Jack Mickow
“In relation to the media area you studied, discuss the ways audience consumption has changed over time”
In the area of film, audience consumption of movies has severely changed over time. The past decade has been the most influential to change, as it has been the most revolutionary in technology consumers can buy. These radical changes allow movie developers to cater to more and more as technology has reached to all corners of the world.
Back in 2015, a movie called “Furious 7” was released at the SXSW Film Festival, lunching it into the public view. Here, they also used many global locations to draw in the public to the movie. Universal studios produced the movie a conglomerate of NBC, who owns Universal theme parks. They implemented this movie in their theme parks and made a ride about the movie. To further their outreach, they teamed up with a brand, OPPO, where they had promotional events about the movie to draw in crowds. On April 3rd, 2015, they released the film and the box office took in 384 million the opening week. This means people flooded into large and small movie theaters to view the movie, showing audiences heavily appreciated the ability to go into theaters. On September 15th, 2015, the same movie was released on disc. This delay was intentional, as they knew the movie theaters would be the real success, not wanting to put too much into the disc version. There is no where online where you can find the movie Netflix and Hulu do not have the rights to the movie, as people chose to view it in theaters over in home exhibition. Jurassic World had a very similar outcome. They did lots of cross promotion within their conglomerates and blew up the movie with as much advertising as they could do. This lead to the release on May 29th, 2015 being highly lucrative with 4274 theaters showing the movie. However, they have not put the movie on any streaming service as people chose to go out and watch the movie in theaters.
Producers began to see a trend where people wanted to watch movies form their home, not always wanting to go out to watch a film. Future movies began to take note, like the movie “Beauty And The Beast.” It was a very different scenario than “Furious 7”. Audiences flocked to movie theaters and it was the favored way of viewing movies. However, this movie took a very different approach to keeping up with the societal normals as consumption changed. Before its release date on March 17th, 2017, they chose to market the movie using Synergy. Disney, the creators of the movie, teamed up with ABC, to use their show, “The Bachelor” as a way to expose audiences to Beauty And The Beast from home. They did this by showing an ad for it during the episode. This strategy worked as the box office took home over 500 million. However, this was not their plan to have an audience. They knew people wanted to have home exhibition now, and needed to keep up with the change in movie consumption if they wanted success. They released the movie in 2018 onto Netflix, a popular at home streaming service and to On Demand on June 6th, 2017. This is the way movies are going, less theater exhibition and more at home viewing. People are doing this as it if safer, more cost effective, and less stressful than having to go out and view a movie. If movie production companies want to stay afloat, they need to keep up with the changing audience.
The movie, “Joker” was the perfect example of how filmer’s and producers adapted to the consumers push for staying at home for movies. They choose to favor an online release, only doing 335 million in box office sales at its release week. The thing the production crew at Warner Brothers did differently is they teamed up with streaming services, HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video to have the movie release on their websites the same day as the theater exhibition. This was the best thing to do as people do not want to not leave their house to see a movie, so bringing the movie is perfect. This was a big step in giving the consumer what they want as the previous years people were forced to go out to see a movie.
People no longer want the theater exhibition. They want to view movies from the comfort of the own home. Moving form theater releases to online releases is the only way producers will be able to keep with this new trend in the consumers of wanting to stay home. I would also believe that due to the Corona Virus, this will speed up even more, as the public no longer can even be at movie theaters, so in home viewing is the way of the future, and movie theaters are no longer what the consumers want.
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