Film distribution and Marketing

What is meant by the term film distribution?
Film distribution is the highly competitive business of launching and sustaining films in the market place.

What does a film distributor do? 
A film distributor must identify a film's audience, consider why they'd go to see it, estimate the revenue potential across all the formats of its release, develop plans and partnerships to create awareness of and interest in the film, aim to convert as much interest as possible into cinema visits and persuade cinema operators to play the film.

How does reach relate to film distribution? 
Reach is how exposed potential customers are to promotional materials to a film. It determined by spread and frequency, where spread is the amount of promotional materials put out there and where frequency is the amount of times someone is exposed to it. For example, how many times a television advertisement is shown on television and how many times it has been viewed.

What is meant by the distribution plan?
A distribution plan is a plan that lays out the 'when' and 'how's for releasing a film, in order to optimize its chances of success. It is based on a combination of market knowledge, commercial experience, statistical research and professional judgement.

What is meant by the marketing plan? 
A marketing plan is a plan to fulfill the objective of creating visibility, raising awareness and engaging interest from potential viewers of a film through the use of advertising, publicity and promotion. It is important to compete for a significant share of voice against, not only other distributors, but against other leisure activities too and to do this, a marketing plan is key to guiding the way.

What is the difference between advertising, publicity and promotion?
Advertising is the act of creating awareness of your film by paying for things such as TV advertisements, billboards etc. Publicity is the act of having your film independently written about by a publicist in a media text such as a magazine. Publicity can be a lot more persuasive  to an audience since it is not trying to be sold to you via the people who made it, but rather, by people who, alike the reader ,are consumers to the film too. Promotion involves partnerships, and can help generate displays for the film in places where conventional advertising cannot reach, such as shops, restaurants or on packs. They can help customers to interact with the film characters by collecting premium items or entering competitions.

Find a poster and trailer for a horror film and put them on your Blog – who was the distributor and in how many countries was it released? Can you find how many screens it was shown in on the opening weekend?

Poster:

Trailer:

Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Chernobyl Diaries was released in 42 countries and had 2433 screenings in the opening weekend.