StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry

In my latest Film Data Scientist video, I’m going deep on “The Greatest Movies Ever Made”©®™ to understand what makes a movie great and why that classification may slip over time.

I am uploading new video essays every couple of weeks, so make sure you’re

Earlier this year, the head of the Berlin Film Festival, Tricia Tuttle, was criticised by Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, for standing next to filmmakers wearing keffiyehs and brandishing Pales...

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 Brits (when Spider-Man, Superman and Batman were all Englishmen), and the latest “invasion” is coming from the Irish.

But just because journalists can sell a piece about it d...

Ted Hope reached out to ask:

What percentage of first-time feature filmmakers made a second film within five years?

A damn fine question. Is it talent? Connections? Money? Luck? A famous parent and a good haircut?

So I turned to the data. I took every person whose first f...

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 superhero movies.

On the one hand, it’s great to see so many people get the r...