Audience Research.. Online Data Collection

In order to discover the target audience we should use for our thriller film, we need to use online resources to look at recent and current opinions and reviews, numbers and figures on a number of thrillers. By doing this we will get some guidance who to aim our production at.

To get an idea of what was the most popular films, we were able to find a chart listing the top 50 thriller films, here is the top 25 as stated on imdb.com/chart/thriller web page.

Therefore with the aid of this chart of the best selling thrillers I am able to choose a few films which I will know for certain have been successful, some more than others however with the majority of them being fairly recent as we need the most up to date research in order to truly know what people like now.

Black Swan

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798/

Even though this wasn't rated in the top 25, it was however number 44 and therefore still in the top 50 I still decided to use this on a research basis. Black Swan is about a ballet dancer who wins the lead in Swan Lake and she is perfect for the role of the delicate White Swan, Princess Odette, but she slowly loses her mind as she becomes more and more like Odile, the Black Swan.

The film has made $106,952,327 as of the 1st of May 2011.

After reading through many articles and reviews online, it soon became clear to me that not many people had a bad word to say about the film. It is widely described as a thriller and mystery film and also been described as a masterpiece of obsession and what that obsession ultimately does to a person. I would say that it doesn't typically strike me as a thriller because of the main character and setting but as soon as the story evolves and the characteristics progress it becomes clear that in fact it is. This is mainly because the lead character is a women and despite it becoming more common within thrillers the lead characters are usually male.

I also had a look on YouTube at the films trailer and found that it had a substantial amount of views, and over thirty thousand likes compared to only over a thousand dislikes. It also has a considerable amount of comments, and a few reactions with most of them being 'incredible'.

The audience target for this film was generally for the majority of people and I thought it would appeal to the older generation more however the YouTube trailer was mainly watched by females aged between 13 to 17 and 18 to 24, and surprisingly popular with males aged 25 to 34. I was also able to see where in the world the Black Swan trailer is popular in. 


It is difficult for me to give my personal opinion on the films audience targets and my own review as I haven't seen it, therefore I think I will take time to get and watch the film.

Se7en

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114369/

I thought I would take a quick look into some information about the audiences for thriller films from a while ago instead of limiting it to only recent ones so therefore I chose the 1995 thriller called 'Se7en' as we had previously watched the first few minutes in lesson time and I really liked the way they had done the opening credits as it related to some ideas that originally went through my thoughts when we first found out about the task. I also think I am going to take time to watch this film, as from the initial beginning I was keen to find out more because of all the letters and writing used in the opening credits.

The film Se7en is a film in which two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his modus operandi. It is widely described as a thriller, crime and drama film and has made 316,400,000 at the box office worldwide.

It has been rated the 9th best thriller according to imdb.com.


Unfortunately there was no statistics available on YouTube about the audiences that watched related clips to the film, but I think that is understandable seeing the film was first released in 1995 when YouTube wasn't around as a way of getting your film trailer seen. Despite these factors the trailer has nearly a million views. I was however able to find a demographic breakdown which displays the ratings from viewers.

The audience target for this film was 18+ as the certification for Se7en was 18, this demographic graph shows that most males and females between the ages of 18 and 29 gave a higher rating for this film as a high majority of people who voted fell into these two categories.


The Dark Knight

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/

The Dark Knight is an action, thriller and crime film which was released in 2008 and still is ranking number 85 out of all films and ranks in at number 2 on the top thriller charts according to imdb.com. In The Dark Knight, Batman, Gordon and Harvey Dent are forced to deal with the chaos unleashed by a terrorist mastermind known only as the Joker, as he drives each of them to their limits.

As of the 1st of December the box office of The Dark Knight, managed to gross $1,001,921,825 worldwide.









Also to see what made thriller films unsuccessful I decided to look at the top worst ones in order to see what not to do in our film. These were the top ten voted worst according to imdb.com  However this may be because they have received far less votes than the top 50 films, so taking this into account I still wanted to look at a few of these despite this.