The data gap

A course frame for a specific and checkable absence: there is no accessible authoritative public dataset for films produced per year, cinema screens by chain and region, annual admissions, or day rates by department. Not a dataset that is hard to reach. One that does not exist publicly.

It is not a footnote about research difficulty. It is the constraint underneath every other item on the industry’s list. A tax argument, a labour argument, a screen argument and a regional equity argument all end in the same committee question about how much and how many, and an industry that cannot answer loses by default to an industry that can. The gap also runs in the direction of less information rather than more: the country’s largest annual film event chose not to publish its own box office during its most recent run. Level 3 teaches this as a finding rather than hiding it, which is why the course marks its own compiled figures as compiled instead of presenting them as authority.

Source: Course-coined, from section 11, problem 10, of the Cinema research map, which had to reconstruct output and admissions figures from press citations and marks several of them unverified. The 2025 non-disclosure decision by the MMFF Executive Committee is reported at https://radar.ph/51st-mmff-box-office-slips-high-ticket-prices-cited-as-factor/ . The closest working precedent for closing a gap of this kind is Korean, and it arrives in Lesson 4.2.

First used in: 3.7 · The industry you are actually walking into