Below are several articles on how the film industry has used the Internet to promote films and exhibit films. Read them then do research to find examples from the last 5 years, in relation to one mega franchise, one UK film and one micro budget film. Write in complete sentences, modelling your answer on the approaches below.
Also worth considering:
Making unauthorized copies of movies for friends is a form of online piracy
Internet piracy can have a detrimental effect on more than just corporate profits: an unfinished version of the action movie The Hulk was available on the internet two weeks before its cinema release. As more internet users watched the pirated copy, online chat rooms filled up with bad reviews of what was an unfinished version of the film. Some in the industry have blamed this "bad press" for the poor takings and official reviews received by the film.
Integration
Ultimately, one of the major effects the internet may have on movies stems from its effect on TV. Since the current generation is used to watching TV on demand and without commercials (or minimal commercials) advertisers are desperately looking for new ways to market products. One of the ways many marketers are settling on is product integration, or featuring a brand or service in shows and films. These has been since films were created, but the frequency is expected to increase. Directors, actors, and screenwriters may all be expected to work around an increasing number of brands that "have" to be featured in the film by contract, a practice that may threaten artistic integrity.
MOVIE PROMOTION ON THE INTERNET
In the summer of 1995, media and advertising executives announced that the Internet had become the "new frontier" in film promotion. Marketing Batman Forever(1995), Warner Bros. was the first to promote a major feature film using a Website as the campaign's center-piece. The Web address (or URL) was included on posters, print and television advertisements, and radio spots, and the Batman Foreverlogo appeared with the URL without elaboration at bus and train stations. The film's Website offered a hypertextual narrativethat linked to plot twists and hidden pages for users to discover by correctly answering a series of concealed questions posed by the Riddler, one of the film's main characters. The Batman ForeverWebsite also cross-promoted ancillary products from its sister companies, including the soundtrack recording and music videos.
In June 1995 Universal Pictures partnered with leading Internet service providers American Onlineand CompuServe to present the first live interactive multisystem simulcastto promote a film on the Web with Apollo 13star Tom Hanksand director Ron Howardbefore the premiere. The Website later included special Internet video greetings from some of the film's stars and digital still pictures from the film's Los Angeles premiere. Another notable early example of Internet promotion was the Website for Mars Attacks!(1996), by Warner Bros., which included an original fifteen-minute Internet "radio play" about a truck driver who evades Martians while attempting to deliver the only print of Mars Attacks!in time for the premiere. In late 1996, the Star Trek: First ContactWebsite received over 30 million hits during its first week of release, at that point the largest traffic ever for a film Website, and by the end of 1996, movie trailers, digitized stills, actor and filmmakerprofiles, and computer screensavers were available online for almost every major film released. Web addresses were also commonly included in theatrical trailers, TV commercials, print advertisements, and posters. In 1997 studios were spending approximately $10,000 to produce an independent film's Website and at least $250,000 for blockbuster studio films, which accounted for an extremely small portion of the overall promotional budget.
In 1999 studios began to coordinate Website tie-inswith pay-per-vieworders, allowing viewers to "play along" at home through synchronized Web content. Viewers who purchased the December 1999 pay-perview release of New Line Cinema's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Mewere offered an interactive television experience synchronized over the Web. For the DVD release of The Matrix(1999), Warner Bros. scheduled a synchronized screening and Internet chat session with the film's directors. In 1999 Apple Computer launched its very popular movie trailerWeb page to promote its QuickTime video software, receiving over 30 million downloads for the Web-basedtrailers for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace(1999) alone.
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT AND ONLINE FAN DISCOURSE
The Blair Witch Project(1999) was one of the most profitable films in history when measured by its return on the initial investment. Made for approximately $50,000 and grossing over $100 million in US theatrical box-office alone, this financial victory of a low-budget independent film over the major studio blockbusters instigated a paradigm panic among Hollywood executives due in large part to the important role of the Internet in the film's commercial success. When the mainstream film industry had already begun to create content specific to the Web, Internet promotion was still considered to be supplementary to established media outlets, and the theatrical film was still the main component of the brand or franchise. For The Blair Witch Project, however, the Web became the central medium or the primary text for the film's narrative and its reception, as well as its marketing or "franchising" beginning more than a year before the film's major theatrical distribution. In this sense, the Web functioned in the 1990s for The Blair Witch Projectin the same way that newspapers and magazines did in relation to the earliest commercial cinema in the 1890s by playing a primary role in the film's narrative and its meaning for the audience.
Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez originally launched The Blair Witch ProjectWebsite in June 1998 on their production company's Website, Haxan.com. When the independent distributor, Artisan Entertainment, boughtThe Blair Witch Projectfor $1.1 million from directors Myrick and Sánchez at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, the company envisioned exploiting the medium of the Web to compensate for its relative lack of funds for promotion. On April Fool's Day, Artisan relaunched The Blair Witch ProjectWebsite with additional material, including footage presented as outtakes from "discovered" film reels, police reports, the "back story" on missing film students, and a history or mythology of the Blair Witch legend. The next day Artisan sent 2,000 The Blair Witch Projectscreensavers to journalists and premiered its trailers on the "Ain't It Cool News" Website instead of on television or in theaters.
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OLDER ARTICLE BELOW
Throughout 1999, the major studios also established online retail stores in partnership with their studios' other Web operations. Increasingly since the 1980s, the film studios have become part of larger transnational media conglomerates that often have holdings in other industry sectors. The Web is thus inordinately well suited to this structure of convergence and integration, providing a retail and cross-promotional portal to sister and parent company products, services, and subsidiary media outlets.
The Internet quickly became a significant retail outlet for the distribution or sale of DVD releases, and by 2001 all of the major film companies had partnered with the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb (www.imdb.com), and leading online retailer Amazon.comto promote new theatrical films, personalize movie showtimes, and sell DVDs. In October 1990, IMDb started as the Usenet newsgroupbulletin board rec.arts.movies to which volunteers would post information about films and discuss movies with other fans. With the advent of the Web, the bulletin board was transformed into one of the most visited sites on the Internet, averaging over 30 million visitors each month and containing over 6 million individual film credits, including information on over 400,000 films, 1 million actors and actresses, and 100,000 directors. The IMDb has also built a strong sense of community among its almost 9 million registered users, who can post to the public discussion forum available for each film and rate a film between 1 and 10. All of this information lends itself to the customized links available for celebrity news and gossip, images of stars, box-office and sales statistics, and Amazon.comfor DVD purchases.
In addition to providing easy access to detailed information about films and convenient ways for consumers to purchase DVDs, the Internet also provides a distribution method for alternative or independent fictional films and documentaries. The technical and economic advantages of digitization and online distribution have benefited academics and researchers through the availability of digitized film archives like the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection and the Internet Archive's Movie Archive, which includes the Prelinger Archives. The Internet also serves as a significant medium of distribution for multimedia art, Flash movies, film parodies, home movies or videos, and animated political cartoons. In addition, the distribution and sale of pornographic films and videos online totaled over $1 billion in 2005 and comprised a large portion of total Internet file-sharing volume.
Due to technical limitations of bandwidth and connection speeds as well as legal obstacles surrounding the Internet rights to distribute Hollywood films, the independent "short" has become one of the most common categories of film distributed online, including a large selection of animated shorts. One of the most popular sites for viewing online films is AtomFilms.com, which launched "AtomFilms Studio" in January 2006 to fund independent producers looking to create short films specifically for Internet broadband distribution. In 2005, in addition to streaming content, AtomFilms.com's major competitor, IFILM.com, expanded its distribution methods to deliver video-on-demand (VOD) to cellular smart-phonesand personal digital assistants (PDAs).
In 2001 BMW premiered its eight-part online promotional series of big-budget, short action films titled The Hire, made by such established international film directors as David Fincher, John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, Kar Wai Wong, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and John Woo, and such stars as Clive Owen, Stellan Skarsgård, Madonna, Forest Whitaker, and Gary Oldman. On its Website, BMW boasted that the films had been viewed over 100 million times before they were removed from the site in 2005, despite the fact that the films were released on DVD in 2003.
Although technical and infrastructural obstacles related to bandwidth and video quality and size may be overcome, Internet copyright issues, Internet distribution rights, and Internet release time "windows"—which traditionally go from theaters, video/DVD, pay-per-view, premium cable, network television, and basic cable—have also complicated online distribution. For instance, the major rights holders (that is, Hollywood studios and entertainment conglomerates) have prevented companies like Netflixfrom shifting their distribution and rental methods to on-demand streaming and downloading over the Web, although the online DVD-by-mail rental service is still one of the more profitable Web ventures, ending 2005 with about 4.2 million subscribers and sales approaching $1 billion.
Responding to increased consumer demand, and in response to the fact that only 15 percent of worldwide Hollywood film revenues come from box-office profits, and that two-thirds of the income for the six major studios now comes from the home theater divisions, the majors have begun to pursue their own online distribution options by offering feature-length filmsalready available on DVD for legal downloading, including MovieLink (http://www.movielink.com), a joint venture of MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.; and CinemaNow (http://www.cinemanow.com), financed in part by Lions Gate and CiscoSystems. In December 2005, Apple Computer also began to distribute animated short films from Pixar(co-owned by Apple CEO Steve Jobs), Disney-ABC television programs, and music videos through its popular iTunes music download service. While no feature-length films are included in Apple's library, the January 2006 purchase of Pixar by Disney may facilitate the distribution of Disney's feature films through Apple's service.
By the end of the summer of 2005, industry analysts and mainstream news outlets were announcing the "death of the movie theater" as industry figures and independent film companies began to question and challenge traditional film release windows. Director and producer Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape[1989], Traffic[2000], Erin Brockovich[2000], Oceans Eleven[2001]) entered into an agreement with 2929 Entertainment, HDNet Films, and Landmark Theatresto produce and direct six films to be released simultaneously to theaters, DVD home video, and on HDNet high-definition cable and satellitechannels. For the 26, January 2006, "stacked release" of the first film from that venture, Bubble, 2929 Entertainment agreed to share 1 percent of the home video DVD profits with theater owners who exhibited the film. Another new distribution model of simultaneous releases was announced in July 2005 by ClickStarInc.com, a Web venture between Intel Corp. and Revelations Entertainment, co-founded by actor Morgan Freeman. ClickStar will offer legal downloading of original feature films before they are released on DVD and while they are still in first-run theaters. Freeman's considerable star power, which he is lending to several of the ClickStar films, may give a film enough exposure through its Web release to be distributed through other media, like cable television.
It remains to be seen whether or not the major studios will welcome these new methods of exhibition and release windows for distribution. History suggests that the mainstream entertainment corporations will resist this model since it would change the established profit-making system. Even if video-on-demand over the Web becomes widely adopted, like the rapid adoption of television by consumers in the 1950s and 1960s, predictions about the impending death of the movie theater may be exaggerated or misguided. The film and entertainment industries have a long history of appropriating newly established models of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as purchasing independent companies that pose a significant threat, as the acquisition of many formerly independent studios by the Hollywood majors attests. In addition, the same companies that own the major film production, distribution, and exhibition outlets are horizontally and vertically integratedcompanies that already have oligopolies in many of the other media sectors that will distribute these films in the future, including television, cable, and the Internet.
Castonguay, James. "The Political Economy of the 'Indie Blockbuster': Intermediality, Fandom, and The Blair Witch Project." In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, edited by Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey A. Weinstock, 65–85. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003.
CNET News. http://news.cnet.com
Finn, A., Simpson, N., McFadyen, S., and C. Hoskins. "Marketing Movies on the Internet: How Does Canada Compare to the U.S.?" Canadian Journal of Communication[Online], 25(3). http://www.cjc-online.ca(March 28, 2006).
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