This 'story in data' on the changing popularity of film genres, 1908-2008 by Jonathan Richards appeared in The Times Magazine (21 February 2009):



All of Hollywood’s output - in a single page.

The above graph - made using imdb.com data - shows the breakdown of films by genre over the past 100 years. The deep pink and beige bands show the staples of drama and comedy. In blue you see shorts, which were once predominant (D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the first feature film, was made in 1915) but tailed off steadily, until digital technology kickstarted their resurgence 15 years ago.

Crime takes off in the late Sixties as a result of the collapse of the studio system, which left film-makers freer to explore the underbelly of society (Coppola’s The Godfather and William Friedkin’s The French Connection exemplify this trend). It was also the moment porn found its feet.

Sci-fi comes of age in the mid-Fifties, driven by the idea that science held the key to a brighter future. Westerns, meanwhile, appear to die a slow death, though the tail is a long one - a reflection, says the Times film critic Kevin Maher, that the genre is “tied to American identity and to the core of Hollywood itself”, meaning they survive even the leanest periods.

If romance seems thin, that’s because it hasn’t appealed to film’s core audience - teenage boys and men - although that paradigm may well be shifting given the success of films like Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City.

Very informative, thanks for posting. I'm surprised to see that the sci-fi genre is so little

Quoting W0m6at:

Quote:
I wonder if, having used IMDb's data, the documentary section is skewed by all the "making of" documentaries listed there. What doesn't surprise me is that shorts show up so prevalently... they're cheaper to make, just harder to get distributed.

Assuming that the proper production year is being used, that would only explain the last 10 years or so.  Documentaries have been around since the very beginning.  The easiest thing in the world is to simply take the camera, point and shoot.  In it's purest form, that's all a documentary is.

I think the most suspect numbers would involve porn.  It also has been around since the beginning, just not well documented.  No big surprise considering that just being associated with the production of a porn film would get you thrown in jail.