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

I was contacted by a reader who asked whether “female audiences respond more positively to feature films that have at their heart a female creative team? In particular, a female director and writer“. It’s a fascinating question as it speaks to the significance of the creative voice(s) behind films and how they connect with us as viewers. One of the (many) reasons why I believe passionately about equality of opportunity is that if we preordain that only one group of people get to control the creation of our shared stories then we rob everyone of interesting perspectives. The people who share th ..read more

As we start to ease out of the ‘pandemic emergency’ phase, I’m getting an increasing number of questions about the effects the pandemic had on the film business. The short answer to almost everything I’m asked is – it’s too early to tell. When the dust has settled, it’s likely that the changes we’ve experienced in the past three years will fall into one of three categories: Long-term trends. Changes which were already taking place and so once the pandemic is over, we should expect them to return to their longer-term trend. One such example is likely to be the increase in the number of films b ..read more

Last week I investigated if there was a link between the number of people thanked in a movie’s credits and the quality of the movie. This week I am testing a related industry truism; namely, that a greater number of producers is an indication that a movie is more likely to be bad I have in the past shown that movies are increasingly less likely to generate a profit as the number of producers increases. But what of quality? Does having more people on hand to share the producing duties result in better movies? Or do too many producers spoil the set? To answer this I studied 75,903 producing cred ..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

Last week I looked at the popularity of various first names in movies over the past two decades. The process involved building up a vast database of acting credits, noting both the gender of the fictional role and of the performer representing them on screen. This led to some readers getting in touch to ask what else can be done with that dataset. Two different readers enquired about whether the gender of the directors affected the percentage of women in the cast. It’s a great question and so I took a look. As a reminder, this is looking at 440,956 cast credits across 8,415 movies released bet ..read more

As regular readers will know, last year I was hired by a film producer to “write” a feature film screenplay entirely using artificial intelligence (more on that here). One of the challenges that I, and my collaborator Dr Eliel Camargo Molina, faced along the way was getting the AI stuck in self-created ruts. These were aspects of the creation process whereby it would keep giving very similar results. For a time, about half of the ideas it generated were about characters called Sarah. Sarah feels like a common name but it certainly was over-indexing in our outputs. So I conducted a quick data s ..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

At the core of any movie-watching experience are the emotions you feel. 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 ..read more

Regular readers will know that I’ve conducted a number of research projects into horror films over the years. Despite not being much of a watcher of horror movies, the business side fascinates me. The genre seems to break many of the rules of thumb which apply to other genres and deserves its own economic study. For example, The Black Phone is currently doing great business in theatres, on a modest $18 million budget. I was asked on Twitter if this is another illustration of the idea that “the less you spend, the more you make” with horror movies. I went back to my past (pre-pandemic) data to ..read more