Case study: production contexts and your favourite film

For this session, you will be exploring the production contexts, marketing, distribution and financial contexts of your favourite film. While you can pick absolutely any film you like, from any country and from any decade, either indie or mainstream, it may be easier if you pick a more recent and more mainstream film, or if you pick a stone cold classic with lots that has been written on.

You will be spending the ENTIRE LESSON on this, so pick your absolute favourite, honest to goodness all time number one film. Use this as an opportunity to connect with the thing you love, and to consider how it works in an economic context

Why are we doing this?

Apart from the fun of researching something you love, you are also exploring and reinforcing your knowledge and understanding of production contexts. You are learning how the film industry works in a specialised way, and that all films to some extent must exist within this context and must compete somehow.

• Production history - what happened during the preproduction and production of this film? Was it smooth sailing, or did the film have development hell?
• Ownership - who produced this film? Who distributed it? What kinds of companies are these? 
• Trailer analysis - Find the theatrical trailer for this film. Select three screenshots from it. Analyse the trailer with specific reference to how the film maximises audience appeal
• Advertising and Marketing and merchandise - Create a collage of marketing material for the film
• Director and actors: brief resumes, brief details. Some head shots too, please!
• Critical reception: critical and audience response. If the film has been out for a while, has the critical response changed over time?
• Production and distribution costs: cost of production, cost of advertising campaign, and any other juicy figures. This will vary wildly depending on what film you have selected!
• Earnings: Box office, opening weekend, digital sales, total number of screens, worldwide gross,  (really hard to find!)

Today, my favourite film is Dario Argento's nonsense horror masterpiece Suspiria. I love it so much I  have probably seen it 25 times! I have never seen this Italian theatrical poster for it though.