Film genres across the past 100 years
All of Hollywood’s output - in a single page.
The above graph - made using imdb.com data - shows the breakdown of films by genre over the past 100 years. The deep pink and beige bands show the staples of drama and comedy. In blue you see shorts, which were once predominant (D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the first feature film, was made in 1915) but tailed off steadily, until digital technology kickstarted their resurgence 15 years ago.
Crime takes off in the late Sixties as a result of the collapse of the studio system, which left film-makers freer to explore the underbelly of society (Coppola’s The Godfather and William Friedkin’s The French Connection exemplify this trend). It was also the moment porn found its feet.
Sci-fi comes of age in the mid-Fifties, driven by the idea that science held the key to a brighter future. Westerns, meanwhile, appear to die a slow death, though the tail is a long one - a reflection, says the Times film critic Kevin Maher, that the genre is “tied to American identity and to the core of Hollywood itself”, meaning they survive even the leanest periods.
If romance seems thin, that’s because it hasn’t appealed to film’s core audience - teenage boys and men - although that paradigm may well be shifting given the success of films like Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City.
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2 Responses to “Film genres across the past 100 years”
Great site, how do I subscribe?
Interesting. What about “musicals” ?
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