SSC Film Studies

Marketing for a film can influence whether or not a film will be successful. Many of the most successful films are generally the ones that have spent large amounts of money on marketing. For example Avatar being the most successful film of all time spent just under half of their budge on marketing. This stresses the importance of marketing and that without the film would not be a successful. However not all marketing will be successful; the marketing has to appeal to audiences, it has to meet the correct expectations that audiences would expect of a certain type of genre. Such that if a film portrays an action in the trailer but the film is not really an action; this would obviously result in an unsuccessful film; although it may pull in huge amounts of money depending on the stars or directors starring which may be another pulling factor to an audience within the first opening week of hitting the cinemas, the film would generally decrease in sales through word of mouth. Therefore resulting in decreasing profits as the weeks of opening week go on. Marketing is generally all about persuading the audiences to spend their money on tickets. However in this day and age there are many factors that can effect whether audiences will spend their money. A key factor is publicity because it can effect how people see the film in a different light to what they might of originally seen in the trailer etc. Publicity can often result in huge profit losses or gains. There are now many sources of publicity, which can no longer be controlled by the studios. However in the past the studios controlled most of publicity through trailers and press kits however through the new technology there are many ways to access Information on a film, which may not be what they studios want you to know or see. Marketing is all about creating an expectation and meeting it; therefore when the audience leave the cinema they feel satisfied with what they expected to see. This is always the case with successful films. Overall I would say that the most successful films are the ones that meet expectation, build a relationship between the audience and