never fully confirm or deny what we want to know (one might include Inception in here too).

• Some films use a perspective shift, letting us see the story through a new lens only late in the game. The ending doesn’t upend the entire plot, but it nudges us to re-examine everything, as in Atonement or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

• Metatextual reveals flip the relationship between film and viewer. Sometimes the movie stops the show or pulls back the curtain, reminding us that this world is a construction and making us question what’s real and what’s artifice such as Adaptation’s blending of fact and fiction.

• Some endings go for a moral or emotional undercut. Instead of wrapping up with satisfaction, triumph, or closure, they end on a whimper which is twist-like. The Graduate and La La Land leave both their characters and we the audience suspended in a state of emotional uncertainty.

• It’s not always clear when “The Twist” happens. Some films go for the collective reveal, when we all learn about it together, such as in Fight Club when we’re told that Tyler isn’t real. Some creep up on us, such as the reveal of the non-linear narrative in Arrival. And then there’s movies trying for the former but there will always be some people who say they spotted it early (à la The Sixth Sense).

I took a pretty broad approach to the movies I studied. I wanted to look at all reveals of information which fundamentally alter what we thought we knew in a surprising way.

How often do movies do the twist?

Across all the movies I looked at, 3.7% had what I regarded as a twist.

However this has not been a consistent feature. They were fairly rare until the 1960s, and really blossomed in and after the 2000.

Before I carry on, I wanted to give a quick shout out to another film data Substacker who I think does incredible research and writing. Stat Significant is a free weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about movies, music, TV, and more. When do we stop finding new music? Which TV shows got their finale right, and which didn't? Which movies popularized (or tarnished) baby names? It’s totally free and you can subscribe below:

Stat Significant

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

By Daniel Parris

Right, let’s do the twist again….

The most common types of plot twists

The most common element to movie twists is that of a reveal about someone’s previously-hidden identity and/or a coverup of the hidden information.

Some ideas overlap. Gone Girl uses a fake death and an unreliable narrator to flip the story midway through. The Invitation plays on suspicion until the final moments confirm the worst. Triangle traps its protagonist in a looping nightmare that only makes sense once you realise time isn’t moving the way it should.

Twisting in the winds of time

Some twist types never seem to go out of fashion, while others come in waves.

Fake deaths, staged crimes and secret conspiracies dominated in the early decades. Les Diaboliques kills a man off, hides the body, then brings him back to life. Laura builds its entire middle act on a woman we think is dead. The Third Man has Harry Lime step out of the shadows long after his funeral.

These kinds of twists are clean and dramatic, and give the audience a clear shock. But they’ve waned in their popularity with filmmakers. Staged events in particular have dropped off sharply since the 1960s. Fake deaths remain common but are less likely to anchor the entire plot.

The twists that have gained ground are the ones that unravel the mind.

• Black Swan slips between reality and hallucination without warning.

• Jacob’s Ladder keeps the viewer trapped in a dying man’s fragmented consciousness.

• Stay and The Secret Window both dismantle their characters’ sense of self as the story collapses inward.

Family secrets have held steady. Stoker hides a history of violence beneath a polished surface. We Need to Talk About Kevin builds tension around a mother’s fear of what her son truly is. The Skeleton Key and The Orphan each reveal truths about family roles and identities that change the story’s entire shape. These twists don’t always shout. But when they land, they turn domestic space into something dangerous.

Let’s twist again

Finally, let’s go for a scorched earth policy on revealing twists. Below are a few of the interesting movie twists I learned about during this research:

• M (1931) The child murderer is revealed to be the terrified, mentally ill man that all the various criminal elements of the city have been hunting, not a scapegoat.

• The 39 Steps (1935) The secret the spies are after is not a document, but a man who has memorized a vital government secret in his head.

• The Lady Vanishes (1938) The old lady that everyone believes never existed is revealed to be real and the victim of a sinister conspiracy, overturning the protagonist’s sanity and credibility.

• Rebecca (1940) Rebecca’s supposedly noble death was actually a suicide meant to look accidental, and Maxim de Winter confesses to having hidden the truth, shocking his new bride and the police.

• Suspicion (1941) The audience believes Cary Grant’s character is a murderer, but in the twist ending, he is actually innocent and the heroine’s suspicion is proven unfounded.

• Notorious (1946) Alicia’s allies seem to abandon her, but in a tense final twist, Devlin rescues her in front of the man she married under false pretences, dooming the villain to his fate.

• Rear Window (1954) Jeff’s wheelchair-bound protagonist's spying on his neighbours pays off when he discovers he was right all along, a neighbour really did commit a murder only to turn the tables on Jeff by coming for him.

• Witness for the Prosecution (1957) Christine confesses to perjury to save her husband, only for it to be revealed she was planning to kill him herself, shocking both the courtroom and the audience.

• Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Just when the defence succeeds in acquitting the accused, it is implied that the alleged rape victim and her husband manipulated the system, raising doubts about whether justice was truly served.

• Charade (1963) The charming love interest is revealed to be an undercover agent with multiple identities, not a mere suitor, and the actual villain turns out to be someone the protagonist trusted.

• The Manchurian Candidate (1962) The American hero has been brainwashed to become an assassin against his will and is ultimately forced to kill his own mother to stop the plot.

• The Servant (1963) The master becomes mentally and emotionally overpowered and dominated by his once subservient manservant, completely reversing the power dynamic by the film's end.

• Don’t Look Now (1973) The mysterious figure in a red coat is revealed to be not a vision of the protagonist's dead daughter but an adult murderer, leading to an unexpected and tragic ending.

• The Wicker Man (1973) Sergeant Howie’s investigation was a set-up all along to lure him to the island so that he can be sacrificed in a pagan ritual.

• Chinatown (1974) Just when the detective believes he has uncovered the truth, he learns that Evelyn’s daughter is also her sister, unravelling a web of abuse and corruption that he cannot resolve.

• The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Darth Vader reveals that he is Luke Skywalker's father, completely changing the audience's understanding of the hero and the villain.

• The Vanishing (1988) The protagonist willingly takes the same drugged drink that was used to abduct his girlfriend and finds himself buried alive, shocking the audience.

• The Stepfather (1987) The seemingly perfect stepfather is revealed to be a serial murderer who reconstructs a new life after killing each family that disappoints him.

• The Game (1997) After a series of threatening and life-destroying events, Nicholas discovers that the deadly conspiracy against him was actually an elaborate, staged game for his birthday.

• Twelve Monkeys (1995) The “Army of the Twelve Monkeys” was a red herring, and the real cause of the apocalypse comes from an unexpected, almost invisible source.

• Donnie Darko (2001) The protagonist sacrifices himself by allowing himself to die, thus erasing the film’s disturbing events from ever happening in a paradoxical twist.

• Saw (2004) The corpse that has lain in the room all along stands up and is revealed to be the mastermind Jigsaw, who orchestrated the entire game.

• Identity (2003) The ten strangers dying at the motel are actually multiple personalities inside the mind of a man awaiting execution, and the killer is a personality within him.

• The Gift (2015) The seemingly well-meaning visitor, Gordo, proves to not be so harmless as a final act leaves the characters and the audience questioning who was truly the villain.

• Promising Young Woman (2020) Cassandra’s careful revenge plot leads to her murder, but she posthumously exposes the truth, completing her plan even in death.

• Barbarian (2022) The home-invasion scenario pivots suddenly to introduce a new twist involving hidden tunnels and a monstrous resident, upending the apparent narrative.

• Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) The investigation’s events are shown from a different perspective, gradually revealing a different truth about who the true mastermind was all along.

Notes

Todays research was based around movie plots as described on Wikipedia and IMDb (if Wikipedia was too short).

I love this as it gives me permission to go even deeper into the topic, and hopefully help everyone understand what ‘genre’ really means.

Some people asked about how subgenres work. It’s a good question because the answer is rarely clear from marketing or loglines. The way a film is described often suggests a neat hybrid, but the reality on screen can be quite different.

I analysed the dialogue from 65,000 movies that were listed on IMDb under more than one genre (i.e. Action and Adventure, or Horror and Comedy).

We have to start by getting a baseline for how movies of each major genre sound, and after that we can look at which has the greatest influence on what the characters are saying on-screen.

Dialogue styles differ between genres

Every genre has its own style of dialogue. Some are built around events and spectacle, others lean towards character and emotion. The language of a sci-fi film typically sounds nothing like that of a family comedy or a war drama.

To do this, I measured how similar the language of each film was to other films in its genre. By looking at the dialogue across thousands of movies, I could see clear patterns in how each genre tends to sound.

Using these results we can visualise how close the dialogue of different genres are from each other, on two separate axes.

Note: The text labels on the axes are my own, based on interpreting the data. The maths can tell you what’s significant, but not why or how to refer to it.

When we consider the distance between genres (i.e. how similar they are to one another) some patterns emerge:

• Genres like romance and musical lean towards personal, everyday conversations.

• Action, sci-fi and war pull the language towards event-driven, genre-specific territory.

• Comedy, drama and biography sit closer to the centre, often bridging the gap between styles.

To make the patterns even clearer, I have put another copy of the same chart below, overlaying some blobs to represent clusters of genres.

Here’s my thinking when determining what the clusters were:

• Tense. This cluster contains horror, thriller, crime and mystery. The language is event-driven, sharp and tightly focused on tension, danger or investigation. The dialogue tends to be functional, clipped and less personal.

• Spectacle. Here we find sci-fi, action, adventure and western. The focus is on big events, high stakes and genre-specific language and so the speech is shaped by plot mechanics and technical terms.

• Fantastical. Including animation, fantasy and family, this cluster uses genre-specific and imaginative language. Dialogue is shaped by world-building, magic and playful or didactic exchanges, often reaching beyond everyday speech.

• Emotional. This includes drama, romance, musical, music and comedy. The dialogue centres on personal relationships, emotion and everyday speech rather than genre tropes or technical terms. This group leans into character-driven storytelling.

• Truth. This perhaps the most contrived of the groups, as I am using my understanding of the plot settings, not just the semantic data (i.e. war, history, biography and sport). That’s why is covers a large area and has a stretched shape. I considered leaving these uncluttered but given that their topics do overlap, I felt it was worth putting them together. It is interesting to note that ‘truth life stories’ can have very different styles of dialogue, as illustrated by the distance between sports and war, a greater distance than that between sci-fi and musicals.

The genres that dominate when mixed

Now that we have our baseline for each major genre, we can see what happens when a film is a hybrid subgenre, such as ‘action comedy’, ‘sci-fi romance, or ‘sports western’ (ok that last one was a stretch, but they do exist, unsurprisingly around horses, such as Hidalgo and 8 Seconds).

So when a movie is two genres, which takes the lead?

Most two-genre movies lean heavily in one direction, with genres like sci-fi, horror, action and western often overpower their pairings.

This is perhaps why movies of this ilk are often literally referred to as ‘Genre Films’ by professionals in film sales. Also, the fact that in only one subgenre did drama dominate, ‘drama mystery’, adds further proof to those same folks oft-repeated mantra that “Drama is not a genre” (for the purposes of film sales).

Let’s get under the skin of a couple of them.

Sci-fi acts like a black hole in subgenres, pulling the film’s language and tone into its orbit. Whether paired with comedy, drama, fantasy or family, sci-fi usually takes over the dialogue style. The rhythm, word choice and focus become recognisably sci-fi, even if the other genre remains part of the plot.

The ‘sci-fi-ness’ is overpowering in all sci-fi subgenres, other than ‘sci-fi fantasy’. Unsurprisingly, this covers most of the Disney tentpoles from within the Star Wars and Marvel universes, which can’t financially afford to be seen as fringe genre films.

Within horror it’s a more complicated story. When mixed with crime or sci-fi elements, the horror influence is a lot weaker, but it rules when mixed with fantasy, mystery, comedy, romance and drama.

Subgenres in detail

Finally, for you completionists out there, here are all the subgenres for which I tracked at least 50 movies.

Notes

Today’s research started with around 65,000 subtitle files provided by OpenSubtitles.org and IMDb genres from the OMDb.

I sorted and cleaned the subtitle files, embedding them with a sentence-transformer model, producing a vector that reflects the overall style and content of the dialogue. I calculated the typical dialogue style by averaging all films in that category. For each two-genre film, I compared its dialogue to both genres’ averages to see which it was closer to.

Pairs where more than 55% of films leaned towards one genre were marked as dominated by that genre. Pairs within 5% of a split were listed as balanced. All dominance findings used only pairings with at least 10 films. To show subgenre splits across the board, I limited detailed visualisations to pairs with 50 or more movies.

I argued that we need horror subgenres to achieve what the word “horror” once did in the 20th century, i.e. to give audiences a clear idea of what to expect.

That piece prompted several readers to get in touch with questions about genres and the audiences they serve. Today, I want to use data to explore one of the key aspects people asked about - the audience. Or more accurately, the audiences.

To do this, I turned to the MovieLens database, which contains over 32 million film ratings. It gave me a way to measure how similar or different genres really are, based on the people who actually watch and rate those films.

Measuring fans’ taste overlap

To understand how similar viewers perceive genres, I employed a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This compresses complex, high-dimensional data into a two-axis plot, keeping as much of the underlying variation as possible.

This technique is often used in genetics, image analysis and recommendation systems. Here, it reveals which genres get similar ratings from the same people.

The chart below is the key output, and several key insights can be gleaned from it.

Each point in the chart represents a genre, and genres that are close together are typically liked by the same viewers. Those far apart have less audience overlap.

To make it easier to interpret, I’ve labelled the axes in plain English. These are my words to explain what we’re seeing, not technical terms from the dataset.

• Horizontal axis = Challenging to comforting Viewing
  Genres on the right are the ones people turn to when they want something familiar, warm or safe. Musicals, animations and family films tend to land here. Genres on the left sit outside that comfort zone. They are darker, heavier or more intense. Horror, crime and psychological thrillers cluster in this space.

• Vertical axis = Adrenaline to heart
  Genres at the top focus on emotion, character and reflection. They invite viewers to feel something lasting. Genres lower down rely more on movement, tension or energy. They keep you alert, push the pace and often aim to thrill more than to stir.

There are several key lessons to be learned from these calculations:

1. Horror sits on its own (in the corner)

Horror is far to the left and deep into the lower half. This means it is both challenging and fast-paced. Viewers who enjoy horror tend to rate other genres very differently.

That makes horror an outlier in terms of taste, as it attracts a distinct group.

2. Family (films) stick together

Children, Animation and Musical sit close together on the far right. These genres are comforting and emotional. Viewers who like one tend to like the others.

They rarely rate darker genres highly as this group favours warmth, safety and joy.

3. The ‘thinking genres’ ponder together

Drama, Romance, Documentary and Mystery are tightly packed in the upper centre. These are the genres for viewers who value emotional depth and moral complexity, and tend to be slower, more thoughtful and character-led.

4. Excitement, without the fear

Sci-Fi, Action and Thriller all appear in the lower half of the chart. They share a taste for pace and adrenaline. These genres are more challenging than comforting, but not as extreme as horror.

5. War crimes and crime wars

War films are found high up and far to the left. It is emotionally serious but not comforting. This may reflect its historical significance or perceived importance. Crime is nearby, though with less intensity.

6. Comedy and adventure are middle of the road

Comedy and Adventure hover near the centre. They are lighter than horror but more dynamic than drama. This position suggests broad appeal and a mix of pace and warmth.

What this tells us

This type of research is not intended to instruct filmmakers or film professionals on how to view genres. Instead, it highlights how audiences already view them.

It gives us clues about which genres are compatible. If your film sits at the intersection of Action and Thriller, you’re likely to reach a large overlapping audience. If you’re blending Documentary and Horror, the task may be more challenging.

By examining genre through various lenses, we can move beyond the notion that genres are fixed, rigid categories. We can start to see them as clusters of taste.

Notes

Today’s data comes from MovieLens, a long-running film recommendation site created by GroupLens at the University of Minnesota. The dataset I used includes 32 million ratings by 200,000 anonymised users across 87,000 films. I focused on users who had rated at least 20 films. I wanted to look at which genres share the same fans, so I focused on ratings of at least four out of a possible five.

Each user’s ratings were aggregated into a genre profile, based on the share of their high ratings across genres. From these, I calculated Pearson correlation coefficients between every pair of genres. The result is a symmetric correlation matrix showing how strongly the same people like two genres. Positive values mean overlap in taste, negative values suggest divergence.

I then applied Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to this matrix. PCA reduces the dimensionality by finding the two directions (components) that explain the most variation in the data.

Each genre becomes a point in this two-dimensional space. Genres close together have overlapping fans, while those far apart don’t. The final axis labels are mine, based on how genres are grouped in the space. The maths finds the patterns, and I added the words afterwards to help explain it.

It’s worth noting what this chart doesn’t capture:

• It doesn’t distinguish between mainstream and niche titles.

• It doesn’t account for subgenres, like political thriller versus slasher horror.

• It also averages out each user. Someone might enjoy both Sci-Fi and Romance, but rate them very differently depending on their mood, style, or subject.

Still, as a snapshot of how genre preferences cluster, this map is helpful. It’s based on what people actually rate highly, not what they say they like. That makes it a grounded way to look at how genres group in the minds of audiences.

By that, they don’t mean that films cannot be dramatic, nor that there are not films you could call “a drama”. In fact, it’s the reverse - too many films could be classed as a drama, thereby making the term of little use.

The main function of a genre descriptor is to quickly convey to the audience what they should expect from a movie.

• You say comedy, they expect to laugh.

• You tell them it’s a romantic comedy and they expect to have their heartstrings exercised.

• You say western and they have a clear idea of the setting of the movie.

And for a long time, horror brought forth a pretty narrow set of expectations.

However, times are changing and the horror genre of 2025 is not what it once was.

On Tuesday I was part of an event called “The Business of Fear” with Jason Blum and other senior figures from Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, where we unpacked trends across modern horror. I wanted to share the key points here to ensure the topic is open to all and to continue the discussion in public.

Let’s start by setting the scene…

It emerged from the shadows…

Before cinema, “horror” described physical revulsion and after World War I, also became a shared shorthand for trauma. This means that by the 1920s, it had emotional and cultural weight that made it ripe for cinema.

Early films with unsettling themes were labelled “weird” or “mystery” rather than horror. Critics used “horror” occasionally, but not as a genre. Even Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari weren’t called horror at the time.

That changed in 1931 with Dracula and Frankenstein. Universal initially pitched Dracula as a mystery, unsure how audiences would react. But viewers and critics called it horror and the label stuck. The studios chose to embrace then term and by the end of the year, horror was a recognised genre.

The next year, the British censorship body, the BBFC, introduced an “H” certificate, and the Hays Code in the US soon limited what horror could depict. The word now shaped how these films were made, marketed and seen.

Horror is having its boom moment

Genres rise and fall depending on what the world wants to watch.

Bright, happy and optimistic musicals dominated in the post-war years, and westerns thrived during America’s frontier obsession.

Action films exploded in the 90s and early 2000s, and other genres have seen peaks and troughs (regular readers will know of my research into the decline of romance on the big screen).

Horror is now clearly in its moment. The share of horror films in global production has tripled since the 1980s.

In 2024, horror generated more theatrical revenue than drama, comedy or thriller.

This is where things get complicated. For the chart above I included Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as horror - a description some will agree with, while others will consider it juicing the figures.

One label now covers too much

When horror accounted for just a few percent of production, it made sense to use a single genre tag. Now it covers a wide spectrum of tones, styles and audience expectations.

It includes gore-heavy franchises, quiet psychological studies, family-friendly thrillers and arthouse allegories. In practice, calling all of them horror is about as useful as calling them movies.

This is the same reason professionals avoid using the term "drama" as a working category. It doesn't exclude enough to be helpful.

Horror has become too large to be a label. It now works better as a section heading, with the real work happening at the next level down.

Horror is already subdividing

When I came to research my Horror Movie Report last year, I had to decide how I would subclassify horror. After a lot of research and number crunching I settled on 11 sub genres, allowing for movies to fit into more than one.

Later in the year, Blumhouse reached out to compare notes. In their research they settled on 24 subgenres.

And I’m sure other organisations and people will have their own list of what is and isn’t a subgenre. The aim here is not for us all to agree on a single, strict nomenclature but more to reflect that subdivisions are a real-world necessity.

Subgenres

Whichever criteria you use, once you start to pick between the types of horror subgenres, fascinating patterns emerge.

As we saw with top-level genres, the ebb and flow of different types of horror movies seem to reflect the age they were made in. Post-apocalyptic horror tends to spike during periods of instability. Survival stories and found footage surged during economic uncertainty. Gothic and monster cycles come and go, but rarely vanish completely.

Why this matters

This isn’t the first creative media which has faced the challenge of labels outgrowing their original purpose. In the middle of the 20th-century, referring to “popular music” was enough for people to know what you were referring to. However, now Spotify offers a cornucopia of subgenres and micro-classifications for music lovers.

As well as better describing the creative works, the subdivisions also tackle another problem which happens as a label swells - audience fragmentation.

Someone who enjoys psychological horror may have no interest in body horror. Fans of slow supernatural films may avoid high-speed slashers. Trying to talk about horror as a single category misses this entirely.

The word horror no longer tells us what a film is trying to do, how it feels, or who it’s for, meaning that the term alone has stopped being useful.

What is a horror movie, anyway?

The rabbit hole of an exact definition of a horror movie is way deeper than I have presented thus far. Here are some thoughts for you to ponder and discuss among yourselves:

• The horror aesthetic is often used in children’s movies, such as Hotel Transylvania and The Addams Family.

• Similarly, pure comedies are sometimes set in horror worlds, such as Dracula Dead and Loving It, or What We Do In The Shadows.

• The line between a disgusting thriller and a horror movie is so thin as to subjective. Examples would include Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs.

• The action genre is littered with movies following the horror playbook, from Jurassic Park to War of the Worlds.

• I’ve heard it argued that many films for kids are plots lines ripped directly from the horror world, without attribution. Examples would be Disney’s Pinocchio being a simple retelling of Frankenstein, or the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being a pretty bog standard slasher, bumping off it’s characters one at a time based on their moral failings.

Epilogue

No-one knows when horror movies will stop their inexorable rise (or if they continue their current trajectory, all movies made will be horror by the year 2104).

But even if horror’s plateau comes about soon, they are already such a large and varied set of films as to make just the word “horror” a little dead on arrival.

The Horror Movie Report

If you want to dig deeper into the horror genres(s), then grab a copy of my Horror Movie Report

It’s a massive collection of research, statistics, and spreadsheets. It’s packed with insights on everything from horror’s financials to its evolving subgenres.

Read more at HorrorMovieReport.com

The marketers will have used all their skills to create certain emotional expectations, the movie itself will take you on a journey, and afterwards you may continue to experience emotions as you reflect back on what you saw.

For bad movie-watching experiences, this three-step process might be hope -> confusion -> anger.

But let’s instead focus on the desired journey, in which the audience gets what they’re seeking. Audiences may want a movie to heighten their existing emotions, to counter emotions they want to shake off, or to take them to a wholly different emotional place.

Whatever the desired end state, audiences will typically have a clear (if sometimes unconscious) emotional goal in mind.

In order to visualise these emotional expectations, a few years ago I teamed up with the TellyMoods. They describe their app as:

A hyper-tailored recommendation service, which helps you instantly find movies and TV shows on all existing streaming platforms, based on real-time analysis of your mood.

I focused on the 26,055 movies released in US cinemas between 2000 and 2021. For each movie, the TellyMoods data provided a value for one of five emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger.

There are a number of ways we can use this data but I wanted to open with a simple one – what is the emotional promise of each genre?

Joy

Let's start happy, even if we will soon descend to the dark depths of the human psyche.

The most joyful movie genres are Musicals, Animation and Music-based films. At the other end of the spectrum, we see relatively joy-less genres of Thriller, Crime and Horror.

Sadness

Given how most people regard sadness as the inverse of joy, it's no surprise that we see a largely reversed picture of joy, with the genres of Mystery, Thriller, and War films being associated with sadness, and those with the lowest levels of sadness being present in Animation, Musicals, and Family-focused films.

Fear

It will surprise no one that Horror films top the most fear-laden films. However, it is perhaps less well-known that fear-filled Sci-Fi movies tend to be on average. They outrank War movies, Mysteries and Thrillers, albeit only slightly. A major driver of tales from our possible futures is warnings of doom if we don't change our ways.

A respite from these fearful tales can be found in Music-based films, Musicals and Biographies.

(Incidentally, my rough rule of thumb when thinking about the line between "Music-based" movies and "Musicals" is if the characters know they're singing. Typically, the former does, while the latter does not.

Disgust

The sheer amount of sneering that takes place during your average Western and Crime-based films should have given us a clue as to which genres would top the disgust charts.

Movies based at children and families tend to be the least disgusted (ironic given the increased likelihood of "disgusting" childish humour).

Anger

In our final chart, we descend into anger. We'll find plenty in Westerns, Crime films and Action movies.

The least-disgusting trio of Music-based, Musicals and Family movies are also the least angry.

Summary

Overall, the patterns shown above should be essentially what you were expecting to see; they quantify and illustrate our shared popular culture.

A few things which jumped out as interesting to me are:

• Mystery films have low levels of joy. There is nothing inherent in the notion of a mystery (i.e., a story slowly revealing unknown information) that should preclude a joyful experience - think of a children's treasure hunt. However, 'Mystery movies' typically include elements of distrust, suspicion and threat.

• Physical genres dominate anger and disgust, whereas metaphysical films lead with joy and sadness. The movies which lean most heavily on physical on-screen action include Crime, Action, and Westerns. The other end is dominated by metaphysical films (Music and Romance) and genres targeted at children (Animation and Family itself).

• Similar bedfellows don't always overlap. There is a strong link between anger and disgust in most, but not all, genres. The most significant disconnect between these two is found among Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Animation movies.

Further reading

If you've enjoyed this, please check out my previous analysis of the emotions expressed in human faces on movie posters.

• Using facial recognition to track emotions on movie posters

• Measuring actors’ brands via facial recognition

Methodology

The core dataset of movies originated from my own database, which was built from public sources over the years. The genres and production years were those of IMDb. The emotional data came from Telly Moods, who used IBM Watson NLP to analyse the overview of the movie.

TellyMoods describes itself as:

The first product of eClapper Project Inc., a US Data & Emotion company that addresses decision-makers in the entertainment industry; through specific services and products, we help them better understand what the audience wants.

This is not paid content and TellyMoods had no control over the research, findings or data. They provided the raw emotional data, on a per-film basis, and I did the analysis. They read the article ahead of time and shared their notes. I'm very grateful for them reaching out, and for their openness and patience during the process.

Epilogue

At this point, it would be worth stating the obvious - this is not a formula for every movie.

As with any art form, some of the best examples of movies are ones which surprise and delight us.

Countless movies have broken out of their genre's bounds to make us feel more than we bargained for, including the heart in Die Hard, the loss in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, joy in The Shawshank Redemption, anger in Passengers, humour in The Martian, sadness in WALL-E / Toy Story 3 / Up / .... ok, ok, maybe I should be better prepared for the sadness Pixar constantly deliver.

So if you're a filmmaker, how should you use this type of data? Not to limit what your movie is or could be.

Instead, consider that this is the landscape of expectations in which your film will be released. This is what people reasonably expect to see, and which they may actively seek. If you underdeliver on what they think they paid for, they may feel cheated. Know this is how your movie is likely to be sold, and then consider how you can sate their needs while still making the movie you want to make.

This made me wonder - what percentage of sports movies feature a big race, competition or tournament?

I looked at the plots of 1,910 sports feature films to find out.

Sports movies as the underdog

Sports movies have held a steady place in global cinema for over a century. While their share of production has never rivalled genres like drama or comedy, the genre punches above its weight in cultural visibility. The past three decades have seen a clear increase in sports-themed titles.

Which sport takes the top spot?

Boxing has been the most popular sport throughout film history, featuring in 15.3% of sports movies.

It appears in everything from gritty indies to prestige dramas. Raging Bull, Ali, The Hurricane, Southpaw, Hands of Stone, Hard Times, The Great White Hope and The Set-Up all build stories around the ring.

One reason boxing may have been the 20th-century movie champ is that it lends itself nicely to a more straightforward story, well told. It offers a perfectly structured narrative, even for those unaware of the rules of the sport - one character, one opponent, and a clear win or loss.

But as boxing has started to wane on the big screen, other (more complex) sports are zooming past to take its top spot.

Football stories are more common than ever. The Blind Side, Varsity Blues, We Are Marshall, Undefeated, Invincible, Brian’s Song and Safety cover everything from college glory to grief and recovery. Soccer too, especially outside the US. The Miracle of Bern, Pelé: Birth of a Legend, Offside, The Two Escobars and Next Goal Wins all lean into the global side of the game.

Basketball has also surged. White Men Can’t Jump, Above the Rim, Love & Basketball, Hustle and High Flying Bird each bring a different angle, from playgrounds to pro leagues.

Even cricket, mostly absent in decades past, now has films like 83, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story and Iqbal drawing big domestic crowds.

Making mat and winning nationals

On to our core question - what percentage of sports movies feature a big competitive event?

Almost all.

Even in the 1960s, which saw the lowest share, just over 84% of sports films included a final tournament, match, or high-stakes event.

In the current century, the number approaches universality.

Some movies do play with the expected formula - Million Dollar Baby puts its key fight at the midpoint, shifting the emotional climax to the aftermath of injury and a moral dilemma. The Wrestler, Foxcatcher, and The Rider also turn their backs on the tournament ending, focusing instead on decline, loss, or personal reckoning.

But these are the exceptions. The overwhelming majority of sports movies serve up a final competition as the climax.

And in two-thirds of cases, this showdown goes the way of our heroes.

Most sports movies seem to be built around doubt, such as a team no one backs, a coach no one trusts, or an athlete who’s already been counted out.

Hoosiers follows a side-lined coach leading small-town kids to the state finals. Creed spotlights a fighter with a famous name but no track record. Cool Runnings sends four sprinters to the Winter Olympics with no snow and no respect. The Replacements, Whip It, The Mighty Ducks, McFarland, USA, and Warrior all work from the same starting point.

And the counterpoint to this doubt is recognition. In Bend It Like Beckham, the goal clears space between two generations. Breaking Away makes a college bike race into a stand-in for a whole town’s worth. The Karate Kid sets up a crane kick that ends more than just a fight.

Doubt drives the story. Recognition closes it.

It’s a game of two halves

Before we end this journey on a winning high, we must acknowledge that it’s not always plain sailing (least of all in films about sailing).

Injury, trauma and sacrifice run through a surprising number of sports films.

North Dallas Forty shows players treated like disposable parts in a broken system. The Program has athletes pushing their bodies to the edge under pressure from coaches, boosters and each other. Concussion shifts the focus entirely, following the real-life doctor who exposed long-term brain damage in American football.

Racing films go the same way. Rush includes a fireball crash that nearly kills one of its leads. Borg vs McEnroe shows how mental pressure can damage just as deeply.

In boxing, Fat City centres on decline rather than glory. Raging Bull follows a champion whose greatest damage comes outside the ring. Girlfight highlights both physical and emotional cost, especially for fighters pushed to prove something bigger than themselves.

In fact, movies around boxing are the most likely to kill off a significant character, followed by soccer and ‘the other football’.

Notes

The data for today’s article came from OMDb, IMDb, Wikipedia and The Numbers. The ‘sports’ classification is IMDb’s genre tag.

Some want proof that diversity and progressive themes deliver stronger box office. Others are looking for signs of overreach or audience alienation. But both sides share something in common. They want a way to measure it. And none of them can agree on what “woke” actually means.

The meaning of “woke” depends entirely on who’s speaking. Almost two-thirds of UK adults now say they are at least somewhat familiar with the term “being woke”. Its usage is also shifting, with 36% of the public seeing it as an insult, up from 24% in 2020. That shift is sharpest among older voters and Conservatives, while Labour supporters and younger people are more likely to see it as a compliment or at least neutral.

There is also a divide between those who make creative content and those who watch it. In a 2021 survey, 59% of TV executives said the industry hadn’t gone far enough on transgender rights, compared to just 31% of the general public. When asked if political correctness had gone too far, 62% of the public agreed, compared to just 19% of TV executives.

So the gap is widening. As “wokeness” gets more politicised, audiences and creators are talking past each other. That makes it harder to have a grounded debate, let alone measure anything useful.

Still, I wanted to try. If we’re going to ask whether films are “too woke”, we need to split it in two.

1. What does it mean for a movie to be woke? Can we track the presence of woke themes or decisions, regardless of whether they’re seen as good or bad?

2. What does “too much” mean? Are there links between perceived wokeness and other outcomes like box office, reviews or cultural pushback?

I’ve been working on this for a while, and it’s going to take a few articles before we get firm answers. Let me show you where I’ve got to so far…

Woke is in the ire of the beholder

I suspect that part of the reason that cinema often finds itself on the frontline of the current culture war(s) is that we all enjoy arguing about movies. Movies are shared culture, accessible to everyone, and feature powerful people, sexy stars, big money and salacious gossip - what’s not to love?!

To illustrate this point, I looked at the Wikipedia pages for 22,668 feature films and found that:

1. Controversy in movies is omnipresent, and

2. The most contentious period is not our current moment but that of the 1970s.

However, the topics under discussion have shifted over the past century. The 1970s controversies were more about workplace misconduct, censorship, and community backlash.

By contrast, the current decade is the high point for controversies connected to the culture wars (i.e. ideas of identity politics, cancel culture, political correctness, DEI and related woke-adjacent ideas).

Movies can be a Rorschach test, in that what you see in them says as much about you as about the film itself. The same film can represent free expression to one person and “everything wrong with modern culture” to another.

Arguing about movies gives people a low-stakes way to air high-stakes questions, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that they are invoked so often in conversations about wokeness.

But we should remember that just because they are often cited at the tip of the argumentative spear, that doesn’t automatically mean that they actually are relevant to the debate they’re being summoned within.

So, our first question is - do movies contain woke ideas or themes?

Woke up this morning?

If we want to measure “wokeness”, we can’t just rely on a single definition. Instead, we need to look at what kinds of ideas or decisions tend to attract the “woke” label.

To build a proper method, I decided to look in two places:

1. Off-screen. What do people say about a film? What kinds of films attract audience discussion around these themes?

2. On-screen. Do those themes actually appear in the plot?

We’ll start with what people are saying.

Woke the line

The first step is to find out which films get talked about as being woke. To do this I built a database of over four million public user reviews across 51,240 feature films, and looked for how close the reviews were in meaning to key themes.

Rather than just searching for keywords, I used a method based on language similarity. I wrote a batch of short dummy reviews, each one focused on a specific cultural or political theme. These included things like feminism, LGBT identity, social justice, and climate change. Then I mapped every real film review into a mathematical space based on the language it used, and compared each one to my dummy reviews. The closer a film’s reviews were to a dummy, the more likely it was that audiences were talking about that theme.

As an illustration, the films with the highest levels of feminist discourse in their reviews include She Said, Suffragette, Roe v. Wade, and Women Talking.

A helpful example is to note that among the highest scoring films in this metric was The Red Pill, a documentary exploring the polarised world of the Men’s Rights Movement. Its inclusion illustrates that this approach captures when people are talking about feminism, regardless of whether they are supporting or opposing it.

At the other end of the spectrum, the movies that generate the lowest levels of conversation around feminist themes seem to be those featuring kung fu, Dracula, Godzilla, and Elvis.

Comparing the levels of discussion of feminist ideas in reviews over time shows a slight increase over the past couple of decades.

When I charted feminist discourse across all films over time, the results showed a clear upward trend. Audience conversation around feminist ideas has slowly grown over the past two decades.

The chart below shows the average annual figure compared to an arbitrary 1940 base.

With this method, we can look for any number of woke-adjacent themes. I isolated a handful that showed the strongest growth and clearest patterns in audience language. These were:

• Inclusion as plot. Where inclusion or identity is central to the story or character arcs.

• Lack of subtlety. Where the messaging is delivered in a direct, heavy-handed way.

• Agenda-driven storytelling. Where the story seems built to push a viewpoint rather than develop characters or drama.

• Social justice subtext. Where the themes beneath the plot reflect issues like inequality or systemic power.

• Representation over story. Where casting or content choices appear to prioritise identity over narrative cohesion.

This doesn’t tell us whether audiences liked or disliked these elements. It simply shows that these topics are being discussed more than they used to be, and that some films attract more attention around them than others.

A woke of art

Next, I turned to what’s actually in the films themselves.

Read more

I turned to the data on almost 60,000 movies to find out where their scripts came from.

We have to start by defining terms. When I say a film is an 'Original' movie, I am purely referring to the provenance of the script. There is an adjacent topic about how unoriginal movies can be despite being 'Original Screenplays' (I'm lookin' at you, Rebel Moon), but today, we're focusing on whether the filmmakers had to license a preexisting piece of work in order to get their film to market.

Where do movies come from?

This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays.

The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis.)

Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, 'Other' includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more.

How has this changed over the years?

Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That’s quite surprising, both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time.

But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn't plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.

The story of movies based on real-life events could not be more different. Here, we see a steady rise over the same period, from one in twenty movies in the 1980s to almost one in four in the 2020s.

This coincides with growing demand for true crime, social justice narratives, and prestige biopics. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, there was a surge in scripted films about real-world systems and breakdowns (Margin Call, Too Big To Fail, The Big Short). And streaming platforms took it even further, building entire brands around true story formats.

Why does this feel... off?

At this point, you may be wondering why, instinctively this feels different to what you were expecting or feel you've noticed at the cinemas.

That's because we've been looking purely at the number of movies made. But not all movies are created equal. The bigger a movie is, the more likely it is to grab your attention and be an adaptation.

As the chart below shows, original movies take a disproportionality smaller percentage of the box office than they do of the production figures. While 55.9% of movies made during 2000–23 were original screenplays, together they only account for 42.3% of the box office takings.

So let's go through the same charts we saw previously, but add on the box office share and see if this makes more instinctive sense.

While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that's despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%).

The story behind movies based on real-life events also shifts when we take into account the box office. While there has been a big boom in such movies being made, they haven't made the same level of impact on the financial side of the industry.

We'll end by looking at the production and performance of movies based on written material. This is the inverse of what we've just seen with 'real-life movies' in that their production has decreased but their box office market share has grown.

Notes

The core of today's data came from Opus Data / The-Numbers, with additional data from IMDb, OMDb, Wikipedia, and my own datasets. The hard work of determining the origin of each movie was done by the talented folks at Opus Data.

It covers 58,900 feature films, released in the US between 1974 and 2023, inclusive. Box office here refers to the Domestic Box Office, i.e. the US and Canada.

Epilogue

There is a deeper conversation to be had around the idea of originality.

Avatar (2009) is officially an 'Original Screenplay', but I think most viewers would concede it doesn't contain much we've not seen many, many times before.

On the other end, The Dark Knight (2008) is a sequel to a reboot of a movie of a comic, but its script doesn't suffer from this convoluted route to the screen.

I tracked the fates of the leading characters in 27,268 movies to find out how often the main character dies before the credits roll.

The result is a data-driven view of one of the most enduring decisions a storyteller can make. It also shows what kinds of stories Hollywood thinks are worth telling, and how that’s changed over time.

How often does the hero(ine) die?

Across the full dataset, 15.9% of lead characters die before the end of the film. That’s roughly one in six. But this figure hides major variations by time, genre, and story type.

Lead characters were far more likely to die in the 1960s and 1970s than they are today. Across the 1970s, almost one in three protagonists died by the end of the film. That rate has steadily declined since.

The drop has been particularly sharp since 2010. In the last five years, the share of lead characters who die has averaged just 17%. This is one of the lowest rates in almost a century of film history.

Death by genre

Genre plays a role in how much the death "matters." In comedies or action blockbusters, deaths are rare and often played for shock or spectacle. In drama, war, or historical films, they are central. A romantic tragedy almost demands it.

In addition to narrative significance, we also see significant differences between genres in terms of how often death occurs. In fact, the top genres are more than nine times as deadly as the safest ones.

At the top of the list are history and biography films, where the lead dies in 28.7% and 28.5% of cases. That’s unsurprising, given how many of these films portray real people whose deaths are part of the story. Braveheart, Selena, Amadeus, and Malcolm X all end with the lead’s death.

War films, westerns, and horror also show high death rates for their protagonists. War films, in particular, often use the lead’s death to underline the futility or cost of conflict, such as Saving Private Ryan, Gallipoli, or 1917.

At the other end of the scale, just 3.1% of animated and family film leads die. Titles like Frozen, Finding Nemo, or Despicable Me put their heroes through peril but nearly always let them survive. When animated characters do die, it tends to be symbolic, offscreen or quickly reversed, such as in The Lion King or Big Hero 6.

Health and Safety advice for movie leads

The most frequent cause of death for lead characters is being shot, accounting for 26.6% of all on-screen demises. This includes everything from dramatic assassinations like The Godfather Part III and The Assassination of Jesse James to chaotic shootouts in Scarface or Bonnie and Clyde.

Natural causes come next at 9.0%, and they are typically found in dramas and biopics such as The Father, Philadelphia, or Still Alice.

Suicide is involved in 7.9% of lead character deaths. Sometimes, suicide is central to the story (Dead Poets Society, Leaving Las Vegas), and other times, it is a sudden final act (The Hours, Thelma & Louise).

Supernatural deaths have been on the rise, no doubt linked to the growing ubiquity of horror films and horror tropes in mainstream cinemas (read more on that here: We're in a golden era for horror movies).

The most narratively powerful deaths tend to fall into a few categories. Sacrifice, where the protagonist dies to save others, often lands hardest. So does suicide, especially when tied to inner conflict (Dead Poets Society, The Hours). Executions and murder can provoke outrage or grief, while natural causes or accidents are less common unless the film is about illness or aging (Amour, The Fault in Our Stars).

Dying to be different

To uncover what makes a hero’s death different, I also tracked all the ways other identifiable characters die. These other characters will also be ‘leads’ of a sort, as they would only be counted if their death was mentioned in the plot summary on Wikipedia.

Gunshot is the largest category of deaths, no matter if you're a leading man/woman (26.6% of those who die met their fate this way) or a supporting sidekick (27.1%).

However, suicide and sacrifice are both far more common among lead characters. Together they account for 14.6% of lead deaths, compared to just 5.8% across all identifiable deaths. These are often dramatic narrative choices that align with character arcs or moral conclusions, such as in Gran Torino, Armageddon, or A Star Is Born.

Executions are almost three times more likely to befall leads than supporting characters. Movies such as Dead Man Walking or Braveheart place their protagonists at the centre of moral or political acts of punishment.

Conversely, deaths by physical force or cutting are underrepresented among leads. These are more often seen in chaotic crowd scenes or genre set-pieces where individual character identity matters less. In ensemble-heavy action films or war movies, unnamed characters may die by the dozen while the lead survives or gets a more narratively satisfying exit.

Notes

Today’s research was based on 27,268 feature films released between 1930 and 2024. Data came from Wikipedia, OMDb, and IMDb. I focused on films with meaningful plot summaries on Wikipedia. That said, the level of plot detail provided does vary between titles.

Epilogue

I’m fascinated by the point of inflection that the 1970s appear to be. The data we’ve seen today reveals that the 1970s were the most dangerous time to be a movie hero.

This mirrors an unconnected trend I saw a few weeks ago when I examined the amount of dialogue in movies. The 1970s were the quietest period in modern cinema, with dialogue use at its lowest and the longest gaps between spoken lines.

That space, both literal and narrative, fed into the ambiguity, introspection, and moral uncertainty that defined so many films of the time.

Add to that the real chance that a character you had been following might die, on top of the anti-heroes, fatalism, and downbeat endings already reflecting wider cultural and political disillusionment.

Film scholars have been saying this for decades, but it’s satisfying to see the data back it up too.

Sometimes the Pope is a symbol of tradition or authority. Other times he is portayed as a politician or a comic outsider.

I thought I would take a quick look at the data behind the on-screen portrayal of His Holiness.

Pope quiz, hotshot

If you’re feeling papal-bullish, then try on these trivia questions for size:

1. Which member of the Beatles played a Pope on screen?

2. Which Pope helped make a Hollywood movie, including being on set for filming?

3. Who has played the Pope in movies most often, despite never being a professional actor (or actually the Pope)?

Pope-ing up again and again

Popes have remained a consistent part of cinema across the decades. The 2010s stand out with a notable increase in films featuring Popes, but there have been rises and falls in previous decades as well. This trend stretches from classic religious epics to modern stories of personal struggle or political intrigue.

Movie Popes come in all shapes and sizes, including:

• Real Popes - Jon Voight (Pope John Paul II), Anthony Hopkins (Pope Benedict XVI), Jonathan Pryce (Pope Francis), John Gielgud (Pope Pius XII, Pope Pius V, and Pope Pius XIII), Marcel Iureș (Pope Pius XII), Alec Guinness (Pope Innocent III), Rex Harrison (Pope Julius II)

• Fictional Popes - Anthony Quinn (Pope Kiril Lakota), Liv Ullmann (Pope Joan), Michel Piccoli (Pope Melville)

• Funny Popes - Robbie Coltrane (Pope David I), Ringo Starr (the Pope, Lisztomania), Jude Law (Pope Pius XIII)

The most frequent person to play a Pope on screen wasn’t even an actor. Gene Greytak was a real estate broker who had a sideline in impersonating Pope John Paul II, including in Hot Shots!, Sister Act and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.

Pope springs eternal

We’ve all spent many hours with friends discussing who our favourite Pope is, in part because there are 266 to choose from over the past 1992 years.

However, as most movies have a contemporary setting, it’s no surprise that the most common century for cinematic pontiffs was the 20th century, followed by the 21st century and 16th century (I like to think of that last one as the ‘Pope Classic’ era).

Some films have been actively recommended by real-life Popes.

• Pope Francis has claimed both Babette's Feast (1987) and La Strada (1954) to be his favourite film.

• Pope John Paul II said that Dances With Wolves (1990) had the best soundtrack.

• Mervyn LeRoy managed to secure official blessing from Pope Pius XII for the 1951 epic Quo Vadis. I know what you’re thinking - ‘How do I get MY screenplay blessed?’. Apparently, the ceremony involved the Pope placing his hands on the script, praying in Latin, then saying "May your film be a successful one”.

• At least one movie was partly funded by the Catholic Church - 1963’s The Cardinal. The liaison assigned by the Vatican to coordinate with the production was Joseph Ratzinger, although you are more likely to recognise him by his other name, Pope Benedict XVI.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing between the pontiff and the pictures:

• The shooting of Moonraker (1979) was delayed by a day due to the bell-ringing mourning the death of Pope John Paul I.

• Hail Mary (1985) was denounced by Pope John Paul II and Ecstasy (1933) was denounced by Pope Pius XII.

Always the Pontiff, never the lead

It’s tricky to track all frames of all on-screen Popes, and not just because he’s often all in white against a white background. So the chart below shows when the Pope has been mentioned in the plot or synopsis of a movie.

In most cases, the Pope plays a significant but not a leading role. Movies with a leading Pope have been on the decline over the past half century.

A roamin’ Catholic

Some movie Popes lead with spiritual authority, such as in Francis of Assisi (1961). Others are political figures, reformers, or even comic characters. In The Pope Must Die (1991), Robbie Coltrane becomes Pope by accident. Popes have also featured in genres ranging from thrillers to supernatural horror, such as The Pope’s Exorcist (2023).

The role of Pope can serve many functions for a screenwriter. He can be a gift from God to signal the highest religious authority, or a gift from the Devil to represent political machinations.

POV (i.e. Pope Of View)

Let’s end on considering how movies with an on-screen Pope choose to portray the Catholic church.

Earlier films tended to treat the Pope with a certain distance and respect. More recently, the tone has shifted to allow for satire, self-doubt, and even vulnerability. Amen. (2002) is open in its criticism of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War. The Two Popes uses humour and warmth to draw out the personalities behind the papal robes. Jude Law’s Pope in The Young Pope (2016) is a surreal creation, challenging viewers to question what a modern Pope might really be like.

I found that most Pope-ular movies tend to have a clear-cut position on the church, as either a force for good (less often) or as a force for ill (the most common Pope-sition).

Notes

This was a study of feature films in which the Pope popped up in the plot. I used data from OMDb, Wikipedia and IMDb.

I finished the movie, wondering how atypical The Conversation was. And how all movies from the 1970s compare with modern ones in how they use dialogue.

At that very moment, as if a gift from the content sponsoring gods, I got an email from Audiio.com offering to support any research project I was working on. They provide royalty-free music for filmmakers and so the idea of a data project focused on sound was a perfect fit!

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I analysed subtitle files from over 61,517 films released from the 1930s to the present day. Subtitle files include timestamps for each line of dialogue, which allowed me to track how much dialogue appears, how quickly it arrives, and how tightly it’s packed within a film.

Films Are Using More Dialogue Than Before

Let’s start by counting the number of words spoken in the dialogue. The Conversation has just 3,452 spoken words, an average of 30.5 per minute.

That’s almost half the overall average across the full dataset, which sits at 6,697.

Looking at the median breakdown by genre, the films with the most dialogue tend to be musicals, comedies and music-driven stories. Genres with the fewest spoken words include westerns, war, and horror.

The average has shifted over time. Total words spoken peaked in the 1940s and then dropped steadily through the 1960s and 70s. In recent years, the volume has climbed again.

The Conversation fits neatly into that quieter stretch. It uses fewer words than the films that came before and the ones that followed.

Interestingly, while the peak for total words came in the 1940s, those same films had fewer lines of dialogue than we see today. That tells us the lines were longer. Fewer pauses, fewer cuts, and more sustained monologues.

Modern films use more lines to say the same amount, or slightly more, suggesting a shift in writing style. Sentences are shorter. The rhythm is more broken up. Dialogue arrives more often, in smaller doses.

Dialogue Takes Up More of the Film

By comparing the dialogue timestamps with the total run time of each film, we can estimate how much of the movie is taken up by people speaking.

The pattern follows what we saw with word count. Films with shorter gaps between lines also tend to give more of their runtime over to dialogue.

Animation tops the list, helped by shorter average runtimes and tightly packed dialogue. Musicals and comedies also sit high on the list, with both genres often crossing the 55% mark. These films use speech and lyrics to carry much of the story and character work.

Early films had fewer camera moves and simpler sound design, so dialogue carried more of the storytelling. Film released in 1940 had 60% of their running time taken up by dialogue.

By 2005, the average share of screen time given to dialogue had dropped to just 35.6%. It has since climbed back and currently sits at just under 50%.

Films Leave Less Space Between Lines

Another way to think about dialogue is to measure the silence. Specifically, how long the gaps are between people speaking.

Across all war films, the median gap between spoken lines is 3.7 seconds. That’s the longest of any major genre. At the other end, comedies keep things much tighter, with a typical gap of just 1.9 seconds.

The numbers reflect the rhythm each genre tends to favour. A Quiet Place (2018) is built on silence. That silence is part of the story and the suspense. Turning Red (2022), by contrast, keeps the dialogue flowing almost constantly. Both choices make sense for the stories they’re telling.

Over time, we’ve seen the dialogue gap shrink. In the early 1960s, it peaked at around four seconds.

Today, that has halved.

We’re not quite back to the briefest pauses of the 1940s, but the gap is heading in that direction. Back then, it was around 1.5 seconds. This made space for fast delivery, shorter lines and tighter pacing. We're now seeing similar rhythms return.

Dialogue Rhythm Is Getting Tighter

Writing, editing, acting and scoring all shape the rhythm of a scene. When there’s less space between lines, there’s less room for music, sound effects or silence to take the lead.

Shorter gaps force music to sit under dialogue rather than between lines. That changes how composers work. A cue needs to hit more precise timings. There’s less space for long builds or slow fades.

Speaking of cues, this is also one for a word from our sponsor:

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The data doesn’t show that all films have got faster. It shows there’s less time between one line and the next. The rhythm has changed. Dialogue arrives more often, with fewer pauses.

In The Conversation, the longest gap between lines is almost two minutes. But across the whole film, the average gap is 2.4 seconds. That’s actually shorter than the average in 1974, which was 3.7 seconds. The lines are brief, often clipped.

Here's a short stretch from about two-thirds of the way through the film:

MARK: Better start looking.
MEREDITH: Harry.
ANN: Well, what about me?
HARRY: Why, why, what is she frightened of?
MARK: You'll see.
MEREDITH: Turn it off.
ANN: You're no fun. You're supposed to tease me, give me hints, you know.
HARRY: ...give me hints.
MEREDITH: Harry, come here...
MARK: Does it bother you?
ANN: What?
MARK: Walking around in circles.
ANN: Look , that's terrible.
MARK: He's not hurting anyone.
ANN:  Neither are we...

Film dialogue is shifting. There are more lines, delivered more quickly, and they take up more of the film’s running time. But in some ways, we’ve been here before. These patterns echo the pace and density of the 1940s.

Notes

It’s worth noting that what we’re tracking here is dialogue as recorded in subtitle files, not as written in the script. Subtitles may be edited for length, and long sentences often get split into multiple entries.

So a single monologue in the script might appear as several lines, or even fragments, in the subtitles. Given that today’s focus is on the volume and absence of dialogue, this isn’t a problem. But if you’re a screenwriter looking for guidance on how long your lines of dialogue should be, a better resource might be my 2019 study Judging Screenplays By Their Coverage, which looked at over 12,000+ screenplays.

Thanks again to Audiio for supporting this research. Their platform gives filmmakers access to high-quality music with full stems and powerful AI tools to find exactly what you need, fast. You can get 70% off your first year at audiio.com/stephenfollows with the code stephenfollows.

It was some research I had conducted six years ago which found that movies based on video games had the lowest average ratings from both critics and audiences of all script sources.

The headline I used was, “Movies based on video games are the worst. No, literally, the worst.” I admit I was trying to be cute with it, but it was accurately reflecting the maths, rather than proffering an opinion. (For the record, I have no strong feelings either way on video game movies).

The post seemed to anger a small but vocal minority, which surprised me. I thought this was fairly common knowledge, and a pretty robust finding.

From the comments, I gathered some valid complaints (it’s an old study, things have changed, and it’s all Uwe Boll’s fault) and some more… er… interesting thoughts (that box office gross is a measure of quality, that Angry Birds 2 was a good movie, and that I don’t do enough research into the film industry).

The former are exactly the kind of notes I love - another point of view that is actionable to test. So I went back to the data to check if anything had changed.

The short answer is no.

Video game movies are still ‘the worst’.

But, but, but - before the video game hordes descend en mass, let’s get a few things straight:

1. This is a mathematical calculation, not a ‘hot take’

2. These average numbers reflect a subjective, taste-based opinions.

3. And it doesn’t matter. If you like a movie, then enjoy it. If you don’t, then move along quietly.

4. There’s a business reason as to why this the case, and it’s nothing to do with video game stories or characters being inherently flawed.

Let’s check in on the maths, and then talk about why this entrenched rating pattern persists.

In short, why do video game movies get rated so poorly?

How many are we talking about?

It’s worth stating up front that we’re talking about a small number of movies. Video games have been the source of just 52 movies for which US box office data is available.

The high point was 2016, which saw six movie releases from video game IP (Assassin’s Creed, Dead Trigger, Final Fantasy XV: Kingsglaive, Pokémon the Movie: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, Ratchet and Clank, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter).

A curious quirk of the data is that while we’ve had numerous video game movies in recent years, they are representing an ever-smaller market share of movies released.

While production levels suggest declining interest, the box office tells a very different story. In recent years we’ve seen box office smashes, including:

• The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) - $1.4bn worldwide

• Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024) - $491m worldwide

• Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019) - $429m worldwide

• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) - $404m worldwide

• Uncharted (2022) - $401m worldwide

• Sonic The Hedgehog (2022) - $302m worldwide

How bad are they?

Turning to the meat of today’s question - ratings. Movies based on video games have the worst average ratings from both critics and audiences across all sources of intellectual property (IP).

The Metascore provides an average score out of 100, across many top film critics. The overall average across all movies is 58.2. The highest-rated IP sources are movies are those based on real-life events (average of 66.5), with video game adaptations scoring at the bottom at just 37.3.

And it’s not just critics. IMDb users also put video game movies last, with an average rating of just 5.47 out of 10, compared with 6.89 for movies based on real-life events.

To give you a sense of how they compare to all films, the scatter plot below shows the Metascore and IMDb rating for 14,035 movies

Video game movies are in red, and I also added movies based on musicals or operas in green as there are about the same number over this period, and they provide a nice contrast.

What do audiences say is wrong?

In order to get a better understanding of what’s going on, I gathered 10,601 audience reviews from major platforms, focusing only on low scores (5 out of 10 or less, or the equivalent). I then coded what people complained about.

Nearly every review included a complaint about the story and characters.

Plot, character development, boredom, acting, and dialogue dominate the list. Technical aspects like sound, visuals, or cinematography barely register. Even “lack of fidelity to the source” was mentioned far less often than problems with the script.

This suggests that audiences aren’t necessarily rejecting these films because they deviate from the games. They’re rejecting them because they don’t work as films.

But why does the film industry allow this pattern of poor adaptations to continue? It clearly know how to make better films but just isn’t bothering when it comes to video game adaptations.

The reason is to do with incentives.

Why do they keep turning out like this?

Hollywood is a business. Decisions are shaped by commercial potential, not artistic ambition. That means studios will spend only as much time, money and creative effort as they believe is needed to achieve their financial goals.

And when you’re trying to work out almost anything around how the film industry functions, the answer is usually the same - audience.

Let’s look again at the ratings by IP source and consider who goes to see movies in the top-rated categories.

Movies based on real-life events, factual books, and stage plays tend to attract older, more quality-aware viewers. These are people who care about storytelling, quality, and credibility (another word which comes to mind is ‘snooty’). If the product isn’t good, they’ll stay away. Hollywood refers to this type of movie as “execution dependant” and hates it. It means that if they make a bad movie, they’ll be punished.

That creates commercial pressure to get things right. If the execution is weak, box office suffers, meaning that producers seek to raise the bar from the start. More time is spent on the script; only higher-quality products make it through the myriad of gates from development through to release.

On the other end, we have movies adapted from video games, legends and past movies. These are typically aimed at younger audiences, who are more influenced by branding, trailers, social media, and peer buzz.

They prioritise fun over narrative quality or emotional depth. For studios, that’s a different kind of audience - one that doesn’t punish poor quality in the same way. They can spend heavily on marketing to inflate that brand appeal and move the dial with their deep pockets. The brand is king here, not the script.

If a studio knows it can release a brand-heavy, effects-driven action movie and still pull in big numbers, it has no incentive to aim higher. The critical response becomes secondary. The financial model doesn’t rely on strong reviews.

The result is what we see in the data. Video game movies often underperform on narrative and character development because they don’t need to do more. The business case doesn’t demand it.

Compare that to movies based on real-life stories. Those have to pass a higher bar to justify their budget. The audience is less forgiving, and the quality of the product matters more to its success.

This isn’t a creative failure. It’s a business outcome.

Epilogue - Is one man actually to blame?

One of the LinkedIn commenters threw the blame at the feet of one man - Uwe Boll.

Uwe Boll is the German director of House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, and In the Name of the King, to name but a few. He’s a controversial character not only because of his poorly-reviewed movies but also for his forthright approach to critics. In the past he’s challenged critics to boxing matches and described himself as “the only genius in the whole fucking business”.

So what do the numbers say? If we remove Uwe Boll’s contributions to the canon of movies based on video games, does that improve the picture?

Well, actually, yes.

Removing Uwe Boll’s video game movies raises the cohort’s average IMDb score to 5.62, placing them above movies based on religious texts (5.53).

So while the margins here are so small as to be essentially meaningless, the following statements are technically true:

• Uwe Boll is the reason video game movies are rated as ‘the worst’.

• Uwe Boll is keeping God from coming last.

Do with that what you will.

What I did was email Uwe.

I asked Uwe Boll why he thought video game adaptations were so poorly reviewed. He said:

Not all of them got bad reviews - but the majority and I think for two reasons:

• They are not good and for a long time b-movies in comparison to the a-list comic book based films. Now a lot of them have the same budget as the comic book films and we have especially as TV series better productions like THE LAST OF US.

• Critics who love the arthouse and Oscar winning films will never fall in love to action, sci-fi, horror genres.

That last point is especially strong. In horror we’ve seen the rise of the term “Elevated Horror” which often is a shorthand for "I liked this horror film but I don't want to admit it so I'm going to pretend it's a whole new type rather than update my worldview".

I think there's a similar impulse in how critics treat video game adaptations. Maybe we need to invent a term for such film - "Prestige Mayhem", "Refined Chaos", "Artcore Action".

I also asked Uwe what he thought about his role in bringing down the average rating of video game movies:

My films came early and got bad reviews but made money. Over time they look better and better and got a cult following. What was better HOUSE OF THE DEAD, BLOODRAYNE or BORDERLAND? HOUSE OF THE DEAD made over $20m profit.

Look at the movies today and how many very expensive movies making no box office at all and of course no home video revenues. IN THE NAME OF THE KING sold over 4m DVDs and Blu Rays worldwide - that times were great for indie filmmakers like me.

Now we have some tech companies fighting about marketshare, spending $300m on Russo Brothers Crap. Are their films better as ALONE IN THE DARK? 15 times more expensive YES….. but better? Did they ever did films like RAMPAGE, STOIC, ASSAULT ON WALLSTREET or DARFUR like me? Could they do films like this?

I’m grateful for Uwe for being open to chatting. During our conversation the topic of my work for Guinness World Record came up and Uwe semi-cryptically said “I think the one record I hold is enough“.

I didn’t know what he was referring to so afterwards I looked it up. Yup, he holds the record for Lowest-grossing movie based on a videogame.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the lessons filmmakers could take from Tyler Perry’s career. I’m starting to think the next one should be about the unstoppable Uwe Boll...

Notes

The data for today’s work came from Opus / The-Numbers, IMDb, OMDb and Metacritic. I used Opus’ definition of IP source and focused on movies which logged a domestic theatrical gross.

Today's research focuses solely on films adapted from video game IP. I excluded titles based on other types of games, such as board games (Battleship, Clue), tabletop RPGs (Dungeons & Dragons, InSpectres), and toys (My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite). The goal was to look at movies whose narrative, characters or worlds originate directly from a video game.

Uwe has a new film out soon, although not a video game adaption. He didn’t ask me to, but I offered to put the trailer here as a thank you to being open to chatting.