These are mass appeal films created at huge cost and supported by massive marketing effort. In contrast a large number of high quality, independent and foreign language films are released annually but invariably they earn much less at the box office.
Young people, although still the multiplexes mainstay audience, are increasingly consuming film online through downloading or streaming services. Films based on literary works or specific aspects of social history or parts of the country are often well received by local audiences who prefer cinemas with comfort, character and the opportunity to have a coffee or a bar drink.
Young children enjoy cinema going. Sometimes they attend with a group of friends. Often they are accompanied by parents or relatives. Local cinemas have to be capable of adapting to whatever is currently in the news and available to them. This requires skill and showmanship on the part of the cinema manager and staff in addition to a well designed building. The cinema industry categorises audiences in many different ways but often relies on an age-related scheme which closely follows the film certification categories U, PG, 12A, 15, 18 :.
Apart from being regular attenders these individuals are often the opinion leaders who influence other less committed people to attend. The motivation to attend a cinema, and the opportunities for doing so, varies considerably from group to group. Teenagers living in a rural community may want to see a film each week but might have to travel 10 miles or more to get to the nearest multiplex cinema. Without a car this may be impossible.
Families may want to attend regularly but the total cost travel, tickets, confectionery is sometimes felt to be too great. Older audiences may enjoy cinema-going but feel that the area around their local cinema is unsafe during the evening. Within the broad leisure sector, operators are increasingly focusing on the social aspects of leisure and on four influences affecting the choice of activity:.
Planning a cinema development, like any other leisure or retail development, involves estimation of the catchment area that the new cinema will serve and from which it can expect to draw audiences. The boundary takes into account the type and quality of road links as well as distance.
Typically, several catchments are examined at the planning stage for a new cinema — for example a 10 or minute inner catchment where the majority of the regular cinemagoers live, and a 20 or minute outer catchment where infrequent cinemagoers live. In order to obtain a good understanding of the potential audience for a new cinema it is usually worth looking at these catchments independently. Other relevant catchment boundaries can be derived from travel to work data and from retail catchment information.
His aim is to present qualitative research personal opinions of audiences rather than mere sociological or economic research, which is what most movie audience research has been in the past. The author and researcher, Tom Stempel, is a film historian rather than a marketing researcher and while his book is essentially a flawed exercise and not as ground breaking as what Stempel would have you believe, he does raise many pertinent issues in regards to movie audience reception.
The research analyses audience reaction to mostly Hollywood mainstream films from to the present and while box-office results are not obviously reflective of the quality of the film Stempel is continually appalled at some of the films that are top grosses , it does reflect the preferences of the masses which, in turn, affects the films that are subsequently produced by the studios and the future of the film industry.
I must mention that while the book and this article focuses on and is limited to Hollywood films, there are obviously other films beside those from Hollywood. Independent and foreign language films are not represented by the study probably because their relatively limited box-office potential does not warrant extensive and costly research.
Of course, this does not diminish their importance to the film industry and film culture. However, in the current state of the local film industry where such films have to compete with big-budget Hollywood mainstream films in local art-house cinemas, it is important to understand why audiences flock to these commercial films.
In his introduction, he notes that. Some of the film directors mentioned in the book may not like what the audiences have to say about them and their films. As may those academics who will be appalled that I have been talking to ordinary moviegoers rather than elite ones such as themselves.
Subscribe Sign In. Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership. Resume Subscription We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. Please click confirm to resume now. Sponsored Offers. Alison Pilling at the Leeds-based Culturevulture blog suggests that the labels are unhelpful because many people are audiences some of the time and artists some of the time too. Next Wednesday Culturevulture is holding a meeting for audiences in Leeds so they can have their say. It sounds fun.
There will be games. Really hearing the audience and discovering what they want is crucial. The most interesting companies and buildings understand that as they move from making theatre for audiences and increasingly making theatre with audiences, so the lines between the two are blurred. At Contact in Manchester the theatre's users — many of them young people — are increasingly becoming its programmers. The audience has the power not just to say what they want but to deliver it.
As Contact's Matt Fenton says, it changes the entire dynamic of the top-down institution run by a single artistic director often a white, middle-class man. So let's stop being scared about asking the audience what they want.
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