Film essay: Distribution

Distribution
Disney is the world’s 2nd largest conglomerate (a combination of two or more corporations) following Comcast who are Disney’s biggest competition at the moment. The company control film makers such as marvel, Pixar, and Walt Disney productions. Distribution is very important part of modern day media as it will have a huge factor on what type of audience and how many people will be available to watch it, for example Disney sell licenses on Netflix and sky. This helps distribute the film around and make everything easy to watch. Distribution is changing the world because people are more likely to go online and watch a film instead of buy it because there are so many options on how to watch it. It’s very important because without it your film wouldn’t sell. As media has changed over the years, distribution has gotten easier, for example we have social media which is a popular choice for adverts and advertising upcoming films. They wouldn’t have had this luxury in the 20th century which would make it harder to distribute. McDonalds was one of Disney’s sponsors. Disney collaborated with McDonalds and so Disney themed toys were put into happy meals in conjunction to the latest film release from Disney. This advertised Disney’s latest films and encouraged children to want to go and see the film that is coming out. McDonald’s would also benefit as some children will encourage their parents to buy a happy meal purely for the toy inside. Disney distributed their films through posters and billboards, a lot of posters would have been sent around the country to attract everyone. Also they would have shown Disney films in cinemas across the Country as it would have not been on DVD or the internet yet. The new releases of old films bring and invites new audiences together. The film is now the 39th to reach the $900 million milestone.  “The Jungle Book” blew past forecasts in its opening weekend, grossing $103.6 million in the U.S. during April 15-17. Advantages of these are that it means it targets a wider audience.
Conclusion

To conclude it is important to stress the importance of distribution to a conglomerate like Disney. Without effective distribution patterns films could easily underachieve profit wise for example but it must be remembered that distribution cannot be seen in isolation because it can quite easily be linked to the principle of synergy, as one business theorist states ‘industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries try to impose scarcity to keep demand high.’ This is very true of Disney who with the original Jungle Book 1967 found himself with limited avenues of distribution – namely TV  and film, thus to keep The Jungle Book characters fresh in the minds of audiences the company created other programmes and ancillary products from 1967  to the early 2000’s to keep alive the idea of the characters so that in the future there could be a potential remake or reboot of the original film, these other programmes included Talespin, a cartoon starring many of the characters from the original film and Jungle Cubs – another cartoon which explored Baloo, Shere Khan and other characters’ lives as children, the aim of these products were to not only to keep audiences entertained but to keep the Jungle Book franchise fresh and active although more importantly , a means by which one media product can promote another media product by the same company, a term called synergy `and one which will only improve with the creation of Disney’s new streaming service in 2019.

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