Numlock News: May 13, 2026 • Big Words, Bad Shots, No Breaths

May 13, 2026

By Stephen Follows

Walt is on vacation, today’s edition comes from Stephen Follows, of the eponymous movie data newsletter and his new YouTube channel, The Film Data Scientist.

Hi everyone, Stephen Follows here, filling in for Walt. I spend my days digging through data to answer questions about the film industry, and coming up with new movie records for the Guinness World Records. So for my Numlock, I thought I’d pull together seven findings on how movies are changing. Whether this is for the better or the worse it up to you to decide…

Hollywood Has Forgotten How to Use Big Words

Movie scripts have shrunk. Across 64,332 English-language films released between 1940 and 2022, the average length of a single block of dialogue has dropped steadily decade after decade, while the share of micro-lines (one to three words: “Wait.” “Why?” “Now!”) keeps climbing. Vocabulary has narrowed too, with modern characters reaching for the same words more quickly, leaning on “crazy” where an older script might have rotated through “astonishing,” “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.” Curiously, the structural compression shows up even in films set in the 1800s, suggesting it’s a shift in writing fashion rather than mere mimicry of how we now talk. But the rise in filler words like “I mean” and “you know” is concentrated in present-day stories, where period dramas resist the drift, because audiences punish anachronistic chatter in a corset.

Are movies becoming more simplistic?

Nobody Under 50 Can Open an Action Movie Anymore

More than a third of action lead roles in the 2020s are going to actors aged 50 or older, a share that has more than doubled since 2000 and the highest on record. Looking across 2,171 action films from 1980 to 2025, the 1990s turn out to be the youngest decade of action cinema, not the 2020s. But the boom may already be tipping. In the 2010s, it took 11 actors to account for half of the decade’s over-50 action box office; in the 2020s so far, it takes just seven, with Tom Cruise alone responsible for 13 percent. The ensembles that broadened the cohort (Marvel, John Wick) have fragmented or stalled; Liam Neeson is stepping back at 73, Bruce Willis has retired and the generation behind them, the Glen Powells and Michael B. Jordans, has yet to produce anyone with five consecutive $200 million hits to their name. The boom is real, but the bench is thinner than the CinemaCon slate suggests.

Is the over-50 action star boom peaking already?

The 90-Minute Movie Is Dead

Polls say Americans’ ideal movie length is 92 minutes, but Hollywood is no longer in that business. In the 1980s, 13 percent of wide theatrical releases ran under 90 minutes; in the 2020s, it’s seven percent and most of those are animated kids’ films. Meanwhile, the share of wide releases running over two hours has more than doubled, from 14 to 32 percent, and the average action film has swelled by a full 25 minutes since the Reagan era, with “Oppenheimer,” “The Brutalist” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” all pushing past the three-hour mark in a single recent stretch. Budget is the strongest predictor: films made for under $10 million have barely changed in length over four decades, while productions over $100 million now average 130 minutes, because a studio spending that kind of money wants every set piece on the screen. And here is the quiet structural subsidy that nobody has corrected: in most cinemas worldwide, a three-hour film occupies 50 percent more screen time than a two-hour one, but the ticket costs the same.

Are two-hour movies the new normal?

Hollywood’s Cheapest Currency Is a Producer Credit

In 1940, nearly three-quarters of films had a single producer. Today, the average movie credits 4.5 of them, and that’s before you count the Executive Producers, whose numbers have more than doubled since 2000. The credit has become a free chip to throw into deals, given to agents, financiers, location fixers and stars in lieu of actual money, with a result of Amanda Seyfried recently admitting she only discovered she was an executive producer on “The Housemaid” by spotting it on a call sheet three weeks into the shoot (”I didn’t do shit to make that movie. I only acted in it”). Scarlett Johansson, by contrast, asked to have her Exec Producer credit removed from “Thunderbolts” when she felt she hadn’t earned it. The Oscars tried to push back after “Shakespeare in Love” saw five people accept Best Picture in 1998 (only two of whom had done the actual work) by capping nominees at three producers, but the credit inflation has just moved sideways into the unregulated ranks. The runaway champion: a 2025 Argentine film called “Death of a Comedian,” which credits 10,123 associate producers, each of them a micro-investor who bought a bond and got a name on IMDb.

Why do films have so many producers?

Action Movie Villains Have Gotten Worse at Shooting

I built a system to detect every sound event in 1,797 action films released between 1950 and 2025, and the results are noisy in every sense. Gunfire is up 43 percent since 2000, with explosions nearly doubling and automatic weapons fire climbing steadily, so that John Wick now fires more rounds in a single scene than Dirty Harry did in a whole film. Yet in earlier research, I found that fewer lead characters are dying of gunshots than they used to, which leaves only one logical conclusion: the aim of action movie villains is getting considerably worse. Music has crept up too, with modern action films scored nearly wall-to-wall in a way that makes them closer to musicals than their 1970s predecessors. The car chase, meanwhile, is quietly dying, with vehicle sounds down 16 percent since 2000 and helicopters (a Cold War sound, peaking with “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Thunder” in the 1980s) falling away as drones and CGI spacecraft take over. The one constant across 75 years is the human voice, holding steady at roughly six speech events per minute. Everything else is louder, faster and more crowded.

What happened to the sound of action films?

Modern Movies Won’t Let You Breathe

Matt Damon recently said that when he made “The Rip” for Netflix, the streamer asked him to put a big set piece in the first five minutes and to have characters reiterate the plot three or four times “because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” So I checked. Analysing the dialogue of 70,985 English-language feature films released since 1940 (tracking fear, anger, urgency, profanity and punctuation pressure as proxies for dramatic intensity), the peaks have not actually gotten higher. The most intense year in cinema was 1991, and the average movie’s most intense moment has been less peaky since 2010 than at any point in the previous 50 years. What has changed is the rhythm. The share of runtime spent in high-intensity dialogue has risen 21 percent since 1940, and the “downshift index”, which measures how much a film cools off in its middle section, has fallen by roughly 35 percent. Mid-century films were comfortable alternating pressure and relief. Today’s films, once they have your attention, refuse to let it go, because they know you’ll start scrolling the moment they do.

Movies have become more intense (but not in the way you think)

The Oscars Don’t Move the Needle. Except Once.

Finally, let’s end on the power of movies in culture.

Winning Best International Feature at the Oscars is supposed to be a coronation for an entire national cinema, but across the last decade of winners, almost none of them shifted audience behaviour at all. Looking at Wikipedia pageviews and nearly 10 million audience reviews across the back catalogues of nine winning countries, Mexico’s films fell roughly 20 percent after “Roma,” Chile’s halved after “A Fantastic Woman” and Denmark, Japan and Hungary all ended up below the global average. The lone exception is South Korea, whose back catalogue jumped 24 percent on Wikipedia and 52 percent in review volume after “Parasite,” and the lift was national rather than just Bong Joon-ho, with the wider Korean catalogue almost doubling in reviews while Bong’s own pre-”Parasite” films barely moved. “Squid Game” gets a lot of the credit for the Korean wave, but the data shows the surge began 18 months earlier, five weeks before the world locked down with a Hulu deal that had just dropped three Bong films onto the platform. Sometimes a film is good enough, and lucky enough, to rewire how the world sees a country.

Did Parasite change how audiences think about South Korean cinema?

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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