In the archive
Cinema industry trends

This page is no longer updated by Screen Australia. For information about ongoing data see Other data sources > Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Number of Australian and overseas films classified for exhibition, 1989/90–1999/00

Whether locally made or from overseas, films must be classified before they can be sold, hired or shown publicly in Australia. (Although not every film that is classified will necessarily be released in cinemas, the exceptions are few.) This data covers cinema films submitted for classification each year to the Classification Board and Classification Review Board (formerly the Office of Film and Literature Classification). As well as features, Classification Board and Classification Review Board data includes short features (under 60 minutes), documentaries and compilations of shorts. A film may also appear in the figures for more than one year if a modified version is submitted for classification in later years. Festival films were included in 1994/95, which bumped up all figures that year.

Over the 11 years since 1989/90 the main countries of origin have been the US, Hong Kong, Australia and the UK. 1999/00 saw an above-average proportion of Indian films and a below-average proportion from Hong Kong (the number of Hong Kong films classified has been falling since the mid-1990s).

The Classification Board and Classifiaction Review Board no longer publish this data in their annual reports. For updated, related data on the Screen Australia website, see Number released by country of origin.

Source: Classification Board and Classification Review Board (formerly the Office of Film and Literature Classification) annual reports.