Target Audience

Considering our film is going to be considered crime-drama/thriller. We thought it would be best to analyse the films the highest grossing films of the past few years. So far in 2011 it is clear that there have not been many crime-drama/thriller films to have made a large success. However I attribute this to the fact that there simply have not been many big-budget crime-drama in 2011 thus far. I know that there is a large market for this genre as we looked at the previous highest grossing films of recent years and found that a large amount of films grossed a vastly large amount of capital, the most prominent example in recent years is Inception which amassed around £800,000,000, there is also The Dark Knight which also was incredibly successful taking in over a billion pounds since being released in 2008. This overall highlights that there is a very large market for our genre and we believe that if it was big-budgeted and completed then it would probably make a large amount of capital.

We used a strategy known as a Market Segmentation (a strategy me and Barry in particular use in our business classes) to help us find out the exact target market our project will aim for. In essence a Market Segmentation means splitting up the whole entire market of audiences into different segments and then dividing these segments into one another. Firstly we used a Social Stratification, this highlighted that the target audience of our project will be based on the Working Class, Lower Middle Class and Middle Class. This is due to films such as The Departed which uses examples of typical Middle Class jobs and scenery throughout. Once this was completed we decided to use a Demographic classification which allows us to identify the gender and age of our audience. The notion of sophistication is often typical in films which highlight middle class jobs, very often in these the working class people are shown to be illiterate or are used as comedic value.

After much consideration we decided that the age range of 18-64 would be appropriate for our project. This is on the basis that crime-dramas in particular tend to have an era of sophistication around them which is not the typical audience for under 18s. Also films such as The Departed carry an 18 certificate and since a large amount of our ideas have come from The Departed (the synopsis in particular) then we have decided to start our target audience at the 18 age limit. We then thought that in terms of the gender our project will most likely target males as opposed to females. This is based on the fact that older films (specifically for this genre) generally showed the males as dominant whereas the females were generally thought of as either a 'prize' for the hero at the end such as what can be seen in films such as Indiana Jones, or females were shown to be 'damsels in distress' in which the male figure would always be forced to save the female. In our group I thought a very notable example to use in order to show this is the remake of  Scarface, in this film the main character constantly beats up (and at one point kills) men who try to take advantage of his sister, even though his sister is not reluctant for them to do so in anyway. This shows the males being highly dominant and establishes that we should aim our target audience on males as opposed to females. We therefore think it would be very interesting for us to explore the representation of women being overpowered by men and also the social class and stigma which surrounds the working class and the middle class.