Distribution research

1. DISTRIBUTION
RESEARCH
B Y W I L L R U S S E L L

2. WHAT IS A DISTRIBUTOR?
• A distributor is an individual or organisation who will represent your film
around the world who will attempt to sell it to television to make a large
amount of money.
• A distributor is generally an organisation who handles the theatrical
release of a film in a particular country as well as the marketing and
circulation of films for home viewing (DVD, Video-On-Demand,
Download, Television etc).
• The exhibitor presents the film to the audience while the distributor
manages the commercial rights, in accordance with a contract signed
with the producer.

3. WHAT DO DISTRIBUTORS DO?
The business of film distribution may be split in three parts:
• Finance: selection of films, acquisition of rights, financing of prints and
advertising.
• Promotion: choice of the release date, organisation of advertising,
partnerships, public relations, material sent to the exhibitors (trailers,
posters).
• Bookings: negotiation with exhibitors, selection of the cinemas which will
play the film.

4. WORLD-WIDE FILM DISTRIBUTORS
It is vital for me to choose the right film distributor for my movie trailer. Each of the
distributors promote different films to make it as big and popular as possible. The film
distibutors I am going to research into are:
• Lionsgate
• Universal
• Paramount
• Columbia
• Warner Brothers

5. LIONSGATE
• Lionsgate Entertainment Corporation is a Canadian-American entertainment company.
• The company was formed in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 3, 1997, and is
headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
• Lionsgate’s library features all Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment theatrical films,
including The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn- Part 2.
• Lionsgate has maintained its longstanding industry leadership in box office-to-DVD and
box office-to-VOD conversion rates, ranking 1 in both areas.
• Lionsgate distributes films which are usually action/thriller, with their movies generally high
intensity with jump scares
• Lionsgate would be a good distributor to use as some of their films are horror such as Saw,
You’re Next and Asylum, which relates to the genre I am doing.

6. UNIVERSAL
• Universal Studios Inc. is an American film studio, owned by Comcast through its wholly
owned subsidiary NBCUniversal, and is one of Hollywood's "Big Six" film studios.
• Universal Film Manufacturing Company was officially incorporated in New York on April
30, 1912.
• Universal offer a diverse choice of movies by having movies from different genres such
as Jurassic World and The Mummy which are action films and Bruce Almighty, Ted 2
and 40 year old Virgin which are comedies.
• Most of the action films are generally ratings of PG and U and more suitable for
children so universal films would not be a good distributor to use.

7. PARAMOUNT FILMS
• Paramount Pictures Corporation is a film studio, television production company and
motion picture distributor, consistently ranked as one of the "Big Six" film studios of
Hollywood.
• Paramount Pictures was founded by Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian, in 1912, originally
named the ‘Famous Players Film Company’ which merged to form Paramount in 1916.
• The film company has produced some of the best films, including Titanic (1997) and
the Transformers series.
• Most of the films which have been produced by Paramount are action and family films
• They have produced a small amount of thriller films such as World War Z which is a
zombie thriller, however I do not feel this distributor would be suitable for my trailer as
they have not produced enough physiological horror films.

8. COLUMBIA PICTURES
• Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution
studio of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group.
• It is part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, which is owned by the
Japanese company Sony.
• Paramount Pictures were founded in 1918 and released their first featured film in 1922
• Paramount's core target audience is male and females between the age of 21-29.
However this distributor would not be suitable for my genre as they usually produce
films which are action movies or comedy movies such as You Don’t Mess with the
Zohan, Spider Man 3 and Ghostbusters 2.

9. WARNER BROTHERS
• Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. is an American entertainment company that produces
film, television and music entertainment.
• As one of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its
headquarters in Burbank, California.
• Warner Brothers have produced many successful movies and box sets such as Harry
Potter which has become one of the most successful movies world-wide.
• Also many other popular movies such as Batman v Superman, Sherlock Holmes and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

10. MORE ON WARNER BROTHERS…
• In my opinion I feel this is the best distributor to produce my psychological horror
trailer. My reasons of thinking this is because they have produced many other
successful horror movies; these consist of movies such as, The Shining, The Exorcist,
Friday the 13th and Orphan
• I have also recognised many of these horror films suit my sub-genre which is
psychological which will become very useful to sell my movie trailer.
• To be even more appealing, their reputation of a distributor is very positive as it has a
very good reputation in producing horror movies. So this is why this is the distributor I
have chosen.