Trends of the Film Industry

Throughout this blog post I will be looking at many of the trends within the Film Industry.

Below is a document about the trends of genres within films. There are some interesting theories on the rise and fall of many genres, relating to 20 out of the 28 genres that imdb.com uses to catergorise each film that is released from 1967 - 2008. Interestingly, the tables at the end of the document show that Action and Adventure categories are steadily increasing whilst other genres such as biography, documentary and drama have steadily decreased in number from the Top 20 of each year.

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Below is a link to a site that uses information from over 2,000 webpages to make up statistics about the Film Industry from 1995 - 2012, all of which show some big trends year to year. Since 1995, the revenue from films range from $1.25 billion to over $1.5 billion, with the highest revenue so far being 2002, whilst 2012 has already beaten 2011 total and still has 3 months left of revenue to collect, so depending on the films released over the coming months, 2012 could be the biggest revenue year to date.

A very interesting trend is that the highest rating for the top grossing film of each year since 1995 show that PG is the highest rating that was given to those movies. Children obviously make up a large amount of the audience, whilst they will probably bring their parents to view the films, adding even more movie-goers. Additionally, from the results it shows that PG-13 is the third most popular rating yet is the highest grossing category by over $30 billion.

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Below is a very casual website about films but the article points out five trends that are ruining the Film Industry.

1. Sequels - Shows that publishers are more likely to endorse a film that is more likely to succeed then to take a chance on something original.
2. Adaption/Remake - Similar to the above, publishers are more likely to endorse a film that has already proved successful either in a film form or other medias such as the current comic book trend.
3. Piracy - This will always be a major problem, however, the Film Industry is still grossing billions in profit, so the effects could be negliable.
4. Knock-Offs - Basically films that are of poorer quality than their counterparts. One example is Battle: Los Angeles (Successful film) to Battle of Los Angeles (Poor quality films), so basically leeching of other film's success.
5. Rating System - The system is flawed as it can decide the success of the films thus meaning that parts of films are cut out such as The Hunger Games that had 7 seconds cut out due to the blood violence, so to make it completely appropriate for a PG-13 rating, those 7 seconds were cut out.

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There are numerous research papers and articles on the internet about the trends within the Film Industry that it would be impossible to comment on them all, so above show three of the most important research into the trend of the Film Industry.