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

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

Last week, a row erupted over a film review in Variety of Carey Mulligan’s new movie Promising Young Woman. In an interview for The New York Times, Mulligan discussed her frustration of reading character descriptions along the lines of “Beautiful but doesn’t know it”, and with the way movies present women as sexual objects for the gratification of men. As a case in point, she highlighted a review of her new movie in Variety by Dennis Harvey which included the following: Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale – Margot Robbi ..read more

In the most recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, they covered the efforts being made to increase the representation of women in below-the-line roles. As part of this coverage, I was asked to crunch the data on the number of women working in specific film departments. So I built a dataset of all feature films released in US cinemas over the past twenty years and sought to calculate the representation of women in below-the-line roles.  There is much more about my methodology in the Notes section at the end of this piece. The big picture Let’s start by looking at the big picture for films ..read more

Last week, I shared research I have conducted into the number of short films made over the past two decades.  I focused on live-action shorts which had played at least once at any film festival. While production levels are interesting, they were not the original reason I conducted the project.  I was responding to requests to look at the gender of short filmmakers. I have studied gender in the film industry a number of times in the past (links at the end of the article) but only briefly with regard to short films.  Shorts are an important data point to track when seeking to buil ..read more

Last week, I looked at producers’ careers and this week I am going to use the same data to look at how the picture differs between male and female film producers. This research harnesses my dataset of every feature film released between 1949 and 2018 inclusive. This includes 631,365 producer credits across 274,991 films and 269,385 individual producers. For today’s article, I’m going to assume that readers are familiar with the different types of producing credits.  If you would like a quick primer then head over to last week’s article, entitled On average, how many films does a prod ..read more

Last week, I looked at the average number of films a director is likely to make in their career, and also how many directors work on the average film. Today I am taking into account the gender of directors and looking at how the experiences of male and female directors differ. As a quick reminder, my dataset is of all fiction feature films produced around the world between 1949 and 2018 (over a quarter of a million movies).  You’ll find more detail on this in the Notes section at the end of the article and in last week’s piece using the same dataset. What percentage of film directors are ..read more