Number of films made each year

[sevenarts]

This is a somewhat esoteric question, I know, but does anybody know of a resource that lists the number of films released in particular years or decades? Especially for Hollywood releases. I wanted to compare the number of films released in the US in the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc as opposed to today.

[Gropius]

The IMDB is presumably a moderately reliable resource for this kind of data; clicking on the bracketed year next to any film title will lead you to a list of releases for that year. You can sift out the TV entries to be left with films alone. So for 1940, there are 1,973 films listed; for 1950, 2,217; for 1960, 3,142. Skip to 2000 and we have 13,048.

Obviously IMDB listings are incomplete, but these figures are broadly indicative of the increasing volume of media production. You can further subdivide these listings by country, although doing so reintroduces TV show listings, which clouds things. (Sample for USA only: 1900 - 526; 1950 - 894; 2000 - 5,998)

One could use this data to plot somewhat anal graphs, although I'm sure many film studies types have already done so.

P.S. It seems even the 'movies only' filter still includes TV show titles; all it does is exclude the counting of individual episodes. This means that the IMDB's film data becomes increasingly skewed as its archiving of TV episodes becomes more comprehensive (e.g. the number of USA entries for 2006 leaps to 11,178, most of which probably involve Paris Hilton or corporate singing contests). And now it even lists video games, so they should really try and improve their filter system.

[Person]

Using IMDb Power Search, excluding animated films and most television artifacts...

American Film Production by Decade:

1910-1929 - 40857 (silents only)

1930s - 9838

1940s - 7900

1950s - 5454

1960s - 4335

1970s - 5908

1980s - 7722

1990s - 11758 (includes about 350 video games that cannot be filtered)

2000-2007 - 24924 (includes about 250 video games that cannot be filtered)

2008-2010 - 1100 (officially announced films)

From these figures alone, it is evident that a consolidation of creativity took place in the 1930s when sound came in and led to concresence of highly skilled individuals which eventually reached its zenith in the early 40s, diminished substantially during the war, was renewed in the aftermath, but with a steelier execution, before altering its course in the 50s in order to compete with television and the general affluence of the times which led in the early 60s to an overextension with many artistic errors - and more to the point, financial disaster. Transgressive films appeared later in the decade and ushered in a brief period of experimental low budget studio productions as well as independent films which drew adults back to the aisles in droves and led to a period of blockbuster R-rated films in The Godfather and The Exorcist, before Jaws came along and blew everything out of the water, but also ushering in the era of the bubble-gum blockbuster, which reached stratospheric proportions with Star Wars. By the 1980s, going to the Cinema was de rigeur for 6-30 year-olds in America, even in an age of cable TV and electronic gaming. But in the early 90s, there was a distinct drop-off in production due to a recession that was overcome to some degree and since 1995, the output of American Cinema has been phenomenal to the point of tedium. Mass production within an artistic medium that is reliant on major financial returns (ie. tens or hundreds of millions) and is very much in the hands of cynical marketing and demographic experts is doomed in one regard; on the other hand, it opens up the possibility of a vast ocean of undiscovered species of ripping yarns.

[justeleblanc]

The 90s and 00s results are skewed if only by very very indy, amateur, and college films that may have played in a small festival of some sort.

[skuhn8]

Excellent topic, sevenarts, and excellent post Gordon. This very question has been on my mind as at school here in Hungary I overheard some teachers in a discussion talking about film and the erosion of standards taking place due to American cinema. The big argument method is to take whatever 'art' film they've seen recently, whether it be Amelie or Volver or a classic Hungarian film, and place it next to the latest American blockbuster slamming the cinemas, say Fast and Furious, and come to the most erudite conclusion that American cinema is pedestrian crap. More recently I countered that I had recently seen Argo (a Hungarian black comedy with a high body count) and felt that it was wanting compared to the Godfather (I didn't feel it necessary to elaborate which) or Silence of the Lambs--I chose randomly since why should I be restrained by genre if they aren't? Plus I had to choose titles that most people here had seen. My colleague countered that such a comparison was not fair: Argo was crap for the masses. So it goes.

What so many people fail to realise is that American cinema is built on some 500+ films a year and yet your average guy on the street is aware of a very slight faction; a typical foreign audience so much less--yet no one seems hesitant to come to broad conclusions. Of course here no one seems to ask why such crappy films are so popular. The Fast and Furious franchise is bigger here than Star Wars ever was. In the land of the Trabant, the Skoda and the Wartburger, cars reign supreme on the silver screen.

And then on the other side, what does the average American know about the French films produced in any given year? 0.5/year? Less?

[Person]

Another perspective: all art or entertainment media today is created by skilled groups of people, not by nations (America, for example) or 'film industries' (Hollywood, for example).

Or: Some films now create themselves, using skilled people as a means to an end. Mass media, the Internet in particular, assess popular trends and media artifacts (ie. novels, video games, arm-chair political fads such as global warming, overseas atrocities, etc) and a mythologizing of sorts takes place and eventually leads to films of those myths. (This perspective may be flawed).

Also: Imitation has been made easier in all post-WWII artforms. This is not exclusively a negative state of affairs, as long as some of the imitations are, on their owns terms, original, ie. Sin City (better examples are to be found, of course).

In renouncing religious / supernatural beliefs and adopting an aesthetic outlook to the world, western man has limited his range of topics and themes when trying to make serious works. This has been countered by constructing excessively fantastical fictional worlds that are as far removed from the world as we find it today, as of those of our nihilistic ancestors.

The tragedy today is that our artists have forgotten the art of tragedy.

[Gregory]

40,857 silents? The estimate I've often heard of how many silents of the total number made that survive today is 10-20%. So that means that there must be at least 4,000 silents out there (not even accounting for the likelihood that the original number must have been well over 40,000 because many of those that were lost do not have an IMDB listing). Can there really be that many?

[PhilipS]

40,857 silents? The estimate I've often heard of how many silents of the total number made that survive today is 10-20%. So that means that there must be at least 4,000 silents out there (not even accounting for the likelihood that the original number must have been well over 40,000 because many of those that were lost do not have an IMDB listing). Can there really be that many?

There were nearly 11,000 silent features made in the US alone. About 2,200 survive intact or nearly so, a few more in less complete form. Whereas the survival rate on Japanese silents is more like 1%. Australian film is about 10% (26 or so out of about 250). Not sure about European silent film, but I gather a sizeable proportion of British, French and German silents still exist.

It would not be surprising that in roughly 20 years of silent film production there would have been an average of 2,000 features per year worldwide. Don't forget that silents were being made in the US until 1930, in Japan until 1936, China until 1938 or so.

I've seen nearly 600 silent features. I'm aware of people who have seen well over 1,000. If the number of surviving features is 4,000, then that's a surprisingly high proportion of those films that are available to the public.

[tryavna]

To further muddy the waters, especially in regards to the silent era, how many of these films are features and how many are shorts? That could make a big difference during the following decades: 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s. In fact, how many feature films were made at all before 1919? (And I don't mean to sound stupid. I know that feature films began to appear around 1912-13, but surely they were exceptions rather than the rule before the feature film really began to take off around 1918-19.)

[pm]

To further muddy the waters, especially in regards to the silent era, how many of these films are features and how many are shorts? That could make a big difference during the following decades: 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s. In fact, how many feature films were made at all before 1919? (And I don't mean to sound stupid. I know that feature films began to appear around 1912-13, but surely they were exceptions rather than the rule before the feature film really began to take off around 1918-19.)

Here are the numbers for films produced & commercially distributed in the US, according to Ben Singer ("Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Distributor" in American Cinema's Transitional Era, edited by C. Keil & S. Stamp).

1908: 1 feature, 677 shorts
1909: 2 features, 1080 shorts
1910: 0 features, 1547 shorts
1911: 0 features, 2407 shorts
1912: 8 features, 3593 shorts
1913: 56 features, 4782 shorts
1914: 342 features, 5187 shorts
1915: 342 features, 5631 shorts
1916: 835 features, 4115 shorts
1917: 936 features, 2749 shorts
1918: 836 features, 1567 shorts
1919: 763 features, 1517 shorts
1920: 741 features, 2154 shorts

Shorts are films of three or fewer reels. Features are anything more. I recommend Singer's article itself, for, among many other things, all of the caveats he puts on how much we can read into the above numbers. In fact, the whole collection is very good.