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 ...

Twelve US states have just ordered the new Paramount / Warner studio to release 30 films a year. I crunched the data on ...

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 ...

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 ...

My latest Film Data Scientist video, this time quantifying the sheer scale of Steven Spielberg. ’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, so make sure you’re subscribed ...

Predicting who will be the next James Bond has become one of the great communal conversations. Whether that’s via prediction markets, professional bookmakers, newspaper headlines, or just down the pub ...

To aid an episode of Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town with the Hollywood producer Todd Garner, I was asked to crunch the numbers on longer movies. It’s a question I’ve looked at before on this site, ...

For most of movie history, a movie had one producer. In the 1940s and 1950s, the vast majority of movies credited just one producer. Even through the 1970s, producer teams were small and stable. That ...