From what I have gathered, India continues to produce the most films annually in the world, and the U.S. comes second. But after that?

I know that it used to be so that Hong Kong and Japan were often up there too as far as sheer numbers were concerned. However, the impression I get is that Korea and Mainland China -- and perhaps even Thailand too -- may be producing more films than them these days.

Similarly, get the sense that while Britain, France and Italy used to be the main film-producing countries in Europe, Germany has been making more of a mark (no pun intended!) in recent years.

In any event, if someone could provide illumination and/or point me to some (internet preferably) references, etc. on this subject, I'd be really grateful.

P.S. To make things more interesting, can I get votes/suggestions as to which territory/territories people see as being the "happening" one(s) currently?

Korea produces 80 films a year now, up from 49 in 1999. Not sure about any other countries, but that sounds like quite a few.

On an unrelated note, this is the second time I've posted this, and the second time I've posted a reply where it's disappeared. Has anyone else had this? (I'm running Safari on Mac OSX, if that makes a difference.)

Doug, I'm not sure if it's a browser compatibility issue or something in the forum software, but your "disappearing reply" didn't really disappear - it showed up in my inbox indicating that you'd sent it via the "report this post to a moderator" link. This has happened a few times previously, and I'd just chalked it up to an unexplained glitch somewhere, but it could very well be that the various links/buttons aren't displaying correctly in your browser. I use Mozilla Firefox and everything looks fine, but I just noticed that the pages don't quite look right (some of the buttons aren't visible) in an older version of Netscape.

Dave

It used to be easier using IMDB to find a rough estimate of yearly national production under the rubric "Italian/French/German/Korean (etc.) titles by release date by year"

For remote years (long ago), it still works more or less. For recent years, however, you get every darn film that was released in the country, whatever its point of origin so it seems! Arggh. CHUCK AND BUCK may be a fine film, but it's not a 2003 "Italian Film" I care to know about in such a search!

Any idea how to refine such a search, or where else to look for such information online elsewhere and without subscription?

Why is Foreign Distribution Info such a deep secret for paid-up 'insiders' to share close to vest, hush, hush? Try and find these stats on the net, and you'll see you have to pay dearly (or, at least, something) to find out. The odd thing is you'd think burgeoning/competing national cinemas would be shouting the good news for all to hear about where they stand productively rather than hiding it like a precious secret..or is is it that someone else figured BO losses could be recouped a little through a high price for noncommercial info that nobody except web board esoterics could care enough to pay for? How many people who don't know already from their personal ledgers want to find out how much, say, BLUEBERRY netted and grossed? Riddle me this. That said, I glean a very rough count of sixty plus predominantly Italian new movies (TV not included) listed in the imdb count of 2003 releases as a start. I'd suspect a fair number of these are marginal...'grant projects' by state and provincial agencies that get dumped in a theater here and there to fulfill the obligation of supporting new filmmaking. How do other Euro countries compare? My guess is France and Britain (Euro?) are higher numbers still, Germany and Spain around the same or a little less, others trailing. Factoring in non-American films without any certain national identity, ('International Euro Productions') I won't even guess at. Their profitability or lack thereif is even less clear as compared to more purely local varieities.

What is interesting to me from scanning through Italy's releases is how wide an array of Japanese and Spanish film is on the menu lately, some familiar, many I've never heard of. The scatter and distribution of World films through different world markets may be worth paying increasing attention to with Non-American nations establishing markets/distributors amongst themselves.

Internet Movie Database (IMDb):
2004 titles by country
http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Years/2004/by-country
[includes TV series, video games, etc.]

Internet Movie Database (IMDb):
2003 titles by country
http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Years/2003/by-country
[includes TV series, video games, etc.]

etc.

Doug, as Dave says, I think you hit the "Report" button thinking it was "Reply" (I got a copy via the report function as well).

Thanks for the improved link, Todd (what I was looking at before had every film released in Italy )

It looks from just a glance that there were well over 100 Italian non-TV films (130 something) theoretically released this past year! France comes in about the same. Germany is so glutted with TV entries over three pages of 640 titlesthat I'll have to set it aside for now. (For a relatively modest but still impressive entry,Finland has about 20 once you strip away a hundred TV entries.) And, wow, Spain seems to have more movie-movies quite possibly than Italy and France...

Lots to read up on, but what strikes me now is how little of this all penetrates our consciousness and markets in any serious way...