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

My work covers a range of topics; some studies look at pressing issues of inequality or untangle the dense web of the film industry’s economic frameworks. 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 movies released since 1911. Given that I had built the dataset and systems ..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

Sometimes things are so silly you just can’t make them up. The UK government is trying to bring in a policy to force all students to study maths until the age of 18. In a hurried attempt to back up this policy, they reached out to a number of people who use maths in unusual ways, including me. I agreed to share my views on why maths is important and the Prime Minister’s office planned to include me as a case study to defend their policy. The only slight problems with this plan were… I don’t agree with the policy. I only studied maths until the age of 16. They couldn’t find anyone else to do i ..read more