The British Film Industry website has a Industry Statistical Yearbook, which details many film-related statistics, showing the top grossing films from the previous year (2012 in this case) which enables me to determine which thrillers were popular and hence how they appealed to the audience. I will use data from this Yearbook to determine ways I can make my thriller more appealing to my audience.
The "Genre and Classification" table shows the Thriller Genre to be 9th, ranked on gross profit. In 1st place was Action, with "Skyfall" taking 1/3 of all of the gross profit for that genre. One of the sub genres for "Skyfall" was the Thriller genre. In 7th place was Horror, with "The Woman in Black" being the best performing title for that genre, and once again this film also has the Thriller genre as a sub-genre. Also ranked above the Thriller genre was Sci-Fi, where the highest grossing film was "Prometheus", which would also classify as a Thriller. The highest grossing Thriller film was "Jack Reach". This shows that thrillers that combine other genres, including action, horror and sci-fi, are generally more popular than others. To prove this, no thriller-exclusive thrillers were present in the top 10 films for each age classification. The Statistical Yearbook showed that 12A classified films obtained the greatest gross profit, followed by 15 rated films. The top two films that were rated 12A were "Skyfall" and "The Dark Knight Rises", both classed as Action but also considered as thrillers. The 15 films were, according to the Statistical Yearbook, containing "stronger material" and more "adult-orientated themes", and saw mainly comedies such as "Ted" dominate the table. Therefore, to make my thriller more appealing, I need to decide to what extent I will use action or themes of violence or more adult content to make it more appealing generally.
Moving on to consider gender, there is a notable trend from the past years data. For films that have a higher percentage of female viewers, no real thrillers are present in the top 8 films listed, instead there are more dramas and romance-orientated films such as "Twilight" and "Anna Karenina" and much more family friendly films such as "Nativity 2". By contrast, male dominated films include "The Dark Knight Rises", with a 64-36 ratio between males and females, and many action and horror films ranking above, that have the thriller genre as a sub genre, such as "Dredd", with the highest male viewing percentage of 74%, and "Prometheus". This indicates that male audiences tend to prefer action-orientated films with a lot of suspense and perhaps more violent scenes. Films with mixed ratios include "Skyfall", with a 55% male slight majority, and "The Woman In Black" with a 56% female majority. This shows that to make my thriller, in general, more appealing, they need to have some element of action in them. If it is too geared towards the female audience it may not be as popular, due to a lack of current popularity in that genre, whereas excessive elements of violence and action may deter the few female viewers that there could be. In order to maximize the appeal of my sequence I need to get the right balance of content to attract the greatest audience.
Next I will consider the audience itself; the age bracket and where they are viewing the film. Recently, we notice a decline in younger audiences going to the cinema, with the age bracket of 45+ being the dominant bracket in the graph in 2012, which could be due to, as the Yearbook states, "is likely to be due to the greater number of films being released with particular appeal to the older demographic, such as Mamma Mia... The King's Speech... Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel."
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| This Figure, taken from the Statistical Yearbook 2013, shows the distribution of people who go to the cinema to view films. |
From using the Statistical Yearbook, I have found that to make my thriller more appealing to my audience, I need to consider other elements to incorporate into my thriller, such as action, as that proves most popular with the audience I need to target - an age bracket of 15-24 year olds, as that is where thrillers generally prove more popular. This allows me to determine the extent to which I will create "dark" themes in my thriller, such as violence, mystery and most importantly, suspense, taking into account my research on classification. This will also help me to achieve a balance between the gender split of my audience, as I found thrillers were generally more popular with male audiences, but that females still watched them - so to maintain both audiences I must obtain the right level of content.
Using another source, www.rottentomatoes.com , I can take into account what the critics like and dislike also, as this can determine whether or not audiences will view films or not. Recently, they provided a 97% overall rating for "Gravity", a thriller incorporating elements of science, and 100% on "How to Survive a Plague", a documentary, showing that audiences prefer more sophisticated films rather than perhaps comedy films such as "Last Vegas", which also featured on the site, receiving a rating of 43%, with critics saying, "This is like the Hangover Part 43." Cast is an important decision to make, and high profile actors appear in Gravity and Last Vegas (G. Clooney, M. Freeman), but not to this extent in the film that received 100% on the website. Although any acting in my thriller must be of a good quality, this gives me reassurance, as of course I will not be able to obtain the services of one Morgan Freeman in my thriller, and this shows that it is not going to deter my audience. "How to Survive a Plague" also received reviews such as "A cinematically sophisticated documentary that actually finds a way to be an intelligent and admirable work of art in addition to its more overt sociological implications." This suggests further that audiences prefer these more sophisticated films, so I shall endeavour to approach my film consciously considering plot and avoiding making it perhaps predictable or repetitive to appeal to my audience.
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