The film industry has largely stopped sharing production budgets, leaving less than 4% of movies with any public data, and when tested, many of the figures we do have prove to be unreliable.

I crunched the data on 75,903 producing credits across 8,415 films in order to discover whether more producers lead to better movies or not.

A few years ago, David Wilkinson got in touch to ask for advice on his crowdfunding campaign. One of the topics he wanted to chat about was the ‘cost’ of offering a “Thanks” credit to his backers.

When I published my first piece on standing ovations at film festivals a few weeks ago, I expected it to be a niche topic. Tricia Tuttle, the director of the Berlinale, had asked whether applause ...

When I was making short films twenty years ago, it seemed really important to carefully curate which film festivals you gave your premiere status to (i.e. the first time your film is screened to the ...

I often get asked if there is a formula for making money with movies. The short answer is that there isn’t one, and even if there were, it would soon stop working due to audience fatigue. There are ...

I have been asked for years whether “Go Woke, Go Broke” is true for movies. So it was a real honour to be able to give the keynote today at the Zurich Summit and answer the question. Over the last few ...

There’s a lot of advice out there about ideal running times for festivals, and most of it boils down to one thing: keep it short. A while back I interviewed over 500 film festival directors. When I ...

Colour is one of the quickest ways a poster can tell you what kind of film it’s selling. Before you’ve read the title or registered the actors, your brain has already clocked the palette and filed it ...

Most people would assume that once a major studio backs a film and cameras roll, the release is locked in. But a growing number of finished films are being pulled before they reach an audience.