A few months ago, Elizabeth and Nitza from The Writers Lab approached me with a simple question: “What percentage of movies are written by women over the age of 40?” The Writers Lab is an organisation set up specifically to nurture the talent of female screenwriters over the age of 40, via workshops, labs and advocacy.  They describe their mission as being to “amplify the voices of women in their prime whose stories have not been told… working toward a new landscape where the female narrative is in equal proportion to the male narrative”. A fascinating question in support of a good cause ..read more

Sex in movies is a hot topic. Only last month, my research caused a substantial amount of conversation online when I teamed up with The Economist to track the level of sex in movies over the past quarter century. I found that levels of sexual content on the big screen have fallen by 40% since 2000. Today, I am looking at the extent to which censorship bodies around the world appear to be bothered by levels of sexy stuff in movie theatres (the “sin” in “cinema”, if you will). I built up a database of almost 6,000 feature films released since 2000 and found the ratings given to each movie in 44 ..read more

I have previously studied gender representation across all acting roles (see Do films directed by women have more women in the cast?), so today I will zero in on particular jobs, as revealed by the credit the actor received. I identified 41 jobs that appear most frequently in movie credits, such as dancer, police officer, reporter, doctor, and detective. I then identified all the credited uses and the gender of the person playing that role. You can read more about my methodology at the end of the article. This data gives us a fascinating insight into what roles filmmakers are willing to give t ..read more

Last week, a group of friends and I watched Last Action Hero (1993). The script started life as a satire on dumb action moves (its original title was “Extremely Violent“) but was so heavily re-written during development and production that (a) its original writers lost their full writing credit, and (b) it became the exact thing it was looking to send up – i.e. a forgettable dumb action movie. During the many dull moments we had to chat while the movie draaagggggggged on, the conversation turned to dialogue clichés. Last Action Zero included a number of classics, including “This is not happen ..read more

I have been attending the film Cannes Film Festival for almost twenty years, and over that time, I’ve heard some pretty mad things. I used to keep a loose list of the funniest and most revealing comments, as a part of my lessons to film students and to share with readers of my film data newsletter. I have been asked a number of times to combine them in one place, so today, for the first time, I present my collection of very real, very revealing things I have overheard at the Cannes Film Festival. More serious stuff first Between earwigging on public conversations, I have also found a bit of ti ..read more

A couple of years ago, I looked into whether erotic thrillers were indeed dying out or if it was just availability bias due to the fact that the main examples which come to mind are mostly from the 1980s. More recently, Rachel Lloyd from The Economist asked me to look more deeply at one of the charts, which indicated a decline in the levels of sexual content in movies. This prompted me to update and deepen the dataset to help us examine what’s happening and speculate on why. You can read Rachel’s article in The Economist here, and I’ll share the data below. We looked at the top 250 grossing f ..read more

Last week, I examined the origin of movie scripts, showing that Original Screenplays still account for over half of all movies — the same figure it was forty years ago. This prompted a few readers to write in and ask whether there is now a greater prevalence of movie sequels. I’m glad you asked. Are movie sequels on the rise? Turning to the same dataset of all movies released in US cinemas, we can see that sequels have been taking a smaller percentage of the production figures over the past forty years, albeit with a small rise over the past five years or so. Sequels were twice as frequent in ..read more

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