Click on the image for an enlarged table or simply scroll down through the spreadsheet:
Source: Screen Digest July 2008 and older
Films produced by country in 2002:
1 India 1200
2 US 543
3 Japan 293
4 France 200
5 Spain 137
6 Italy 130
7 Germany 116
8 China 100
9 Philippines 97
10 Hong Kong 92
It has been estimated that anime accounts for 60 percent of Japanese film production (2002). Manga - 40% of all books and magazines published. Anime accounts for more than 60 percent of all TV cartoons worldwide.
UNESCO yearly averages 1988-99:
India 839
China + Hong Kong SAR 469
Philippines 456
United States of America 385
Japan 238
Thailand 194
France 183
Italy 99
Brazil 86
Myanmar 85
United Kingdom 78
Bangladesh 77
Egypt 72
Pakistan 64
Germany 63
Rep. of Korea 63
Turkey 63
Islamic Rep. of Iran 62
Sri Lanka 58
Argentina 47
Russian Fed 46
Spain 45
For newest figures (2013) click here and search by language.
Movies by language total production accounted by IMDB as of December 2008
IMDB has been around since 1990 and its database is searchable by language (dialogue). It lists movies since the early days of cinema. It’s hardly precise but it's the most comprehensive, easily accessible database that features this sort of information. These foreign titles are also the most likely to be available on DVD.
English 267,023 titles
Spanish 41,201 titles
German 35,150 titles
French 31,358 titles
Japanese 17,888 titles
Italian 17,747 titles
Portuguese 8,314 titles
Hindi 8,278 titles
Russian 7,745 titles
Dutch 6,878 titles
Danish 6,814 titles
Serbo-Croatian 6,414 titles
Tagalog 6,020 titles
Greek 5,601 titles
Turkish 5,423 titles
Mandarin 4,666 titles
Cantonese 4,371 titles
Swedish 4,300 titles
Korean 4,254 titles
Czech 4,083 titles
Polish 3,882 titles
Hungarian 3,676 titles
Malayam 3,491 titles
Finnish 3,484 titles
Arabic 2,759 titles
Telugu 2,149 titles
Norwegian 2,081 titles
Hebrew 1,993 titles
Tamil 1,894 titles
Romanian 1,676 titles
Bulgarian 1,575 titles
Persian 1,570 titles
Bengali 1,155 titles
Catalan 1,060 titles
Albanian 1,026 titles
Source: IMDB December 2008
I don't know about the other countries but the data for Mexico is all wrong. Since the early 90s the number of Mexican movies reached an all-time high, about 300 or 400 a year. No one knows for sure how many because most of them are straight-to-video releases, known here as "videohomes". Because Mexican researchers don't consider them "real" movies they go uncounted, and since no one (but me!) bothers to review them it can be almost impossible to tell how many are being made each year. Directors I've interviewed say the number has decreased recently because of increased competition from the U.S. but there are still hundreds of videohomes being released.
ReplyDeleteI noticed another mistake on that chart: Nigeria should be right at the top, possibly at number one. The output of the Nigerian film industry, known as Nollywood, is estimated at a thousand movies a year. These are all released on DVD rather than theaters and for this reason are derided as not being "real" movies, much like the Mexican videohomes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting. Many countries have strong straight-to-video markets. US produces several thousand titles per year. If you use broader criteria than "feature film" you would find that even India's numbers don't look very impressive when compared to some other countries.
ReplyDeleteFor this particular purpose I would consider only "real" movies. I'd also look at TV production separately. Mexico scores rather high in UNESCO yearly averages for some of the past decades for "real" movie production. Philippines had an explosion of moviemaking in the past, followed by a trickle. Russia scored very high for decades, but 1990's were terrible.
"The Golden Age of Mexican cinema (in Spanish Época de Oro del Cine Mexicano) is a period in the history of the Cinema of Mexico between 1936 and 1959[1] when the Mexican film industry reached high levels of production, quality and economic success of its films, besides having gained recognition internationally. The Mexican film industry became the center of commercial films in Latin America."
ReplyDeleteAccording Unesco figures Mexico produced 126 movies in 2013 (of which 113 in Spanish). I have included a link to the new Unesco cinema statistics in the article above.