I asked 38 agents, managers and assistants who read cold scripts what earns a reply and what gets deleted unread ...

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 ...

I’m working on a big project around the Oscars, and it's revealing just how sparse the research landscape is on Oscar voters. For example, there is only one reliable source for the average age of ...

A couple of years ago, Sony re-released a movie that had flopped only a few months earlier. Morbius had died at the box office in April 2022, opening to $39.1m and then dropping 74% in its second ...

A year ago I spoke at the Creators Conference of the German Producers Alliance in Munich, detailing the interesting bifurcation in German cinema. (You can read my article write-up here Why German ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I have received a few questions from readers about the path to becoming a top movie director, prompted by a recent Substack post entitled “The Annenberg Ouroboros” by Hollywood Gadfly. The chart below ...