How tall does Tom Cruise look in his movies? I measured 8 million frames from 2,000 films to find out whether Hollywood's ...

At every grade, the films watched mostly by women get the lower IMDb rating. Among films graded A or A+ on opening night, the ...

A few days ago, a new UK film distributor, True Brit Entertainment, went into administration. It had been launched under three years ago, intending to co-finance $150m of British films. In the end, it ...

Twelve US states have just ordered the new Paramount / Warner studio to release 30 films a year. I crunched the data on 170,279 films to see what happened to the middle they are trying to bring back ...

I had the privilege of seeing Terminator 2 in the cinema a few weeks ago, in a 4K restoration released to celebrate its 35th anniversary. Beyond providing a terrifying context to the very real ...

In early 1986, Frank Oz held preview screenings of Little Shop of Horrors in San Jose. He stayed faithful to the musical it was based on, so the movie climaxed with both Seymour and Audrey dying, the ...

Last week I gave a keynote at the Locarno Film Festival, following a request by the organisers to give the well-connected audience a ‘slap in the face’. This is exactly the kind of brief I relish, so ...

My latest Film Data Scientist video, this time investigating why so many film posters seem to have forgotten the names of their lead actors. I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks ...

Marketing is a key part of any film’s success, but training and case studies are much more likely to focus on the filmmaking than on film promotion. So I went looking for real-world examples of indie ...

Let’s start with the seemingly incongruous situation. Hollywood as an industry has been honing its craft for well over a century. Given the power, prestige, and money on offer, it attracts some of the ...

Since 2005, Franklin Leonard has run an annual survey of film industry insiders, asking for their favourite screenplays of the year that have not yet been made. The result, the Black List, has become ...

“We’re moments away from uploading a script and making movies!” (This is usually followed by the person trying to get me to look at a demo of their “ground-breaking” vibe-coded AI-to-storyboard ...