About FilmBurst

Say a friend messages you that a movie is a “7 out of 10,” and Rotten Tomatoes has it at 72%, and your own scorecard runs in stars — none of those numbers line up on their own. Or you’re sketching a first short film’s budget in a blank spreadsheet and have no idea what share should go to crew versus post-production. Or you want to marathon a trilogy before a friend’s party and don’t know if three films plus snack breaks will actually fit the evening. None of these are big mysteries, but they’re the kind of small, specific arithmetic that most film sites don’t bother with — they write reviews and news, and leave the numbers to you.

The gaps FilmBurst fills

Guess the opening weekend of an upcoming release and you’re mostly speculating from a budget figure and a hunch about the genre. Try to work out how much of a two-hour film one character was actually on screen, and you’re stuck rewinding and timing scenes by hand. And if you’re an independent filmmaker weighing which festivals to submit to, the entry fees and deadlines are scattered across a dozen different websites, each with its own currency and cutoff date.

What we built instead

FilmBurst is six focused calculators, built around exactly those situations. The Film Budget Calculatorbreaks a production budget into cast, crew, equipment, locations, post, and marketing, lets you set a contingency reserve, and shows the subtotal, grand total, and each category’s share. The Movie Rating Converterkeeps a 5-star, 10-point, percentage, letter-grade, and thumbs up/down score consistent with each other from a single underlying number, so a “7/10” and a “72%” can actually be compared. The Movie Marathon Planneradds up your chosen films’ runtimes plus a break between each, and tells you the total running time and the exact clock time you’ll finish — even past midnight. The Box Office Predictortakes a film’s budget, genre, and screen count and returns a rough, illustrative ballpark for total gross, opening weekend, and per-screen takings, for entertainment only, not a forecast. The Screen Time Calculatoradds up a character’s scenes so editors auditing a cut, or fans settling a debate, can see their total screen time and share of the runtime. And the Festival Strategy Planner totals submission fees across your target festivals, averages the cost, and sorts the deadlines soonest-first so nothing on your submission slate slips.

Alongside the tools, the site carries film guides at /learn, articles at /blog, and the Cinema & Film Museum, a set of galleries on the formats and technology that capture and project a film, the genres and movements that shape it, the crafts of filmmaking, and the awards and icons of the movies — every entry, image, and fact drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

What this is, and what it isn’t

FilmBurst is an independent, advertising-supported site — the ads are what keep the tools free and the lights on. We aren’t affiliated with the Motion Picture Association, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, any studio, festival, or rating board; where we describe a rating scale or an industry convention, that’s our own reading of publicly known practice, not an endorsement from anyone who owns it. The numbers the calculators return — budget breakdowns, box-office ballparks, screen-time shares, festival totals — are estimates built from the figures you enter and general conventions, not financial forecasts, professional production advice, or a guarantee of how any real film or festival will actually perform.

Questions about a tool, or one you think we’re missing? Get in touch.