Stephen Follows

What the data says about who should be the next James Bond

I scored 460 British and Irish actors against six decades of Bond casting decisions to see who actually fits the brief, and ...
Stephen Follows

Which film directors have the most consistent visual style?

I crunched the data on the films of 190 directors (who had made at least four movies) and calculated 'When you line up a ...
Stephen Follows

Is the over-50 action star boom peaking already?

At CinemaCon last week, five of the most-hyped announcements from the major studios were headlined by actors aged 58 or older. Top Gun 3 with Tom Cruise at 63 Highlander with Russell Crowe at 62 and ...
Stephen Follows

What do Cannes first-timers get wrong?

Here is a 36-page guide I wrote for Raindance on how to best navigate the Cannes Film Festival and Marché du Film. Download your free copy below: Every spring, around this time, my inbox develops a ...
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

Did Parasite change how audiences think about South Korean cinema?

Next month’s Cannes Film Festival will see a very strong showing from the South Korean contingent. Park Chan-wook is presiding over the jury, and the country has two films In Competition: Hope (호프) is ...