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.
'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.'
Here is our 'comp' list:
Our Target Audience. by Fia Brown
You have completed useful research into how distributors make a 'comp list' of similar films in order to have data on what the audiences for these films are and therefore how to reach these audiences. You have made a clear comp list for your own film, which will support your decisions about how to engage your own audience.
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