Daniel Parris is a data scientist, data journalist, and culture critic. He was one of DoorDash’s first data science hires and now writes Stat Significant, a weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about movies, music, and TV with over 26,000 readers.
He’s taken on some fun pop culture questions using data, including:
Daniel majored in film and started his career in entertainment before transitioning into tech and media. He combined his passion for pop culture and his data science skill set to create Stat Significant.
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Today, Daniel discusses five ongoing trends in the film industry he’s found through his research.
Trend 1: Film Festival Standing Ovations
There will likely be no shortage of discussion and debate surrounding the documentary NAZA over the coming months. If you’re wondering why I’m walking on eggshells when it comes to this film, it’s for a simple reason: it’s about the actions of the Israeli army over the last few years, and it will be extremely polarizing throughout its inevitable awards run. You will see no fewer than five think pieces about this movie before the end of the year, so I’ll focus on an extremely trivial matter instead: film festival standing ovations.
A few weeks ago, NAZA received a 24.5-minute standing ovation following its premiere, the longest such ovation ever recorded at a film festival.
Regardless of movie quality or subject matter, these standing ovations have gone too far (or perhaps, more literally, too long). Since the pandemic, the annual tally of films earning an ovation of four minutes or longer at the Cannes Film Festival has increased considerably, with 20 movies achieving this feat in 2025.
I can’t remember the last time I stood still for ten minutes without being at an airport. While many of the films garnering lengthy standing ovations are worthy of praise, my hot take is that these ovations, and the media circus surrounding them, trivialize the art they’re meant to reward. We’re likely in the midst of a standing-ovation bubble, a strange outgrowth of post-pandemic film culture, and years from now psychologists will study this highly specific phenomenon.
Trend 2: Is Digger the Most Polarizing Movie of the Decade?
Most films generate an inexact consensus among critics and audiences. Within each group, a general agreement emerges about whether a movie is “good” or “bad.” But every so often, a film becomes something of a Rorschach test, provoking reactions so wildly different that you wonder whether everyone watched the same film.
Such is the case with Digger, which opened to a paltry $20 million worldwide against a $180 million budget (and an additional $100 million for marketing). Whatever its artistic merits, the film is an undeniable commercial catastrophe.
That, however, is just the movie’s commercial reception. Its critical reception tells a far more complicated story—or perhaps several competing stories.
In fact, Digger is one of the most polarizing films of the last two decades, with critics almost evenly split between “positive” and “negative” reviews, the two extremes of Metacritic’s three-tier classification system (positive, mixed, and negative). When we measure the share of reviews that fall into these opposing categories, Digger ranks as the third most divisive film of the last 15 years.
Yet opening-weekend audiences have been far less divided, with considerably less variation in their appraisal.
At the same time, ticket buyers are actually less reliable, at least for the purposes of this analysis. After all, they willingly paid to see the movie, unlike critics who were forced to watch it as part of their job.
Trend 3: Is Robert Pattinson’s 2026 Acting Run the “Greatest of All Time”?
The 1998 Major League Baseball season was defined by a fierce competition between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, as the two sluggers raced to break baseball’s single-season home run record. The Sosa-McGwire duel energized the sport, creating a season-long meta-narrative that captivated even the most passive baseball fan.
Minus the steroid-cheating scandal that later tainted the Sosa-McGwire duel, something similar is occurring in movies right now. Robert Pattinson and Anne Hathaway are locked in a (conceptual) slugfest for the title of “greatest movie year ever”—a made-up distinction that exists in the minds of film nerds.
So how unprecedented are these actors’ 2026 filmographies, and who is winning this nonexistent contest?
For starters, there is indeed precedent for the ongoing GOAT-movie-year runoff between Pattinson and Hathaway, particularly in the early 2010s, when actors like Ben Stiller, Jude Law, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt appeared in myriad movies with $20M+ box office in a single calendar year.
In fact, it was once fairly common for well-known actors to star in multiple commercially successful films within the same year, particularly throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Post-pandemic, this feat is exceedingly rare.
Yet the buzz around Anne Hathaway and Robert Pattinson goes beyond ticket sales: both performers are striking a unique balance between box office and prestige. When we chart ticket sales versus critical acclaim, we see Pattinson and Hathaway are in elite company, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch’s 2013 and Josh Brolin’s 2018.
At the most basic level, this analysis serves as fodder for cinephiles with strong opinions. At a metatextual level, the dueling successes of Hathaway and Pattinson offer another proof point for cinema being “so back,” a moviegoing equivalent of the great Sosa vs. McGwire home run race, minus the steroids.
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Trend 4: Public Domain Exploitation
Sometimes I’m hard-pressed for pop culture topics to cover, and I think, “Maybe today is the day I run out of ideas.” Then I’ll read about an absurd entertainment trend that reminds me this newsletter could exist for 100 more years (at minimum), because people do the darndest things.
For proof of this phenomenon, look no further than the following three films, all released in the last few months:
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Pinocchio Unstrung
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Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned
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Betty’s Revenge (as in Betty Boop).
All three are horror films built around beloved intellectual property that recently entered the public domain, joining a rapidly growing canon of movies that make up one of the strangest pop culture trends I’ve ever covered.
Despite Disney’s best efforts, several beloved animated characters have slipped into the public domain over the past five years, including Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Filmmakers have met these expiring IP protections with Disney’s worst nightmare, taking these iconic children’s characters and casting them in low-budget horror films, usually as murderous villains. This emerging subgenre includes Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, Bambi: The Reckoning, and The Death of Snow White.
Often, these films are released within hours of a character entering the public domain, as indie directors race to debut competing films about Bambi’s burgeoning bloodlust.
Trend 5: The Worst CEO Payday of All Time?
I’ve never understood the massive payouts CEOs receive during mergers and acquisitions. What bothers me most of all is the disconnect between job performance and the size of these paychecks. For proof of this phenomenon, look no further than former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
Zaslav’s tenure at Warner Bros. made him one of Hollywood’s most reviled executives (and perhaps one of the most reviled in America). In 2023, a prominent shareholder watchdog ranked him the country’s most overpaid CEO.
He oversaw the numerous renamings of HBO Max, saddled Warner Bros. with roughly $40 billion to $50 billion of debt, and canceled several completed movies (writing them off for tax purposes).
He did greenlight Sinners and One Battle After Another, but beyond that, he wasn’t very good at his job. Yet that didn’t stop him from netting a cool $600 million after the Warner Bros.-Paramount merger—the largest M&A payout ever received by a media or entertainment executive, adjusted for inflation.
Whereas the American dream once revolved around starting a business or landing a stable job at a growing company, perhaps the new formula is to become CEO of a legacy corporation, run it into the ground, put it up for sale as it nears bankruptcy, and walk away with a $600 million payday as a reward for your own ineptitude.
Today’s deep dive into film industry trends comes from Daniel Parris. If you want to read more from him, sign up for his newsletter, Stat Significant.
