Stephen Follows, writing on Substack, asks Has Hollywood given up on the happy ending?

He defines a happy ending as what happens and how the last few minutes feel. His methodology:

“For what happens, I rated the plots of 7,384 movies on a six-point scale from happy to sad, depending on whether the protagonist survives and gets what they wanted, whether the couple ends up together, whether the villain wins. For how it feels, I ran a facial-expression model over 1.57 million close-ups of 10,421 named performers and compared each film’s final 10% with its 65% to 85% stretch (where the darkest hour traditionally lives). A positive ‘ending lift’ means the ending reads warmer on the actors’ faces than the third act. Two further checks, the music of the finale and the ending tags that humans apply in public databases, tell the same story.”

His conclusion? No, happy endings are somewhat up, unhappy endings are somewhat down, but it’s the bittersweet ending that has risen.

“Bittersweet endings have climbed from about a quarter of films in the 1980s to more than a third today.”

Stephen then adds country of origin to see if the “Hollywood happy ending” might be skewing the data and delivers this chart:

India is even more optimistic than the US.

But wait! What’s Canada doing in last place? The only country on the list with MORE sad films than happy. Ten percent more sad! What gives?

Could this be the smoking gun that explains why we have no national cinema in Canada? As a country we persist in making sad movies when the audience just wants to be entertained?

I reached out to Stephen for more insight. He replied:

“I used IMDb’s main country of origin for each film, identifying 168 films out of roughly 6,500. Horror makes up a fifth of the Canadian set, against one in twenty American films, and genre alone explains about half the gap. The 28 films that are Canadian alone are darker still (only four end happily), but they’re mostly Cronenberg, Black Christmas, Ginger Snaps and Xavier Dolan. That’s a strong Canadian tradition of horror and auteur drama.”

Thank you, Mr. Follows.

My take: it’s a complicated equation, but I think this data irrefutably points out that genre is critical to movies with happy endings that satisfy audiences — ones that can create a national cinema. Horror is a niche genre at the end of the day.