Stephen Follows

Did Parasite change how audiences think about South Korean cinema?

I crunched eight years of Wikipedia data and 10 million reviews across nine Oscar-winning countries and 12,267 films to find out whether the Parasite effect was real or not.
Stephen Follows

Are two-hour movies the new normal?

To aid an episode of Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town with the Hollywood producer Todd Garner, I was asked to crunch the numbers on longer movies. It’s a question I’ve looked at before on this site, ...
Stephen Follows

Why do films have so many producers?

For most of movie history, a movie had one producer. In the 1940s and 1950s, the vast majority of movies credited just one producer. Even through the 1970s, producer teams were small and stable. That ...
Stephen Follows

How often does one person write, direct, produce, and star in a movie?

Earlier this year, YouTuber Markiplier released Iron Lung, a $3.6 million horror film he wrote, directed, edited, and stars in. The film went on to gross more than $50 million at the worldwide box ...
Stephen Follows

Movies have become more intense (but not in the way you think)

It’s a common claim that movies today feel more intense than they used to. In a world of multiple screens, endless distractions and an attention span of… wait ...
Stephen Follows

What does the patent behind Netflix’s acquisition of Ben Affleck’s AI company actually do?

This article is part of my ‘Big Ideas’ series, in which I explore the evolving landscape of the film industry. Each instalment combines data, research, and analysis to go deep on a trend, idea or case ...
Stephen Follows

Why the film business is considerably riskier than it used to be

This is part one of a two-part deep dive into how the film industry is changing. This one focuses on the adverse effects, with the follow-up next week focusing on the positives. So strap in, this is ...
Stephen Follows

What rules govern Hallmark Christmas movies?

I’ve written about the data behind Hallmark movies a few times before. So it was great fun to sit down with Pulitzer prize-winning data journalist (and good friend) Walt Hickey of NumLock to talk all ...
Stephen Follows

Why are modern films framing actors’ faces differently than they used to?

Films evolve in many small ways that are easy to miss if you are not looking for them. One area I had not studied before is shot composition. It is such a basic building block of visual storytelling ...
Stephen Follows

No-one knows how much movies cost to make anymore

When people begin exploring data on films, one of the first things they look for is the production budget. It sounds simple enough: how much did the film cost to make? Knowing that number helps when ...
Stephen Follows

What’s the biggest barrier to cinema-going?

This article is part of my ‘Big Ideas’ series, in which I explore the evolving landscape of the film industry. Each instalment combines data, research, and analysis to go deep on a trend, idea or case ...
Stephen Follows

How is the horror genre changing?

Last Friday I ran another event with Jason Blum and the Blumhouse team, this time in New York. We were looking at how the horror is changing, and how we have to evolve the way we think about horror.