I followed the careers of 1,765 directors of top grossing films to work out who gets another go after a first film that doesn ...

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 went through every craft in post-production, from VFX and de-ageing to voice, dubbing and the cutting room, checking the AI ...

I studied the data behind 2,271 movies to reveal why Hollywood's big budget fare is often so poor. It's not random but the ...

My latest Film Data Scientist video, this time looking at the numbers behind the age of directors. If you would like a slightly more… ahem… sensible reading of ...

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 ...

Erwin M. Schmidt reached out to point me to a new study of the survival rates of on-screen geologists in movies titled “Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel”. Four geologists at the University ...

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 ...

Five years ago, 7,000 Hollywood writers fired their agents over a practice called packaging and won. That fight, though, was almost entirely about television, not film. The most pernicious version of ...