RESEARCH: THE ROLE OF THE DISTRIBUTOR

I used the FDA film site to research the roles of the distributor. The Chief Executive of the FDA, Mark Batey explains how a distributor has to consider who, what, when and how which are involved for marketing successful  films.

WHAT?
Mark Batey states that at the earliest moment a distributor needs to work out what this film is. He also says that the distributors should look at if there are any other films which have come out recently which are similar and look at how well they have done. other things that the distributor should look at are how well that the films that the actors involved have done, the director is another factor which the distributor needs to look at. They need to look at how well their previous films have done.

To show how different genres of films need different distribution methods. To show this I made a collage of a number of films that Working Title make:

  

WHO?
Mark Batey says that another role of the distributor is that they need to look at who their audience is. He states that the most frequent cinema goers are young adults and students. However more recently people aged 40-50 have started attending the cinema he finishes off by saying how the age range in one screening can range from 8-80.

The largest audience section is age 16-34 in 2018 91% went to the cinema making a total of 77Million visits. The FDA recorded that ages of audiences are increasing. Over half of TV aduience are aged 54 and over. Figures influence distributers so they would be intrested to know that 48% of 12-15 year olds said that YouTube is their favourite platform with Netflix having 19% of this age group saying its their favourite platform.

WHEN?
Another key role of a distributor is to determine when a film is going to be released. in the uk around 700 feature films are released from blockbusters to low budget documentaries. Mark Batey  says that picking a date to release your film is a very difficult decision.

There are factors that are out of the control of a distributor, for example weather or large sporting events like the FIFA World Cup can result in changes in box office takings. This is because the cinemas are competing with these factors. Another example of the weather being a factor is that during the third week of april when there was a warm weekend less people attended the cinema.

HOW?
Mark Batey suggests that another key decision for a distributor to make is how they are going to distribute the film. How much money that the company can spend on bringing the production to market and how many cinemas are actually interested in screening the film. He also mentions that distributors only get a percentage of the box office takings so distributors need to establish how much money it is going to cost to distribute the film and if they can maximise their percentage due to the cost and methods of distribution they use.

In 2018 the FDA estimated that UK's investment to distribution of 916 new titles will exceed £350Million. Most of this is pays for Uk advertising such as social, digital and physcial media outlets. There is a relatively low cut of money for distributors, from the box office takings,  the high costs of marketing and distribution reduct the amount of money earned by the distributors.