4. Data Analysis

This part of the dissertation will be presented in two chapters which will describe the American and Russian film industries through secondary data, surveys and questionnaires the results of which will be used to confirm the hypothesis. The American film marketing and promotion industry is stronger than Russian and the main aim of data analysis part is to find release and post-release promotion strategies of American film industry which could be adopted by Russian promoters to make their film industry far more successful and profitable.

Several professional film critics took part in both surveys and Russian Internet critic, Eugene Bazhenov, who has his own YouTube show named BadComedian, and Ray William Johnson, who is the creator of the famous YouTube show named “=3” and director of Riley Rewind film, sent their responses to the author via email and their opinions will also be presented in the survey results.

In addition, interview results of American research will be supplemented by short interview with J.J. Abrams, director, screenwriter and producer of Lost, Star Trek, and Star Wars: Episode VII and many other famous films. The Russian part of the research will be supplemented by interview results from Dmitry Puchkov, professional film translator, voice actor, Internet blogger, writer, journalist, screenwriter, publicist, and film critic as well as one of the ministers of the Russian Ministry of Culture, who has been working in Russian film industry since 1990. These additional interviews, which were done in informally, will give more detailed information about the research topic.

4.1. The American Film Promotion

4.1.1. Secondary Research

According to Kerrigan (2010) the American film industry is the most powerful domestic business in the US and all over the world. It total box office has more than $6 billion. It is one of the most profitable and successful industries on the American market. To become a successful industry it is necessary to attract wide audience that will spend their money to see new films. Almost all film studios spent their budgets to make attractive and interesting marketing and promotional campaigns. The most popular and profitable promotion strategies are release and post-release. Pre-release strategies, which include pre-screening, are not widely used by film distributors because it could give not enough audience’s opinions about new film and it also expensive way to promote new films.

Release strategies, nowadays, is the most important way to promote new films (Marich, 2013). It includes well-known tools for every moviegoer, such as posters, trailers, Internet advertising and other forms of promotion. According to Screenvillie (2009) approximately 90% of moviegoers in the USA pay attention on these tools when they decided to see new films or not. In this fast developing world mostly all audience use the Internet for their decision-making processes and film promoters should use this promotional tool as frequent as possible. Word-of-mouth technique also plays one of the most widely used techniques in film promotion and its importance should not be underestimated.

The post-release strategies, which include sales after film’s release, such as DVDs, Blu-rays and merchandise, also became widely used tools to make films far more profitable even after showing particular film in cinemas (Rennhoff and Wilbur, 2011). According to Gong et al. (2012) a film’s total box office success will be the basis for deciding whether or not make sequel. Some promotion and distribution companies prepare and sell merchandise to increase the film’s attractiveness and create fans (Elliott and Simmons, 2011). One of the best examples could be Comic-Con which attracts more than a million people every year for a thematic exhibition in San Diego, USA. Here moviegoers and fans could buy or even sell their collections which are relevant for particular films, such as Star Wars, Hunger Games, Star Trek and many others.

To understand American film promotion and film industry as a whole it is necessary to look at the most profitable and financially successful films of 2013. According to Box Office Mojo (2014) among all American films The Hunger Games: Catching Fire earned more than $424 million domestically (40.1%) and more than $439 million in foreign countries (50.9%). Lionsgate spent more than $50 million on its release and post-release promotion campaigns. Iron Man 3 by Marvel earned approximately $409 million domestically and more than $806 million internationally and became more profitable than Hunger Games. Buena Vista spends approximately $90 million on its promotion campaign and earned more than $1.2 billion. Moreover, both films have big fan communities and its merchandise can be found worldwide. Number three in the list of 685 films made in 2013 is Frozen, whose domestic earnings were approximately $400 million and foreign earnings were more than $713 million. As could be noticed all these films earned more money worldwide than domestically. For comparison, the film named Storage 24 earned just $75 domestically and absolutely nothing in foreign countries. It had no promotion campaign at all because Magnolia studio has no marketing department.

According to The Numbers (2014) of top-selling DVDs, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 took first place and approximately five million copies of this film were sold with earnings of an additional $72 million. Number two, Despicable Me 2, sold more than 4.5 million copies and earned $77 million worldwide and number three, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey sold three million copies and earned $40 million. Sale of Blu-rays of all the films shows a similar result. All these films were in top-10 box office list and they earned additional money by being sold DVDs and Blu-rays and that does not include the sale of merchandise that earned additional profit.