United States
The bar graph above displays the genre distribution of films in the United States every five years. The graph reveals that popular genres are influenced by major events in US history.
This influence is shown by the genre “Comedy,” which reached an all-time low in 1945, a year plagued by World War II, the Cold War, and atomic bombs. In contrast, genres such as “Crime” and “Thriller” reached an all-time high during this same time period. This trend of darker genres overtaking lighter ones showcases shifting cinematic trends and social commentary, highlighting pessimistic times for a war-ridden society. Another example of this commentary in action is the years around 1965, when the genre “Documentaries” saw a dramatic rise. The Civil Rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr., spurred social change, encouraging films to focus on political issues in the form of documentaries.
However, the graph also reveals a key point: dark times did not always shift genres to be more pessimistic. For instance, in the 1930s, the United States was in a Depression, but the movie “It Happened One Night” shifted entertainment to be positive rather than negative. The most popular genre (and the genre with the greatest jump from the previous years) in the 1930s was “Romance.” This shows that while film genres often reflected society, they were also used to combat present events and to improve morale during tough times by shifting focus to a more positive light.
The chart above is a line graph displaying the change in popular film genre distribution over time in the United States. The trends in the graph further support the claim that societal events influence genre. For instance, the orange line (indicating “Crime” films) peaks a few times from the 1940s to the 1950s (World War II and Cold War beginning), but also again in the 1970s, when the Watergate Scandal happened. Both these events directly increased the number of crime films produced in the US, narrating what the public was going through in real time. Additionally, after the 1980s, the genre “Comedy” increased and stayed at about 50%, highlighting the recovery from post-war depression.