Frankfurt Sneak Preview Stats – The Sequel

Another year, another… year of films? Anyway, here are some stats about the Sneak Preview films we had at Frankfurt Metropolis Cinestar. You can see last year’s here, and compare with what happened this year. Get ready for some movie statistics!

So first of all, how long were the films?

Film length in minutes over the year

One weird trend from 2014 has definitely been maintained in 2015: the longest films are in the winter months. Of the 10 longest films, only 3 were in Summer Time and the others were all before the clocks went forward (or after they went back), while 9 of the 10 shortest were in summer. Again, annoying when you’re stuck waiting for a late night train in the cold!

Histogram of film length in 5 minute bins

However, there was a bit more variety in the film lengths this time, without the weird spike at 120 minutes. We had two films shorter than anything from 2014 (Unfriended at 83 min, Slow West at 84) but nothing as long as that year’s Anchorman 2 (the longest was Child 44 at 137 min).

What about genres? If 2014 was the year of the thriller, 2015 was the year of the biopic.

Bar chart of how many films were in each genre

With 11 biopics – plus a couple of based-on-a-true-story films that fell into other genres – it was the runaway winner. Dramedy made a good showing too, as films struggled to decide whether to make you laugh or cry.

Stacked bar chart of genres by month

(Sorry again about the stacked bar chart). There’s not much in the way of obvious patterns here, although all the action films fell at the start of the year. Most of the other genres were fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. But what was not evenly distributed…

Bar chart of film locations

was the choice of locations. 2015 was much more US-centric than 2014 – and many of the films that weren’t set in the US were about Americans overseas.

Bar chart of films by source

Still, Hollywood stayed original, with just one sequel (Magic Mike XXL) and one remake (The Gambler). As you’d expect in a year of drama and biopics, true stories and original concepts both saw a big boost.

Bar chart of films by BBFC rating

As might be expected, we got a lot of 15-rated films this year. Nothing 18-rated – perhaps that’s not surprising given that there wasn’t much horror.

So, those were the films… but how good were they? Rotten Tomatoes is a generally reliable metric, and it says…

Scatter graph of Rotten Tomatoes scores over the year

April really is the cruellest month.

Some random interesting snippets:

Alzheimers films: 2 (Still Alice and Mr Holmes)

Films with “America” in the title: 3 (American Sniper, McFarland USA, American Ultra)

Films about stolen art: 3 (Woman in Gold, Big Eyes, Love & Mercy)

Films about gay people in the 20th century: 2 (The Imitation Game, Carol)

And here as ever is the raw data:

(Films marked “True Story” may be based on books or (in the case of Escobar) a snippet of overheard conversation. Run times are taken from IMDb. Genre and Setting are subjective, and some films straddle locations or genres – I picked the most interesting. Don’t rely on this data for anything serious!)