I traced the backing behind 3,044 features selected by Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto to find out how many got ...

De Luca and Abdy, we hear, ran Digger through their analytical comps system. The combo of Cruise and Iñárritu justified a $125M production greenligiht. Three weeks before Digger opened, De Luca told ...

Last week, I got sent a tweet accusing DiscussingFilm of never posting the Rotten Tomatoes score for a new Universal film, or a single negative review, implying Universal had paid them off. It's not ...

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of watching American Graffiti (1973) at the ActOne Cinema in Acton, and then listening to Mark Kermode quiz Walter Murch about how he built its sound. Murch ...

In early 1986, Frank Oz held preview screenings of Little Shop of Horrors in San Jose. He stayed faithful to the musical it was based on, so the movie climaxed with both Seymour and Audrey dying, the ...

Despite the massive changes in production, exhibition, and home entertainment over the past twenty years, it’s always surprising to me how similar the sales side of the film business has remained. The ...

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 ...

Last week I gave a keynote at the Locarno Film Festival, following a request by the organisers to give the well-connected audience a ‘slap in the face’. This is exactly the kind of brief I relish, so ...

Every year, tens of thousands of screenwriters pay to enter contests. A major selling point for them is that winning (or placing highly) will mean that the right people will finally read your script.

Marketing is a key part of any film’s success, but training and case studies are much more likely to focus on the filmmaking than on film promotion. So I went looking for real-world examples of indie ...

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 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 ...