Essay

Successful media products depend as much upon marketing and distribution to a specific audience as they do upon good production practices”. To what extent would you agree with this statement, within the media area you have studied?

 I do agree with that statement as marketing is a vital part of post production. There are a lot of different methods of marketing and will mainly depend on the budget the film has to the amount of marketing and advertisements the film uses.   
 I think that marketing and distribution is as important as good production practices. The idea of a film may not have an audience like other films, such as films made of books, so the teaser trailers, teaser posters, tv spots, billboards etc. are very important in getting initial interest in the film. If a film doesnt get attention and interest before it is released, not as many people would go and see it and it might be so successful.
A film such as Inception which was directed by Christopher Nolan, also director of The Dark Knight, in 2010. It had a budget of $175million, and a marketing budget of $100 million. Overall it made a profit of $825 million. On the opening weekend it made $64 million.  It is a blockbuster, however it is unlike others as it’s not based on anything e.g. Harry Potter is based on books, Spiderman is based on a comic, etc. It is a completely original idea, and this along with the intellectual level of the film worried Warner Bros.

There were several posters for Inception, with each poster having a main character on it. This allowed people to see who was in it, and it would attract fans of the actors/actresses in it e.g. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page. There was also a teaser poster campaign. The posters didn’t give much away about the film but were eye catching and mysterious so people would be drawn in. There were also billboard posters and on the side of buildings, which would be very hard to miss. The teaser trailers gave a bit more away but still left some speculation as to what the actual plot was. All of these raised awareness of the film and made it well known to the public. After that, the proper trailers were released. This gave the audience enough information about the film for them to understand what it was about and make them excited about going to see it, but not so much information that it gave key things away.

Inception was aimed at different audiences including Christopher Nolan fans, Batman fans (in most trailers it opened with “from the director of The Dark Knight”), action film fans, people who like drama, people interested in special effects and fans of the actors/actresses. However, because it is such a complex story line and it is different to a lot of other blockbusters, the audience may be limited.

Also the statement is backed up even more by a film like The Kings Speech as this had a budget of only £8 Million but made a total of £250 Million at the box office. The film achieved such a high box office taking due to the fact of how high the anticipation was for the release of the film. The film premiered at the Telluride film festival in the United States and also at the 2010 Toronto international film festival so this helped raise awareness of the film and ultimately helped the film achieve what it did.