The UK-based publication Screen International used the term movie very infrequently (in just 115 of the 20,019 articles I looked at), foreshadowing a geographic component to this debate which I will address in a moment. The results were very similar, with four times as many headlines featuring film than those using movie. The most liberal users of movie work in post-production but even they favour film to movie three-quarters of the time.Īt the start of last year I performed a big research project into the film industry press, and so I was able to analyse my cache of 239,720 industry headlines for uses of the terms film and movie. I looked at all 3,198 responses, checking for usage of the terms film and movie and grouping the results by the industry sectors the respondents worked in.Ĩ2% of the time people used either of the terms film or movie, they opted for film. Over the years I have conducted many interviews and surveys with industry professionals and so I went back to all the answers I got to open-ended questions.

Location – Does the choice of term differ between countries?.

Professionals vs Public – Which term is more freely used by the industry and among the general public?.It seems we need to split this question down into three smaller questions: So, as regular readers would expect, I have turned to the data to have a look at which term is most commonly used. Which is the better phrase? Which of the two do most people use? What do they even mean? Now I’m back to writing about things other than Hollywood blockbusters and I find myself… confused.

However, it sounds strange to refer to ‘Fast & Furious 7″ as a film rather than a movie, so I opted to talk about “Hollywood movies” in those articles. It somehow felt more appropriate and mirrored the conversations I have in the industry. Until now, I almost exclusively used the term film on this blog, rather than movie.

In the last few weeks I have been writing articles about big budget Hollywood blockbusters and in doing so I have faced a linguistic dilemma.

Oxford movie theatre