Film Exhibition Research

What is Film Exhibition?

Film exhibition is the methods in which the movie is shown to the audience. There are several ways this can be done with various costs and consequences. Once again, I will be deciding the best method based on being a new producer with a limited budget.

Cinema

Cinema is perhaps the most obvious choice for a producer to make their film available to the audience. A good thing about a cinema is that you can attract a wide range of people in to see your film, even if they never intended to in the first place. Cinemas also essentially give you free advertising for your film via their websites and leaflets. On the other hand, having a place to screen your film in a cinema is very expensive and pretty much out of reach for a new producer. A new producer would perhaps only be able to afford one cinema, which seriously restricts the potential audience.

DVD and Blu-Ray

Film producers may choose to put their film straight to retail by selling them as a DVD and/or a Blu-Ray disc. An advantage of this would be that the film would be incredibly accessible to the audience, especially if the films are sold through major retail outlets and online stores. On the other hand, like cinemas, this method is very expensive for a new producer and can be a very risky move if there is no guarantee that the film will actually sell. You will also need to provide your own advertisement for the DVD/Blu-Ray in most cases.

Online Video Streaming Services

A producer may choose to show their film to the audience via an online video streaming site such as YouTube and Dailymotion. The most obvious benefit of this method is that it’s completely free and fuelled by social media; if your film is well received it will most likely go viral and spread to other people quickly. However, this way of broadcasting your movie can be risky because you need to do all the advertising to get your film noticed. Unlike retail and cinemas, you have to bring the film to the audience. Another potential negative is that a film on a video streaming site may not be taken as seriously as a professional piece of work compared to a blockbuster shown at a cinema.

TV Broadcasting

An alternative to showing your new film to the previous three options would be to have your film broadcasted straight to a TV channel. This would be good because the advertising is done for you by the channel itself (it too wants to audience just as much as the producer), and therefore your audience is likely to be quite widespread. However, TV broadcasting is not a cheap process once again. Even if the new producer would be able to persuade a channel to broadcast their movie, the channel would most likely be quite minor and only available to a select amount of people. The ideal channels such as BBC and ITV would be notoriously expensive to use.

Conclusion

I believe the only realistic option for a new producer with a limited budget would be to do the online video streaming option. Though getting the film off the ground may be difficult at first, it will have a snowball effect on itself and get more and more popular should it deserve to be. Another benefit that you don’t get with other options would be that people who watch the film online have the option to share the video directly to other people, which spreads the video well. All of the other options are simply too expensive for a new producer, but would be a good choice for more developed producers.