‘Marketing and Distribution is just as important as Production and therefore just as much time and money should be spent in this stage.’ Assess this view.
When making a film, its success is usually determined by its box office revenue and the value of sequels/ spin offs produced from the context of the original film. Therefore it is essential for media institutions to get the right balance between production and distribution funding.
One might suggest that production value should be prioritised over distribution budget. If an institution follows this idea, they are likely to produce a film with a higher artistic quality as a result of it enabling a director to purchase more effective equipment and hire more established film crew and cast members. This heightened quality of the film is likely to bring a larger audience to a film through their better reviews and the status of their acting cast.
However, one might argue that a distribution budget should be of a larger concern over a film’s production budget. If an institution were to make a product in accordance to this view they are likely to make a film of lower artistic quality, however it is possible that it will have been seen by a large audience that have been drawn to a film by heavier and more effective marketing. An example of this is the film ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ that only gained a 6.2/10 review on IMDb and a 33% rating on Rotten Tomatoes yet still managed to gain $1.046 billion in box office revenue. It is therefore evident that this successful income was a result of a well funded marketing campaign with four different trailers and promotion on the televised Super Bowl event. If we were to compare this to the film ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ that received a 9.3 rating on IMDb and a 91% review on Rotten Tomatoes yet only gained $58 million in box office revenue, we can conclude that it must have had a much less effective marketing campaign with considerably less money being placed towards the distribution of the film.
Therefore, if we were to measure a film’s success in terms of its financial intake, it is clear that the most successful films seem to have much larger distribution budgets than production budgets.
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