Today, I’m checking in with the data behind a question I get asked often. Almost every week, a reader or journalist asks me why modern movies aren’t as original as they used to be. So 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 lic ..read more

Some of my work seeks to answer important questions about social issues such as inequality and unfairness. Other studies seek to understand and explain complex systems, such as the dynamics of film distribution and employment. This article is not one of them. It’s one of the other ones. By which I mean it’s looking at something pointless, like when I recruited a bunch of students to test cinema popcorn or used data to determine whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Today’s study is an offshoot of work I was doing for Guinness World Records which involved delving into the dialogue of 72,405 mo ..read more

This is the second half of a mini-project I set myself to pay penance for not paying enough attention during film school. In a previous article, I examined when colour movies became more prevalent than black-and-white ones. Today, I am considering the introduction of sound. My dataset contains all live-action feature films I could find—377,967 to be precise—released between 1900 and 2023. I then looked at whether any part of the film had sounded synchronised to the picture (i.e., not those that expected a live pianist or organist to accompany it in the theatre). When did sound take over movies ..read more

Although I attended film school, (a) it was two decades ago; and (b) I shamefully skipped many of the classes on film history. As time has passed, I have become increasingly aware of just how poor of a decision it was to eschew the chance to learn more about the early days of film, and to learn from fascinating film scholars. And so, I have set myself the mission to seek out older films to watch and to teach myself about the early days of film. At the Berlin Film Festival a few weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of watching a new restoration of Ernst Lubitsch’s black-and-white classic ‘Lo ..read more

The film industry is pretty slow to change and usually opts to do whatever it was doing last year rather than embrace change. This is never more true than in the area of employment and the roles on-set. However, two types of roles which have popped into being almost overnight are the intrepid staff of “The Covid Department” and Intimacy Coordinators. While the former are a dying breed, the latter are going from strength to strength. I wanted to get a handle on just how prevalent Intimacy Coordinators were in modern moviemaking, so I turned to the data. I studied 385,723 live-action fiction mov ..read more

In just over a week, many of the world’s film industry professionals will be trying to keep warm in Berlin. That’s because it’s the start of the annual ten-day film industry gathering in Berlin which is half film festival (the “Berlinale”) and half trade show (the “European Film Market” or EFM).  In a previous article, I looked at the films ‘In Competition’ over the past six decades of the Berlin Film Festival so today I thought I would focus on the experience of actually attending the festival and market. The EFM was steadily growing in size each year but was majorly affe ..read more

Warning: This article contains 17 uses of the f-word, 9 uses of the s-word and 8 uses of the c-word, among other examples of foul language. Even the graphs are graphic. You have been fucking warned. Like last week, this is another offshoot of my work for Guinness World Records, although the vast majority of what you’re about to read won’t make it into the 2025 World Records book for reasons that will become extremely obvious. What began as an investigation into the ‘Sweariest Movie’ grew into a much wider exploration of swearing within movies worldwide. I will post a longer explanation of my ..read more

One of my most enjoyable side jobs is the work I do for Guinness World Records. They work with wonderful Bruce Nash at The Numbers for the headline records (Top Grossing Movie, Biggest Budget, etc) and so they look to me for the slightly… stranger World Records. One such record I delivered recently looked at James Bond movies. Specifically, the James Bond movie mentioned its own title most frequently in the dialogue. The answer is revealed later in this article, but for a bit of fun, I’d like you to spend a moment to ponder what the answer might be. It really makes you think about how movie d ..read more

David Wilkinson got in touch yesterday asking for advice on his new crowdfunding campaign. One of the topics he wanted to chat about was the ‘cost’ of offering a “Thanks” credit to his backers. This involves awarding someone who backs the film a credit on the movie under the “With Thanks” section. This name check would appear at the end of the movie and, crucially, on IMDb. On the face of it, there is no cost to offering an almost infinite number of these as it would just be a case of a longer end credit crawl and IMDb doesn’t charge for listing credits. However, David brought up an anecdote f ..read more

For the past six months, I’ve been working in secret on a real-world experiment. Today, I’m delighted to begin sharing what we’ve been doing, why we’ve been doing it and to be part of a larger public debate about the questions it raises. I teamed up with a particle physicist and together we secured a professional script development deal to create a feature film script entirely written by artificial intelligence (AI). There is a lot to share about this project, and so I can’t hope to cover it all in this article. Instead, I’m going to introduce the project and tell you what’s coming out soon. H ..read more