Pablo Fernandez

For MoviePal, one of the questions was whether these things are called movies or films. One of the arguments I heard was that “movie” is American and “film” is British, the other argument was that “film” is an older term, which makes sense, since movies are not distributed as film anymore. Film is still used to make some movies, but that’s an entirely different and super interesting rabbit hole.

So, I did my “research”, and you know which one won, but I found the charts still interesting enough to share:

There’s obviously a big bias here since there are more uses for the word “film” that is not related to movies and I don’t know the break down. The two curves seem quite correlated except that “movies” has an offset that went up and down. Looking at the map:

It looks like a lot of English speaking countries… all of them… call them “movies”. Including good old United Kingdom. I was surprised by “film” winning the popularity contest over so many countries in Europe. I wonder if this is because “film” exists in other languages.

I could zoom in into the US, but let me save you some time: nobody says film anymore. End of story. Now in the UK the story is a bit different:

As of today, England is split 50/50, Wales is strongly on the “film” camp and Scotland and Northern Ireland on the “movie” side:

I’ll keep watching this trend, I wondering if the UK will jump to “film” side soon.