Cinema
Movies, film, and the business of cinema
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Who Actually Makes the World’s Movies? Not Hollywood.
India certified 2,886 feature films in its most recent count, Nigeria classified 1,185, and China put out 792 — all well ahead of the roughly 569 titles that hit U.S. and Canadian theaters in 2024. Hollywood dominates box-office revenue. It doesn’t dominate production volume, and hasn’t for years.
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The Golden Rectangle at the Movies: 1.618 vs the Screens We Actually Use
The golden ratio is 1.618. Cinema shoots in 1.85, 2.39, and IMAX’s 1.43. We drew them to scale and asked whether the ‘perfect rectangle’ means anything on screen.
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Photo Finish: The Weeks Two Movies Split the Box Office Down the Middle
The closest box-office race in 20 years: Toy Story 4 beat Spider-Man: Far From Home by two-tenths of a point. The rare weeks two films tied for #1.
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Does a Bigger Budget Buy a Bigger Weekend? Sort Of — But Less Than You’d Think
We plotted every event movie’s budget against how completely it dominated its week. The link is real but loose – a 0.43 correlation. Money helps far less than Hollywood’s spending implies.
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The Golden Drought: When the Box Office Went Years Without a Geuse
Just 57 films in 20 years have seized 61.8% of a box-office week. They used to be separated by years-long droughts. Now they cluster. A timeline of the rarest event in moviegoing.
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Comeback Kings: The Rare Films That Clawed Back to #1
Losing the box-office throne is almost always permanent. Only 22 films in 20 years lost #1 and then retook it. How a movie climbs back on top.
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The Two-Titan Collision: What Happens When Giants Open the Same Week
Every so often the release calendar produces a collision: two enormous films opening into the same few days, each one large enough to headline a week on its own. The fantasy — the one that launched a thousand “Barbenheimer” think-pieces — is that both films win, splitting the box office evenly and lifting the whole…
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The Box Office’s Most Contested Months — and Why the Biggest Weekends Are the Least Competitive
When is the box office actually a fight? Not summer. The gap between No. 1 and No. 2 is widest in May (29 points) and tightest in January and August – because when a giant opens, it doesn’t compete, it clears the room. The real photo finishes happen in the quiet months.
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Does Owning the Box Office Actually Pay? The Return on Every Star Tier
Dominating the box office and making money aren’t the same question. Across twenty years, the median film returns 3.8x its budget at the Mini-geuse tier, 4.3x at Betelgeuse, and 6.0x at Geuse – but the single most profitable films are cheap horror originals that never reached the top.
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Star Wars Joins the 70mm Revival — and IMAX Says at Least Four More Secret Films Are Shooting on Film for 2027
The Odyssey proved the demand; now IMAX is filling the pipeline. CEO Rich Gelfond says at least four unannounced films will get a true 70mm release in 2027 — and the first revealed is Star Wars: Starfighter, shot on IMAX film for the saga’s 50th anniversary, plus a 70mm re-release of the 1977 original.