I tracked every turn in the stories of 7,225 films to see how many follow the shape the screenwriting books teach.

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of watching American Graffiti (1973) at the ActOne Cinema in Acton, and then listening to Mark Kermode quiz Walter Murch about how he built its sound. Murch ...

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 ...

Last month, I wrote about the career paths top directors took to direct a major motion picture. One finding was that women were less likely than men to make a second film on the same scale. A few of ...

In Die Hard, Holly Gennaro asks Hans Gruber, “What’s going on?”, only to receive the less-than-clear response, “The child is about to touch the stove.” Poetic thieves aside, Reese Witherspoon has a ...

This isn’t a new data study. It’s something I’ve been working on for the past few months, and I’m very proud of it. I’ve made a book with the artist Miriam Elia. It’s called We make a movie, it comes ...

Earlier this week, the national board of SAG-AFTRA (the actors’ union) voted to keep Duncan Crabtree-Ireland in charge until June 2032 and to add ‘CEO’ to his title. The announcement didn’t mention ...

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 ...

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 ...

This article is part of my ‘Big Ideas’ series, in which I explore the evolving landscape of the film industry. Each instalment will focus on one of the key shifts highlighted below, digging deeper ...

The horror genre is a perennial favourite among filmmakers. The general perception is that they are fun to make, achievable on the lowest budgets and can earn a lot of money. The final item on that ...