The Flood
However many movies you think get made, it's more than it used to be — and the line goes nearly vertical after 2010. Cheap digital cameras and streaming's bottomless appetite turned a steady trickle into a torrent: annual feature output has more than quadrupled since 2000.
The Runtime Paradox
"Movies are so long now." It feels true — and it isn't. Across every film made, the median runtime has sat at 90 minutes for seventy years, flat as a table. But the movies you actually notice — the hundred most-watched of each decade — grew from ~105 to ~128 minutes. Both lines are true. Your memory just lives on the upper one.
The Documentary Takeover
The biggest genre story of the last century isn't superheroes — it's documentaries. Once a rounding error, they climbed to roughly a fifth of every genre tag by the 2010s, riding the same cheap-digital wave as the flood in Chapter 1. Meanwhile the Western all but vanished and the musical faded to a niche.
The Great Ratings Slide
Rated by IMDb voters, movies look like they've gotten steadily worse — from about 7.0 in the 1920s to 6.1 today. But be careful before you blame Hollywood. We mostly remember, and keep re-rating, the good old films; the forgettable ones fell out of view. What looks like decline is largely survivorship — nostalgia with a number attached.