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

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 ...

One of the biggest forces in the film industry (beyond familial nepotism) is your professional network. The more people you have backing you and your projects, the better your outcomes are likely to ...

De Luca and Abdy, we hear, ran Digger through their analytical comps system. The combo of Cruise and Iñárritu justified a $125M production greenligiht. Three weeks before Digger opened, De Luca told ...

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 ...

Digger, starring Tom Cruise, opens today. Apparently it cost $125 million to make, but Deadline’s current tracking estimates its ‘domestic debut prospects’ at ‘around $20M’. Deadline is not alone - ...

I’m a huge fan, and if you like the kinds of things I write about, then you’ll love his work. So today I’m giving the floor to Daniel, sharing one of his posts on the future of theatrical. Few ...

If you’re an avid reader of culture journalists, then it seems as though there is always some country or other “taking over Hollywood”. In the 2000s it was the Australians. In the 2010s it was the ...

I saw Spider-Man: Far From Necessary over the weekend and, like everyone else in the cinema, I sat through the entire end crawl to watch the ‘post-credits scene’ that has become so ubiquitous among ...

Every year, tens of thousands of screenwriters pay to enter contests. A major selling point for them is that winning (or placing highly) will mean that the right people will finally read your script.

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 ...