Institutions + Audiences Terminology

*After Media Language A-Z, carries on from Box Office, the Big 6 and the Gant Rule*

GENERAL

Ownership

Subsidiary

Mainstream

Commercial

Niche

Independent “Indie”

Genre
Franchise

(Film) Cycle: Production, Distribution, Exhibition, Consumption/Exchange/Retail

Production/Marketing Strategy

Vertical Integration

Horizontal Integration

Digitisation

Marketing

Promotion

Synergy

Tie-In

Proliferation

Disruption

Piracy

Cross-Media Convergence

Technological Convergence

Prosumer

Social Media

 - Facebook

 - Twitter

 - Instagram

 - Snapchat
 - WhatsApp

 - Tumblr

 - Pinterest
 - Reddit
 - Flickr

 Audience/Consumers

Intellectual Property

Feelgood Narrative

Media Product

Age Rating

Fandom

Nostalgia

Critical Kudos 

Reviews

Interview

UGC (User Generated Content)
VoD (Video-On-Demand)
Star Theory

FILM-SPECIFIC

Box Office

Box Office Flop

Box Office Hit

Tentpole

Prequel

Sequel

Remake

Reboot

Renewal

Short Film

Actor

A-List star

Casting

OST (Official SoundTrack)

Auteur

Director

Producer

Cinematographer

Editor

Release Window

Big 6

BBFC

MPAA

Trailer

 - Teaser Trailer

 - International Trailer

 - British Trailer

 - Final Trailer

DVD Sales

Film Poster

Film Festival

Limited Release

Wide Release

From this post off the British Cinema blog:

Budget See production budget and Prints and Advertising (P&A) Budget. 

Domestic Box Office Total money spent on tickets by moviegoers in the United States and Canada.   

Fanboy Effect Certain films have a very loyal following, usually due to their source material. These people will flock to the film as soon as it opens, either over the opening weekend or, more likely, opening night. This inflates these numbers, reducing both the Internal Multiplier and the overall Multiplier.  

Home Market The Home Market refers to revenue derived from people viewing movies at home. It is broken down into three sections: rentals, sales and TV rights. Combined these bring in more than double the domestic box office and can turn a film that was a mid-level hit to a monster hit, or lift a film that struggled at the box office to one that shows a considerable profit. And to think, just a couple of decades ago studios were suing VCR manufacturers and Video Rental stores claiming they would kill the industry! Of course now DVD is king, representing more than 80% of rentals and nearly all of the sales.  

The Hulk Effect Back in 2003 when Hulk came out, the studio bowed to incredible pressure from fans and released early footage of the special effects. The plan was to get the fans talking and build up the word-of-mouth. However, the special effects were in the early stages and were so bad that the buzz it generated killed any chance the film had. More recently the same happened to Catwoman with the early look at Halle Berry's outfit. Just goes to show you, sometimes there is such thing as bad publicity.  

Internal Multiplier A film's weekend box office divided by its Friday number. It's basically a measure of the film's word-of-mouth, with 3.0 being the best most films can get these day while 2.3 is generally the bottom rung. Certain films have an inherent advantage (like those aimed kids), while the Fanboy Effect can shrink the number as the hardcore fans flock to the movie on Friday.  

International box office Total box office from all nations outside United States and Canada.  

Legs Legs is a term used to refer to how long a film lasts in theaters.  

Multiplier A film's total box office divided by its opening weekend box office. Another measure of the film's word-of-mouth but with a much wider range of possibilities. Films with below 2.0 are not unheard of, while 6.0 or more are a possibility. Just as a side note, not too long ago films with a multiplier of 10 or more were quite common, but the economics have changed and a big opening weekend is too important to the studios and the home market shortens a film's legs.  

Prints and Advertising (P+A) Budget Prints are the actual physical film that are shown in theaters and are quite expensive to make and distribute, costing about $2,000 per print. Each theater needs at least one print and possibly more depending on how many screens the film is playing on. The advertising part of the budget is the amount spent on just that, advertising. Most of the money is spent on TV, but radio, newspapers and magazines, the Internet and in theater advertising are also very important. The average film spends $34.4 million on P&A, while some films have spent more than $100 million.  

Production Budget The amount of money it cost make the movie including pre-production, film and post-production, but excluding distribution costs. The average cost of a wide release is about $65 million, with the most expensive films topping $200 million.  

Screens + Screen Count The actual screen the movie is projected on. Most Theaters have multiple screens, with largest having two dozen screens or more. Screen Count is simply the number of screens a film is playing on, but this is rarely used domestically, but internationally it is used to measure how wide a release is.  

The Sequel Effect, a.k.a. Sequelitis Think of this as a sub-species of the Fanboy Effect specific to sequels. Such films have a built in audience due to the original movie (as otherwise making the sequel is pointless).   

Theaters + Theater Count  A theater is any place a movie is showing from the smallest cinema on the art house circuit to the largest megaplex. A film's Theater Count is simply the number of theaters a film is playing in at a given time. Domestically Theater Count is used to measure how wide a release is. 

Worldwide box office Domestic Box Office plus the International Box Office. 

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

DISTRIBUTION - OST

WHAT I ENDED UP APPLYING:

• I created a fictional identity of the musician behind the soundtrack of my film, James Riley,  who was an Indie romantic artist, which fitted an outside teenager looking for love, similar to how Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys recorded and sung the soundtrack behind Warp's Submarine

It is not always the case, but most films will have a number of tracks.

Even if their isn't an official soundtrack made for the film, you will find playlists on the two main music streaming sites Spotify and YouTube, in the case of Baby Driver there was already a playlist on Spotify created.

For my film opening I have chosen the tracks I Want Candy and I Keep Forgetting.

While these are not mainstream songs and are also covers, they still carry with them some pop identiy.

When I played the I Want Candy track to a girl above in my year, she reacted by saying: "Of course, who doesn't know that song"

However big hit films will feature songs from the top charts, which is included in the trailer

https://www.bustle.com/articles/169688-the-song-in-bridget-joness-baby-trailer-is-absolutely-perfect-for-the-movie

It can be that the personality/image of the singer will correlate with the genre  themes of the film, like for Suicide Squad which deals with a bunch of misfits, you have artists who have all been hedonistic and/or damaged to some extent

 for Bridget Jones's Baby you have romantic Ed Sheeran. 

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!”

...

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.

...

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.

...

INDIE Case Study - Warp

Warp Films was born as a film subsidiary of the independent record company Warp Records.

2002 - Short Film My Wrongs (by Chris Morris)

2004 - First full feature-length film,

           Dead Man's Shoes directed by Shane 

           Meadows, 

2006 - This Is England, Shane Meadows

2007 - Grow Your Own, comedy about racial 

            issues

2008 - Hush, Horror road trip 

2009 - Le Donk + Scor-Say-Zee, mockumentary, 

           took five days to film, shows how 

           convergence and digitisation have made

           filming easier

2010 - Four Lions, surprise small hit, Warp took

           a gamble and increased the number of 

           screens 

2011 - Tyrannosaur, critics raved about the film

           It was given to a US distributor who 

           specialize mainly in LGBT+ films.

2013 - For Those In Peril, final film produced by 

           Warp X, looks like the grant has dried up.

2014 - '71, an historical action thriller, set in NI.

           But unlike other indie films about The 

           Troubles it was from the POV of an 

           English soldier, not the Northern Irish, 

           which goes against the representation of

           minorities. The action genre chosen is 

           quite commercial. However, the lead is 

           unknown to international audiences, is not

           RP and working class. Not glamorized like

           a typical action hero, has less control/

           agency within the narrative unlike Matt

           Damon's lead character in Working Title's

           Green Zone. It flopped, but slowly

           achieved $1.2m in the US.

2016 - Ghost Stories announced. Demonstrates

           Warp's ineffective online presence.

           Yardie announced. Directorial debut of 

           Idris Elba, 

           

Opening EG1 - Legend

WHAT I ENDED UP APPLYING

• I had a track covered by an independent musician that was assigned to a record label owned by main company, so just like with Duffy I had horizontal integration, but very limited, more like the Arctic Monkeys in Warp's Le Donk + Scor-Zay-Zee and Submarine. but arguably even less so.
• My film ended up being a 12 and PG-13, so I'm not taking the same risk as an 18-rated film.

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• As I've seen in Warp Films, the danger of my film being rated 18 can even increase my limited commercial success along with the major setback of an indie and no A-List stars,  however even without an A-Lister and an actor who has some recognition in the US (I would eventually choose Rachel Weisz), if one has a genre that can appeal to a certain audience it can be successful, as the Krays are culturally recognisable in the UK, and the gangster genre will be more appealing in the USA in, the violence and possible blood having similar appeal to that of horror. This can increase digital streaming interest for teens. 

TITLE

Director, 2009

PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Working Title, 
                                                 UK Film Council,
                                                 Aramid Entertainment

DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films (US)
                          Optimum Releasing (UK)

GENRE: Political satire 
               (subgenre of comedy)

LEAD ACTORS: Peter Capaldi

                            Tom Hollander

                            Chris Addison

                            Gina McKee

                            James Gandolfini

BBFC:  15                 MPAA: Not Rated

BUDGET: £612k       
BOX OFFICE: $3.5m (UK) $2.4m (US) $7.8m (worldwide)

LEAD ACTORS: Tom Hardy (playing both lead roles), Emily Browning

GENRE: Historical gangster (subgenre of crime genre)

PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Working Title 

DISTRIBUTORS: Universal Pictures

BBFC: 18   MPAA: R

BUDGET: $m      BOX OFFICE: $m (UK), $m (US), $m (worldwide)

CRITICAL KUDOS:

Notice how a lot of the praise is on the double performance of Tom Hardy.

TRAILERS:

...

The opening sequence after idents and titles and before we cut to the main title has been made available on YouTube by STUDIOCANAL Australia.

INST

the-numbers.com graph highlights the downside of working-class characters in a UK set film

One of the production companies is Amazon Instant Video. An example of convergence with the film cycle step exhibition being challenged. The distributors providers/exhibitors are now also becoming producers. This is can be seen as vertical integration

PROMOTION:

• Playlist created by WT on YouTube

• MTV International interviewing Tom Hardy and Brian Helgeland 

The opening sequence after idents and titles and before we cut to the main title has been made available on YouTube by STUDIOCANAL Australia.

SYNPNOSIS

A clear exposition of the setting, 1960s London, and the narrative, the Krays brothers. The two twins are introduced as a rising force in the criminal underworld, however their differences aren't anchored in the opening sequence, but by the time of the opening sequence it is shown who we are meant to follow as the protagonist.

IDENTS

20 seconds you get the Studiocanal. Universal is the distributor but we don't get their ident. A look at the Universal UK YouTube channel shows that the conglomerate owned by Comcast didn't show that much interest in this film, which its box office shows. However, Working Title had much more belief in it than for example The Program, a film which flopped both internationally and in the UK with only a UK box office of 500km, which was not on their YouTube channel along with Grimsby from their most recent films.

Working Title started with promoting their films on YouTube with behind the scenes footage in 2013 with the adaptation of the hit musical Les Miserables. The Program and Grimsby aren't shown here, signifies not their lower importance. 

TITLES:

There are very few titles, the rest were shown at the end credits. These only include the distributing and production companies as separate white on black captions

STUDIOCANAL PRESENTS

IN ASSOCIATION WITH ANTON CAPITAL ENTERTAINMENT

& AMAZON PRIME INSTANT VIDEO

A WORKING TITLE PRODUCTION

LEGEND

MISE-EN-SCENE:
There is use of CGI for the city. The car is glamorised, it shines, it's not clear whether it has been editing. . There are multiple people in the background.

REPRESENTATIONS:
When a text today represents (it can never truly show what the past was like, just like any media representation) an historical time period, it can be difficult to judge whether there has been 

But nevertheless,  the constant repetition of 'able-bodied', caucasian, heterosexual etc. characters in the media creates a normative effect on society.

SEXUALITY: Through the line "My Reggie", the left Kray is signified as heterosexual, and so is the narrator, immediately showing that there are more heterosexual characters. Ronnie's homosexuality is not signified.

AGE: The classic image of the gangster is The Godfather, age is status there.

SOCIAL CLASS: These are working class lads who rose up in the crime world. Is this a somewhat different representation of class than is typical for Working Title?

REGIONAL IDENTITY: This is closely linked with class and status, and the expectation of 

GENDER: Bechdel Test? Decision to focus not just on symbols of male power but have it narrated by a female character

NARRATIVE, GENRE, EXPOSITION:
From this line we expect

The Krays aren't clearly morally anchored heroes as the film will show, however we will see that Ronnie has a more sensitive side. So here he is called: "Bloodthirsty" and the smoke like a fire breathing dragon seems to anchor he is the more malicious twin, and then Reggie is called different. So this sets up an apparent 

THE CENTRAL PROTAGONIST?: As we transition to the main film, we follow Reggie as he  asserts his authority, meets his love interest.

In this opening sequence this is signified by the narrative

This two-shot that could signify closeness is made to look cold by them not looking at each other.

SOUND:
We get an audio bridge of the non-diegetic incidental music  from the Working Title ident to the opening shot. We then get diegetic 

The track of the closing credits is foreshadowed by this line:

Believe me when I say, It took a lot of love for me to hate him the way I do.

This track also intertextuality references a Led Zeppelin song of the time period, also called Whole Lotta Love.

*Screenshot of Spotify*

This track is an example of horizontal integration, Duffy is contracted with