Film Marketing and Distribution

Marketing a film

When a new film is made, it has to be marketed like any other product in order for it to attract its audience to go and see the production on the big screen. The advertising of a film is known as film promotion or film marketing and the people who are responsible for this are the distribution companies who distribute the films to cinemas across the world.

The way in which a film is marketed can have a large impact in how well the film does and ultimately determining if it is successful. Films are expensive to make and if the films target audience does not go and see the film and the film does not to well at the box office, the companies who produce the film will lose out on a lot of money.

When companies have spent millions of pounds on making a movie, the studio spends millions more on letting its audiences know about its production. Film marketing can be a very expensive business, especially when films are only in the cinema for a limited period of time. The first weekend that a movie is released, often referred to as the 'opening weekend', is the time in which the movie has to be a big hit or else will tend to disappear quickly off the scene and the companies can make a huge loss of investment.

Distributing a film

The distribution of a film is the process whereby a movie is made available to watch by a film audience by the film distributor.

A distributor is generally an organization who handles the theatrical release of a film in particular country as well as the marketing and circulation of films for home viewing such as DVD, On-Demand and download. Often feature films have different distributors representing them in different places and different distributors handling the home-viewing production.

Often distributors will source new films to represent in their distribution showcase at films festivals and markets around the world at prestigious places to rival other distribution companies that attend these highly executive events.