Research - Conducting audience research from BFI Year Book.

Upon visiting the BFI Website to view the YearBook for 2012's movie releases. The BFI website contains numerous statistics about the previous years films that were released. So although it is named for 2013, the movies that are within the yearbook are from 2012. Including audience reception about genres, classification and distribution. Using this will be able to show me the response that Thrillers received last year.

Genre:

Thriller ranked 9th within the chart of 17 genres which is ranked by gross box office. The top performing title of the thriller genre was the movie Jack Reacher. Thriller only had 41 releases which is little compared with Comedy which had 142 releases in 2012, this left comedy at 2nd place. Thriller was fairly popular in 2012 which shows there was clearly an audience for Thriller movies, showing that there is clearly a gap in the market for Thriller genres and with only 41 releases last year it shows that there is space for new releases and people will view them. Thrillers pulled in a gross box office figure of £29.8 million, this reflects it's popularity despite its few number of releases. In terms of Independent movie releases Thriller came 5th out of 14 genres in terms of the number of releases. This tells me that there is a clear audience for Thriller movies due to the lack of them being released. 

Gender:

In terms of Gender the top 20 list is biased toward men because in 2012 they accounted for 52 per cent of 'cinema-goers' in the UK. As we find on an individual basis we see that Men are most centered around the genres of Action including movies such as Dredd and Wrath of the Titans. Where as Women had a much larger variety including Anna Karenina and StreetDance 2. See the list below to view the audience genre split up:

As you can see, there was no Thriller movie that made it into the Top 20 and so therefore the closest link we can make is The Woman in Black which is a horror movie containing a lot of suspense and Thriller genre techniques. The split was 44 Male / 56 Women. This is a fairly even split with a mere 6 per cent difference in it. The split between Thrillers are often very close, and an example for last years Yearbook (2011 releases) shows that the Thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy only had a split of 52% (Male) with a 48% (Women), partially down to the sub genre of Mystery which often appeals more to Males than it does Women but also due to the plot of the movie having a impact on the gender feedback. However this does tell me that I have a very balanced gender split for my movie and it often depends on the sub-genre and also the story line.

Audiences:

Audiences are extremely varied currently. What I immediately learnt from looking at the graph is that the current age distribution of cinema goers is extremely high toward the ages 55+, accounting for a huge 36 per cent of Cinema goers, taking the largest audience field. This tells me that firstly Thrillers aren't often going to succeed in this age group however the graph also shows that between the ages of 15-24 is still fairly high and the second largest audience base, coming in with 25 per cent however this has decreased since previous years, for example in 2010 this age accounted for 38 per cent of cinema goers. This is the age group that Thrillers are often advertised to, therefore this shows that my audience base has been sharply decreasing since 2010 (see graph, colour Yellow.) Therefore this gives me idea to combine and attempt to satisfy a larger audience including 25-34 year olds. This widens my audience to 15-34 year olds and although it is likely to be tricky to do so, together last year (2012) they accounted for a total of 44 per cent of viewers. 

Again, there was no Thriller in 2012 that ranked very highly therefore I cannot see view Thrillers ranking within age groups in 2012, however alike I compared earlier, we see that The Woman in Black was ranked 5th in the audience range of 15-24, coming with 42 per cent of the audience accounting for this age group, this therefore shows that there is an audience for the closely related Thriller and Horror genres in this audience range. Showing that this is my primary audience and my secondary audience will be 25-34 year olds. 

My age bracket that I am aiming to target with my Thriller is young and so therefore they are likely to be the audience who is technology oriented and therefore the more likely bracket of audience who are using the VoD market, using services such as Netflix and LOVEFiLM Instant. This market has increased by 123 per cent since the previous year, from an estimated £55 million (in 2011) to £122 million (in 2012.) Therefore this proves a good basis to publish my Thriller on to, i.e. services such as Vimeo or YouTube for my audience to view upon.