Yes, documentaries count. :)

June 9, 2007 1:45 PM

Trivia hounds: how many Hollywood movies have ever been made?

I realize this is a tough question to answer, and that there probably isn't anyone who can say with any real precision. I'm just looking for a rough ballpark idea. This is in reference to a discussion of the merits of computer games versus movies, over on the front page of Gamers with Jobs.... I'm thinking one of the biggest reasons games mostly don't measure up yet is this: we're comparing the very best of several generations of film talent against the run-of-the-mill gaming crap we get every month.

A more precise wording would probably be, 'How many films have been made in the United States, by the industry that would eventually become known as Hollywood, since the dawn of moving pictures?'

I'm guessing hundreds of thousands, but I honestly don't know how to even approach the problem to find a better answer. I've tried various flavors of 'movies per year' without much specific luck. I see that Bollywood is averaging about three films a day, about a thousand a year, if that's useful to jog anyone's memory.

Thanks in advance, hopefully some movie geek knows this. :)

posted by Malor to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

You can do an IMDb power search. If you search for movies made in the USA, exclude TV series, episodes, movies, and direct-to-video releases, you get a total of around 133,000 movies.
posted by soonertbone at 2:04 PM on June 9, 2007

I don't see why you want to confine it to Hollywood, or even US films, for the purpose of your argument (which seems pretty reasonable). Unless you're also restricting it to US-produced computer games (but why?).

I think the best support for your thesis is just the length of time film has existed versus computer games. On that comparison, I reckon we might arguably still be waiting for the DW Griffith of games.
posted by Phanx at 2:51 PM on June 9, 2007

Maybe you could total the number of ratings certificates the MPAA has issued?
posted by fourstar at 3:10 PM on June 9, 2007

MPAA's rating system didn't go into effect until 1968, so I don't think that would yield a very reliable answer.
posted by bjork24 at 3:39 PM on June 9, 2007

Best answer: The MPAA numbers all of the films that are made by its members. This is separate from the rating certification and they've done it since the '30s for internal recordkeeping. At the very end of the credits of any major movie is the MPAA logo, and, above it in small type: No. 32000. I was trying to Google a little and pin down the rate at which movies have been churned out based on these numbers, and found this link: Filmnummers, which has a pretty detailed list of all of the damn things.

So, for instance, the first movie in the list, with a date of 1990 has a film number of 29401. The first listed in 2000 has a number of 35767. That's a little over 600 per year during the '90s. You could work this out for other decades. There are also some skipped numbers. I don't know if these are ones the site-maintainer hasn't recorded, or if they indicate movies that were assigned a number but never released.
posted by shadow vector at 3:44 PM on June 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Your library might have (in print or on microfiche) the Film Daily Yearbooks, which were published every year from 1915 to 1970. I have the 1939 edition, which lists the 16,461 titles since 1915. I'm not sure if each year's book lists all previous titles, but your reference librarian might be able to help you with this. And from then, you'd need some other source for post-1970 films.
posted by judith at 5:26 PM on June 9, 2007

I think you're going to have to limit yourself to an answerable question, e.g. how many movies have been released in theaters with a ratings certificate, rather than a vague "movies made" metric. Not all movies made see theatrical release, for instance, especially since the advent of straight-to-video. There are also cultural factors at work. The cinema of the 1940s, before TV, was very different -- there were many more films made and released so that a given theater could change out its feature weekly or even twice-weekly. (This is the same reason Bollywood has such a high production rate.) You also have the question of productions that never complete, or small productions without any release intent at all, and indie productions that don't show up on the regular professional filters like the MPAA.

Anyway, if I wanted to take a stab at a reasonable number, it would be in the quarter-to-half million range. US-made movies that are commercially available right now, using any and all means (including 16mm reel from an archive), that might be around 100,000 or so.
posted by dhartung at 6:13 PM on June 9, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks, folks, appreciate your time. :)
posted by Malor at 8:52 PM on June 9, 2007

As has been noted somewhat, note that most silent movies from the beginning of the industry (turn of the century) up until the advent of sound haven't survived. These were often what we'd think of as shorts, maybe 10-30 minutes or an hour long, and studios would make them on the cheap and crank out dozens every week. No one bothered to archive and take care of these films and something like 90% of them were just dumped in the trash. We're talking thousands and thousands of films. Don't know if the titles were databased or not, but it seems likely that many of them have no record whatsoever.
posted by zardoz at 3:38 AM on June 10, 2007

Response by poster: That actually kind of parallels early computer games, in that many would have been lost if it weren't for collectors... had preservation been up to the companies involved, it mostly wouldn't have happened.

Fortunately, computer games are duplicated by the hundreds of thousands, so devoted collectors have managed to preserve nearly all of the commercial releases. So, unlike early film, we have a record... and via emulation, we can usually run them fine on modern machines.

I wonder if, someday, they'll offer college courses on Early Computer Gaming?

Thanks again. :)
posted by Malor at 5:55 AM on June 11, 2007