Kezia Williams, of Entertainment One UK, on the FutureLearn Film Distribution by the Film Distributors Association, speaks about how film distributors build a 'comp list' of comparable films that their target audience would enjoy.
She highlights the importance of knowing your target audience. She asks questions like "what drives them to the cinema" and "what interests do they have". She also says distributors will compare data of films that are similar in their genre, selling points and story. The target audience and budget is formulated from what box office take was like with previous films and the types of audience that saw those films. The target audience can be analysed to find the gender gap, and which cinemas the target audience usually frequent.
The genre of our film is a mix of action and thriller.
Similar films include:
- Prisoners (2013 Thriller/Crime)
Prisoners is a Thriller/Crime film about a man who kidnapped a fathers daughter. The father ends up torturing the kidnapper to get to the bottom of the case. The film offers a variety of violent scenes including graphic torture scenes and police chases. This film appeals to audiences who are interested in crime films. The story line is exciting and filled with action. Prisoners amassed over $120million at box office, with nominations for the Empire Award for Best Thriller and more. One of prisoners USP was the cast for this film, including star names within the industry like, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano
- Inception (2010 Action/Sci-Fi)
I believe this movie is similar to the one we intend to make due to the similarities in genre, which is a an action/thriller. Inception was a film directed by Christopher Nolan, someone who has already achieved big success in the film industry from the Dark Knight and other movies like Interstellar and Tenet. Inception had a range of selling points, however, one of the main selling points was the strong cast consisting of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy. Another selling point was the extremely sophisticated use of sound, created by renowned composer Hans Zimmer. It is clear to see why this movie amassed $836.8 million through the use of high production values and large production budget. The target audience for this movie was supposedly equal for all genders, in the sense that it doesn't have to appeal to specific gender norms. However, a marketing campaign that was carried out for this movie was on the Empire magazine, whereby there are over 570,000 men reading this magazine frequently. Therefore, this is one way in which the creators of Inception showed their knowledge of their target audience as statistics show that over 86% of readers that saw the advertisements for Inception in the Empire Magazine went on to watch the movie when it was released.
Today we carried out similar research.
KEZIA WILLIAMS: Really important to understand who your audience is and what motivates them and what’s going to interest them and drive them to go to the cinema. So you start, often, by examining similar films that have been released in the past– comparable films is a way in which we refer to them in the industry– and create a set that we can then look back at data so we can look at lots of different data and do research, really, on those comparable films to identify who the audience was on those films. So it might be that we look at demographic data and think about, did it skew more male or more female? What’s the age group that it appeals to?
Does it have multiple different audiences that that can appeal to? And there’s lots and lots of cinema-going trends that you can dig into from that comparable set. We’ll also look at box office data to understand regionality, to look at the cinema-going skew– so did more people go to a certain cinema chain to see these comparable films? Right down to which cinemas performed. So it might be that there’s a cinema in London that had a fantastic box office share, and that’s an important aspect for us to consider. And then once you really understand who the audience on those comparable films were, you can start to talk about the differences and similarities between those films and the film that you’re working on.
