Evaluation Question 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

During the Institutional Research stage of our production we looked at various different production and distribution companies and looked through their previous films and people they have been associated with, in order to come to an idea of which would be the best company to film produce our films and then chose a distributor who we believed would be the most capable for supplying our film world wide. After careful decision making we finally chose 20th Century Fox as our production company and Lions Gate  Entertainment to be our distributors.

 

We decided to choose 20th Century Fox as our production company as they have proven to be a major success throughout the years since their founding in 1935. Our main reasoning behind choosing this company is that they have had a great history helping to create many fantastic films such as Prometheus, X-Men and Die Hard which are all part of the Thriller genre we are covering. After producing our film we still believed this is a suitable company as our opening style of leaving it on a rather large cliffhanger links with some other openings from this company such as Die Hard 4.0 opening which I looked at during my research. As this company has had so many hits they cater for many demographics as they have created male action thriller films such as Die Hard, the children sensation Ice Age, and the female based film In Her Shoes. As these may not be thrillers, they have still had major hits with the audience and this may help when it comes to the production as they would know what is needed to help make it successful. With such a wide range of films and audience we know that this company would be capable of producing a film that would attract many people due to their history.

For our distributor company we chose Lions Gate Entertainment for many reasons. To begin with we noticed that this company has again been associated with the distribution of many well known films thriller films including American Psycho, The Expendables and The Punisher. From knowing this we know that if we chose this company we would be able to distribute our film on a much larger scale as they are capable of selling it all across the world, just like their previous films. We also noticed that it was a vertically integrated organisation as they own several separate divisions including Lions Gate Films, Lions Gate Home Entertainment, Lions Gate Music and Publishing and Lions Gate Television. With this in mind, we knew it would be very significant for the distribution phase of the film as it would allow them to promote our film on a much larger scale as well as allowing the film to be available in various formats such as the cinema to DVD’s which would increase its popularity and our income. Also they cater for many demographics which would mean that many people would want to watch our film as they know how good the other films they are associated with are. After finally finishing our film we believed that this company was rather too big for our film as it has had links with very high budget films, which we are not, therefore we decided to choose 20th Century Searchlight which is still an important distributor however specialises in helping smaller films (including many British films, such as Trance, 127 Hours and Slum-dog Millionaire), such as ours make it onto the big screen world wide. We believe that this distribution company would be ideal for us as it would help give us the initial boost that our film needs.