Last week I gave a keynote at the Locarno Film Festival, following a request by the organisers to give the well-connected audience a ‘slap in the face’. This is exactly the kind of brief I relish, so I covered the hard realities of profitability, gatekeepers, and nepotism.
To prepare, I gathered the biographies of the 6,921 people who wrote, directed, or starred in the 100 top-grossing films of each year since 2000 (2,600 films in total). I then looked at who had a family member already in the entertainment industry before they joined.
I was excited to share the results, although I wasn’t quite ready for the reaction. As the Hollywood Reporter put it “the surprise, or shock, of the audience was audible”. I thought it was fairly well known just how nepotistic the top of Hollywood is, but it seems that most people were not expecting the scale the data revealed.
So let’s dig into the findings.
What counts as a ‘nepo baby’?
The word ‘nepotism’ entered English in 1669 via a scandalous book called Il nepotismo di Roma, about the popes’ habit of making cardinals of their ‘nephews’ (itself just a polite word for their bastards). The insult ‘nepotism baby’ has been in print since at least 1915, when a Missouri newspaper used it to attack a state governor for stuffing the payroll with relatives.
The earliest traceable use of its newer form, ‘nepo baby’, is a December 2020 tweet about Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, and Urban Dictionary had an entry by July 2021. In December 2022, New York Magazine put a gaggle of famous actors’ faces on babies’ bodies and declared it ‘The Year of the Nepo Baby’.
While the term ‘nepo baby’ is fun and evocative, it’s a little imprecise for the data research, so instead I am going to refer to people who have family ties within the industry.
I counted someone as having family ties if a parent or close blood relative (i.e. a sibling, grandparent, uncle, aunt or cousin) worked in film or television before that person’s own entry into the industry.
I excluded spouses and partners as it takes most people years to get into the industry, so a partner who works in film is far more likely to be a consequence of being in the industry than the way in. Secondly, I also excluded relatives who joined up after our subject did. There’s more detail in the Notes at the end of this article.
How commonplace is it for film folk to have family ties in the industry?
Of the people I studied, roughly a quarter had a family member already in the film or TV industry before they joined.
Top-billed actors lead on 28%. Directors are close behind on 26%. Writers come out lower, on 18%, though they are also by far the least written-about group, so there’s a greater margin of error.
All this means that when Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, declared herself ‘an OG Nepo Baby’ and wrote ‘I am not alone. There are many of us’, she was spot on. There are many of them - about one in four.
How many films have connected creatives?
As well as helping the individuals themselves, a film project can really benefit from having an industry veteran rooting for it.
So let’s flip from people to films. For each of the 2,600 films, I counted how many people with family ties sat in its core creative team, i.e. the director, the credited writers and the top three billed actors.
30% of top films have no nepo baby anywhere in their core team. 36% carry exactly one, 23% carry two, and 11% have three or more.
Put the other way round, seven in ten of the biggest films of the past 25 years had at least one person with industry family at the heart of their creative team. This was the headline stat that shocked the folks in Locarno.
Is it getting better?
While the term ‘nepo baby’ might be new, nepotism in Hollywood most certainly is not. Universal founder Carl Laemmle reportedly kept more than 70 relatives on the payroll (including making his son head of production as a 21st birthday present), and the Barrymore acting dynasty was on its third generation even before talkies arrived.
The rate of already-connected directors has not wavered for two and a half decades. The most recent period I looked at (2020-24) saw a slight dip, but not because things improved but because the composition of ‘top-grossing movies’ changed due to the pandemic. Bigger movies were held back, and more indie movies cracked the ‘Top 100’.
Does it help in the longer-term?
Having a leg up at the start of your career is not the same as having a career-long advantage. When you listen to actual nepo babies talk about their experience, they tend to reflect the same idea: that it’s only an advantage of breaking in. Lily-Rose Depp told Elle magazine:
Maybe you get your foot in the door, but you still just have your foot in the door. There's a lot of work that comes after that.
Gwyneth Paltrow said much the same:
you get access other people don't have, so the playing field is not level in that way. However... once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good.
So I tested if the data supports this idea. And it does.
Films directed by industry-family directors have a median adjusted domestic gross of $84m, compared with $87m for films directed by everyone else.
The films were also not any better, according to IMDb audience ratings.
So what does a famous surname actually buy?
I narrowed in on the 1,804 directors whose debut feature since 2000 attracted a meaningful audience, whether or not their career went anywhere afterwards.
Connected directors get their first film made younger (a median age of 33 against 35), and those who eventually reached the top 100 climbed faster (a median of 8 years from first feature against 10).
Most of all, they get more chances. 72% went on to a second feature against 66% of everyone else, and their median career is three features against two.
Family ties get you a modest start earlier, keep you in the game longer, and buy you another roll of the dice when a film disappoints. The surname is more of a safety net than some kind of accelerator or guarantee.
Talent, it turns out, is not hereditary. Access is.
Director Jason Reitman, son of Ivan, put it rather pithily when telling NPR about the reception of his first film:
People presumed that nepotism would pave the road for my career. And nepotism let me down, frankly.
Epilogue
The point of today’s research is not to imply that having family ties is inherently a bad thing, or that the people who benefit from them are villains. If you grow up around the industry, you absorb it. You get a chance to learn how sets work, how deals get made, and talk with experienced folk who can advise you on your own journey.
The data is highlighting what those advantages buy. I.e a higher chance of being ‘lucky’ enough to get a shot at showing what you can do, and another shot when the first one misses.
The real question is not about the individuals. It is about fairness for everyone else, and what kind of industry we want. One where talent finds its way in, or one where the door opens fastest for those born nearest to it.
Notes
The film panel is the 2,600 top-grossing films released domestically from 2000 to 2025 inclusive, i.e. roughly the top 100 per year, with box office measured as domestic (US and Canada) gross adjusted for ticket-price inflation. So this is not strictly a study of Hollywood; it is a study of the films that topped the North American box office, wherever they were made. The underlying film, credit and people data draws on Wikipedia, IMDb, OMDb, TMDb and The Numbers. ‘Stars’ means the top three billed actors per film.
Background data came from public web sources, producing a structured record with cited sources for every person. Every claim of industry family was rechecked by a separate verification pass using fresh searches; claims that failed that check were excluded. Family background could be established for 87% of directors, 76% of stars and 37% of writers, and the percentages in this article are shares of those people. Writers are the least publicly documented group by a distance, which is why their number carries the least weight.
The debut-director group is every director whose first feature film was released between 2000 and 2024 and has at least 10,000 IMDb ratings, a floor chosen so the group is documented well enough to study. That yields 1,804 directors, of whom 566 also appear in the main panel. Career outcomes (second features, later top-100 films, ages) come from public filmographies. Film quality is measured by IMDb audience ratings, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and the quality-adjusted box office comparisons split films into equal thirds by rating and compare medians within each third.
Survivorship matters. Everyone in this data already succeeded, so these figures measure how common industry family is among people who made it, not how much a connection improves your odds of making it. The debut group softens this but does not remove it: its members all got a noticed first film made. The box office comparisons are between films that all reached the top of the market.
Would love to see a similar study for novels, but for novels I think you would need to include a longer list of family ties. Does the author have a family member who published, who worked as a university professor, who worked in publishing, or who worked in other media.
How did your audience react to your keynote?