{"id":1018,"date":"2017-04-07T17:00:20","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T17:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commarts.pleather.us\/2017\/04\/07\/the-most-common-characters-throughout-film-history\/"},"modified":"2017-04-07T17:00:20","modified_gmt":"2017-04-07T17:00:20","slug":"the-most-common-characters-throughout-film-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/2017\/04\/07\/the-most-common-characters-throughout-film-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Common Characters Throughout Film History"},"content":{"rendered":"

What characters are the most recurring throughout film history? The most memorable characters in a movie are usually leading or unique roles. However, films are large projects that sometimes require hundreds\u00a0of people to play minor roles. Looking at the credits of a film always left me in awe. It took around 8 minutes to scroll through the ending credits of the 1996 animated film Space Jam <\/em>even though it has a fairly short run time of 100 minutes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016 the global box office revenue was <\/span>$38.3 billion<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>US film and TV industry supported 1.9 million jobs.<\/span><\/a> With the staggering amount of people it takes to create movies, you would expect minor roles to make up a large portion of credited characters in a film. There roles\u00a0for \u201cStormtrooper\u201d or \u201cGladiator\u201d that have been cast hundreds of times\u00a0for multiple films, for example. We expect that extras would be the most common role but interestingly enough, the data tells us otherwise. The dataset is from IMDB and contains the year, title, names of the characters, actors, and actresses from 3 million\u00a0films during the time period of 1894 to 2026 (films in future years are ones that have been announced by production studios or are currently in production and slated for a future release date). <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I expected \u201cExtra\u201d to be the most common but the data shows that the role \u201cHimself\u201d tops the list. According to IMDB, the 1982 biopic Gandhi<\/em>\u00a0had 300,000 extras in one scene of the film. However, these roles are not credited. This explains why \u201cExtra\u201d isn\u2019t the top spot. The next question would be who are the actors that play \u201cHimself\u201d most frequently? \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The actor that plays \u201cHimself\u201d most commonly would be Adolf Hitler. During his lifetime alone Adolf Hitler had 34 film credits as \u201cHimself\u201d. This would not count as characters named \u201cAdolf Hitler\u201d. Only for characters \u201cHimself\u201d with the actor being Adolf Hitler. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Characters credited as \u201cHerself\u201d are not nearly as common as roles titled as \u201cHimself\u201d. This can be attributed by the gender gap between roles available to actors and actresses. In fact, the amount of roles men have played is double the amount of roles that women have played over the history of film (men have had 2,440,028 roles where women have had 1,171,184 roles).<\/span><\/p>\n

What turned out to be a look at the prevalence of minor characters throughout history actually turned out to uncover in interesting fact. The most repeated role is actually one of the most notorious and polarizing individual in history. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, is the man most attributed to the amount of films made about Hitler during his lifetime. However, 62.6% of the roles where Hitler was credited with playing \u201cHimself\u201d are in films released after his death. It seems that the fascination the rest of the world has about the infamous leader seems to be a bigger contributor to the amount of his self-credits.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source: Visual News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What characters are the most recurring throughout film history? The most memorable characters in a movie are usually leading or unique…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":1019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-careering"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/107\/2017\/04\/page-0.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paqOTj-gq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}