GENRE RESEARCH - Teen box office history

IN SUMMARY

• For a successful teen film, romantic comedy isn't the best choice of genre, as recent times have shown like many other genres such as superhero and horror, the franchise model is now being used for young adult fiction as well.
• Next to that intellectual property has been the source for a number of big hits, which another general growing trend in the film industry, who want to rely on an inbuilt audience, which also includes teenagers who might not have read the book(s) but are convinced by word of mouth that it is high in quality, and also thereby give in to peer pressure.

THE BIGGEST HITTERS
Big hits with teen films now are in adaptations of bestselling books, mainly being hybrids with fantasy, horror, science-fiction and dystopia like, these all being book series they are also franchises (and note the trend to have adapted for the final book in two parts, of course not a strategy to make more money. If they really were interested in having more time to adapt the source material faithfully then they might have for example fulfilled JK Rowling's wish to adapt the fifth and sixth book into to films as well)

• Harry Potter, total box office of 8 films:                                                         $7.7b

• Twilight, total box office of 5 films:                                                                      $3.3b

• The Hunger Games, total box office of 4 films:                               $2.97b

• Divergent, total box office of 3 out of 4 films released so far:          $765.4m

• The Maze Runner, total box office of 2 films out of 3 released so far: $660.6m

So if we look at this trend, all the other franchises are attempting to come as close to the financial success, and the other conglomerates want to compete with the success of Warner Bros..

So teen romance, teen comedy and teen drama isn't enough, the intellectual property and hybridity with other genres. 

There are some exceptions of recent years, which include two adaptations of the author John Green's The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns, coming in with a worldwide box office of $307.2m and $85.5m.

Teen romance and coming of age films in the past, box office successes when looking at their budgets but still not having come close to the 21st century franchises.

Pretty In Pink, domestic box office: $40.5m
The Breakfast Club, $51.5m
10 Things I Hate About You, $53.5m

RECENT PURE TEEN FILMS
The Edge Of Seventeen, worldwide $18.8m

SWEDE1/Opening EG10 - Tyrannosaur

This is the final film opening I am looking at for my general research but also to prepare for my Tyrannosaur swede, the final practice exercise. 

Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine (2011)

BBFC 18, MPAA unrated

Running time of the opening sequence: 2:57 mins 

Lead actors: Peter Mullan, 

                           Olivia Coleman, 

                           Eddie Marsan
Genre: Social realism

Budget: £750k
UK/US/World Box Office: £243k, $22k, £400k.

Production co's:  Warp X, Inflammable Films
Production financing:   Film4;UK Film Council; Screen Yorkshire; EM Media; Optimum Releasing.
UK, US theatrical distributors: StudioCanal, Strand.
 
LINKS: IMDB; RottenTomatoes (Users 83%, Critics 85%); BoxOfficeMojo; The-Numbers; Wiki; Official site/page; Facebook.

TRAILER 

CRITICAL KUDOS: (wiki)

Tyrannosaur received positive reviews and currently has a "certified Fresh" score of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 75 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3 out of 10. The critical consensus states: "Tyrannosaur is a brutal, frank, and ultimately rewarding story of violent men seeking far-off redemption."^[6] The film also has a score of 65 out of 100 based on 18 critics on Metacritic, indicating "Generally favourable reviews".^[7]Stuart McGurk of GQ magazine called Tyrannosaur "The best British film of the year", whilst Empire said it was "Riveting, uncompromising, brilliant" and gave it 4/5 stars, as did Total Film, The Guardian, Sunday Mirror, and Evening Standard. The Daily Star Sunday and LoveFilm gave the film 5/5 stars and The Sunday Telegraph dubbed it "One of the most powerful films of 2011."
The American film critic and blogger Jeffrey Wells was so taken by Tyrannosaur after seeing it at the Los Angeles Film Festival that he started 'Hollywood Elsewhere's Tyrannosaur fundraising campaign' with the idea of raising $2,000 to cover the rental of a screening room so that the film could be shown in Hollywood with the hope of gaining recognition. Wells claimed this was the first screening financed by a critic.^[8]Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, calling Peter Mullan's performance muscular and unrelenting. He also remarked: "This isn't the kind of movie that even has hope enough to contain a message. There is no message, only the reality of these wounded personalities."^[9]Mark Kermode of BBC Radio 5 Live, hailed the film as one of the 11 Best Films of 2011.^[10] Kermode went on to award Olivia Colman Best Actress in his own Annual Kermode Awards. She tied with Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin.
By 18 December 2011, the film had won 21 awards from 28 nominations worldwide.
When the BAFTA Award nominations were announced on 17 January 2012, the omission of Olivia Colman in the Best Actress category led to global trending of both Olivia Colman and Tyrannosaur on Twitter.^[11]

IDENTS:

N/A, no idents, just like with Le Donk & This Is England.

TITLES:

Are non-serif and white, lower-case apart from capital letters like names are usually spelt.

The roles are smaller and, unconventionally, upper-case in contrast to names in lower-case.

1. Film4 AND The UK Film Council IN ASSOCIATION WITH Screen Yorkshire,                              EM MEDIA AND OPTIMUM RELEASING PRESENT
2. A Warp X/Inflammable Films PRODUCTION
3. A FILM BY Paddy Considine

On action, as the music begins, switching between left and right near the screen edge.

1. Peter Mullan
2. Olivia Colman
3. Ned Dennehy
4. Samuel Bottomley
5. Paul Popplewell
6. Sally Carman
7. Sian Breckin

MISE-EN-SCÈNE:

Urban location, not glamorised, 

NARRATIVE, GENRE, EXPOSITION:

We are introduced to the main character, and we already have the binary opposition within his own character/personality shown.

The other protagonist of the story, is still to be introduced.

THE PROTAGONIST:

My teacher asked me as the vulgar swearing started whether we were going to feel sympathy for the protagonist. I said definitely not in the opening sequence. I as an audience member was proven wrong.

The music and close-ups of the dog's paws are used to create sympathy for the protagonist.

DISTRIBUTION Critical Kudos

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• The main victims are big tentpole productions, it is less of a danger for indie productions, and rave reviews has shown to often not lead to financial success as can be seen with multiple Warp films, the prime example being Tyrannosaur. This can be seen in the attitude of an independent film distributor below.

This an a consequence of disruption, and the convergence between audience and producers becoming more blurred, as Rotten Tomatoes consists of both reviews by critics and users.

I myself experienced how a whole group of teenagers I was spending a week with were looking forward to Suicide Squad, and how the Rotten Tomatoes review turned them off from watching it, including a hardcore Batman fan.

The power of Rotten Tomatoes:

Launched on a lark in 1998 by Web designer Senh Duong to catalogue reviews for Jackie Chan kung-fu flicks, Rotten Tomatoes has come to dominate the cultural conversation surrounding new movies and fundamentally change the calculus of putting butts in seats. It’s particularly, terrifyingly powerful among teens and 20-somethings who, as recently as five years ago, relied more often than not on “Bro, you gotta see this”-style word of mouth than any sort of professional critic appraisals to make their multiplex picks.
“Moviegoers love trailers. They pay attention to the TV spots. But Rotten Tomatoes is like the truth serum on the entire [promotional] campaign: are all the things you’re telling me about the movie true or not?” says Jon Penn, chief executive of the movie research firm National Research Group (NRG), which has tracked Rotten Tomatoes’ influence on audience behavior since 2010. “These scores are almost like a lubricant one way or the other. If it’s good, it helps you more than it did in the past. But if it’s bad, it hurts you even more.”

A negative review doesn't always mean a film becomes a flop.

There are, to be sure, plenty of movies that become runaway hits despite craptacular Rotten Tomatoes scores—the Twilight and Transformers franchises, Tyler Perry’sMadea series, and the latest two entries in the nascent DC Extended Universe (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad) before Wonder Woman. But the larger pattern shows that the correlation between Rotten Tomatoes scores and audience interest has become remarkably consistent.
According to the stats compiled by NRG, almost every major moviegoing demographic reports an increasing reliance on Rotten Tomatoes. “One of the things we track is, ‘How often do you check Rotten Tomatoes scores before you decide to see a film?’” Penn says. “In 2014, 28 percent of all moviegoers said they were checking. In 2016, it’s 36 percent. Teens went from 23 [percent] to 34. That’s an enormous jump.” 

 The studios preparing to fight back:

And the studios are only preparing for it to get worse. An independent study commissioned by 20th Century Fox in 2015 (and obtained by Vanity Fair), titled “Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office,” concluded, “The power of Rotten Tomatoes and fast-breaking word of mouth will only get stronger. Many Millennials and even Gen Xers now vet every single purchase through the internet, whether it’s restaurants, video games, make-up, consumer electronics, or movies. As they get older and comprise an even larger share of total moviegoers, this behavior is unlikely to change.”
The power of the review aggregator has infuriated heavy hitters like Brett Ratner,who—in an apparent fit of pique after his recent producing effort Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice earned an eye-watering 27 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes—called it “the worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture.”

An independent marketing executive states that the reason is that less attention and financial resources are being paid to the quality of the film, the primary focus is on the marketing. This shows the mentality behind Warp Films, they want to be convinced that the film they have to marketed is high in quality, instead of just convincing the audience of the quality with the quality as a secondary priority. 

The most obvious recourse to Hollywood’s Rotten Tomatoes conundrum, of course, may also be the simplest (at least on paper): prioritize filmmaking quality over marketing artifice, make better/more interesting/more appealing films, and stop blaming some stupid website for lackluster box-office returns.
“To me, it’s a ridiculous argument that Rotten Tomatoes is the problem,” says a marketing executive at an independent film distributor. “F*** you—make a good movie!”

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DISTRIBUTION - VoD Disruption

WHAT I ENDED UP APPYLING

• This all helped me to develop a cynical but ultimately realistic attitude that teenagers are less niche and open to different types of films, and that I always need to consider the commercial side.

Source: Click here.

The Death Of The Classic Movie?:

Reed Hastings, the Netflix CEO who co-founded the company long before “streaming” entered the popular lexicon, was born during a fairly remarkable year for film. 1960 was the year Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho astounded and terrified audiences, influencing a half-century of horror to come. It was a year of outstanding comedies (Billy Wilder’s The Apartment), outstanding epics (Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus) and outstandingly creepy thrillers (Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom—a close cousin of Psycho).But in the vast world of Netflix streaming, 1960 doesn’t exist. There’s one movie from 1961 available to watch (the original Parent Trap) and one selection from 1959 (Compulsion), but not a single film from 1960. It’s like it never happened. There aren’t any movies from 1963 either. Or 1968, 1955 or 1948. There are no Hitchcock films on Netflix. No classics from Sergio Leone or François Truffaut. When Debbie Reynolds died last Christmas week, grieving fans had to turn to Amazon Video for Singin' in the Rain and Susan Slept Here. You could fill a large film studies textbook with what’s not available on Netflix.

Netflix’s selection of classic cinema is abominable—and it seems to shrink more every year or so. As of this month, the streaming platform offers just 43 movies made before 1970, and fewer than 25 from the pre-1950 era (several of which are World War II documentaries). It’s the sort of classics selection you’d expect to find in a decrepit video store in 1993, not on a leading entertainment platform that serves some 100 million global subscribers. Netflix’s DVD subscribers enjoy a much wider selection (four million customers still opt to receive discs in the mail), but as the company shifts its focus to streaming and original content, cinephiles fear the cinematic canon is being left behind.

“If you're the biggest name in film streaming services, the less you offer in classic movies, the more you imply that classic movies have less to offer,” says Nora Fiore, a 26-year-old writer who has a blog devoted to classic cinema, “The Nitrate Diva.” “It's a terrible message to put out there.”

Netflix used to be more niche, it has become more mainstream?

It wasn’t always so bleak. Netflix, which just turned 20 years old, first expanded into streaming media in 2007. Back then, Fiore enjoyed the site’s streaming offerings, when the service was still new and the movie selection more eclectic. (There was even a selection of Criterion Classics, which ended in 2011, when Criterion struck a deal with Hulu.) “I saw Breathless for the first time on Netflix,” she says. “I saw Jules and Jim streaming on Netflix back in 2008 [or] 2009… They would also have some really weird movies that you got the feeling they bought with a package. Like, a movie I saw there for the first time that hardly anybody knows about is a movie called Specter of the Rose, a really weird poverty row film noir about a mad ballet dancer.”

But in recent years, DVDs have started going the way of the floppy disk, and Netflix, the golden child of the streaming revolution, has started catering less to the film nerd and more to the average bored consumer.

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Film professors and historians are particularly troubled by the situation.“It was very distressing when Netflix began to phase out their huge inventory of movies available on DVD with the goal of shifting viewers over to the streaming model,” says Stephen Prince, a cinema studies professor at Virginia Tech. “Now we see the danger inherent in this change—an emphasis on mainstream, contemporary movies has replaced what had been a broad archive of world cinema… Convenience biases viewers toward mainstream fare and makes films of the past or from other cultures less visible.

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TEEN8 - Dazed & Confused

WHAT I ENDED UP APPLYING

• The car driving in, symbol of status 
• Opening sequences mainly consisting of teenagers, 
• The cool hand , realised it reflects some parts of teen culture
• The representation of teenagers in general in my film opening was quite tame in comparison with here, I was constrained in terms of representing nicotine and drug consumption, plus none of my actors smoked, so it would have been not possible for them either. 
• My main female characters went against the gender stereotype of lavish lipstick, with their even being a binary with black lipstick. 

Dazed and Confused 

Richard Linklater, 1993

Length: 

IDENTS:
Universal Pictures with their signature sound.

Gramercy Pictures ident, reflects their status that they are shown while Alphaville and Detour Filmproduction are not included. 



TITLES:
All the titles are white serif, with all lower-case apart from capital letters, no words are fully upper-case.
First three titles are white on balk 
Gramercy Pictures Presents
An Alphaville Production, In Association with Detour Filmproduction

Dazed and Confused


THE OPENING SHOT:
We get a tracking shot

NARRATIVE, EXPOSITION:
We close-in on inside the car, with an extreme-close-up of a cigarette being licked.
We are then introduced to the multiple students in groups

EDITING:
All the different groups are shot in a single take, the camera remains static after the opening tracking shot.

GENRE SIGNIFIERS
AGE: We only get teenagers in this opening, and they are smoking, rebelling against laws.

GENDER: Lipstick in second shot, promotes traditional gender image of beauty, women's body is for display.


SOUNDTRACK:
UGC Soundtrack on Spotify, including the songs excluded from the official so

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Name of a magazine

AUDIENCE THEORY #1 - Stuart Hall's Reception Theory

Stuart Hall developed three readings when talking about how meaning is encoded in a media text by the producers and decoded by an audience.

1. Preferred Reading
2. Negotiated Reading
3. Oppositional Reading

EXAMPLES:

In a scene from Repo Man, a character says the word: "Gringo"

I don't speak Spanish, but I do know that gringo is a Spanish slang (insult) term for Caucasians (due to a Mexican character using it in an audio series I listened to as a child). 

So while I can't follow the preferred reading like someone who can speak Spanish fluently, and might detect signifiers of regional identity, I still understand some of what is being said here. Someone who does not know this term or any Spanish at all will have an oppositional reading towards this line, where as I have a form of negotiated reading.

These two YouTubers show the two alternatives, different readings on the content, in this case verisimilitude of the text, on the other moral issues



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DISTRIBUTION/AUDIENCE - Age Ratings

From the BBFC website:

The Motion Picture Association of America, from the MPAA website:

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Assessment Criteria

FROM THE CIE SYLLABUS:

The Blog's The Thing!:

The Evaluation:

As summarised in this Media Studies blog post, and linking to the two screenshots before, these are the main themes of my AS coursework next to actual media product.

• AUDIENCE RESEARCH
• INDUSTRY RESEARCH
• TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH
• CONVENTIONS RESEARCH
• PRE-PRODUCTION/PLANNING

• REFLECTION OF THE PRODUCTION PROCESS - PRESENTED CREATIVELY USING TECHNOLOGY

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