This looked odd to me too - and suspiciously like a p-hack. Besides - if the grey shaded area is where we are supposed to believe the 'actual' number should fa

This looked odd to me too - and suspiciously like a p-hack. Besides - if the grey shaded area is where we are supposed to believe the 'actual' number should fall, we actually know the 'actual' numbers (the dots) and 60% of the datapoints fall outside of the shaded area, so this seems like total nonsense to me (presumably 95% of the points should sit inside this area?). On top of that - if you added the actual numbers to this graph (which I expect are 1-4 films a year) only a handful of releases can completely skew the data. And then even if you ignore the above, the whole premise titles such as 'old school', 'no country for old men' and 'the 40 year old virgin' are picked because of a trend towards 'old stuff' isn't in any way backed up by either data or common sense when thinking about the movie titles. When you get a graph like this which has such basic failures in stats and common sense, it does make you question the data and rigor behind the rest of the article.