Discuss the ways in which media products are produced and distributed to audiences, within a media area, that you have studied.

Discuss the ways in which media products are produced and distributed to audiences, within a media area, that you have studied.

Media products are produced and distributed to its audience in a variety of ways. Most of the time they are distributed digitally which promotes advertisement. This is because the human race of today spends typically hours of their day on an electronic device, and tend to believe whatever they see on the internet. This can be a blessing for film producers. Time are evolving and the way media products are distributed is a lot more-wide scale than years ago where internet wasn't available for all and the only way to know about a movie was hearing it amongst the community or taking a trip to the local cinema office. 

The film that has recently been released in the cinemas, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (2017) written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulus is a good example of the distribution process. This was a co- production between two big film companies called, Walt Disney Pictures and Mandeville films.

Walt Disney spent around one hundred and forty million dollars to market this film worldwide. This may seem like a big total, but their total profit is targeted to be much bigger.  Walt Disney were smart the way the way they distributed. They decided to leak a small teaser clip of the film to be shown. The word spread rather quickly on social media, the film teaser clip gained roughly ninety-two million views in just twenty-four hours. This was a great achievement which  left thousands of people discussing how excited they are to watch the full film. Walt Disney has a reputation to market their movies with teasers all around for all, such as, Star Wars and Captain America. Although, Beauty and the Beast (2017) gained the most views in the teaser clips. This may be due to the twist, that there was an original 'Beauty and the Beast' in 1946. Since then there has been more modern day versions presented, including cartoons. This shows that when Walt Disney made a modern day 2017 version, it was very sure there would be a positive outcome because it had already held great achievements for its story line over the past several decades. 

‘Beauty and the Beast’’ (2017) is a family based, musical fantasy genre. The sales in the box office hit a great success after it made an unexpected one hundred and seventy million US dollars in just its three-day opening weekend. The movie was so popular that it was reported to have sold out in one thousand show times in many big cities.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ (2017) was distributed on a magazine called the ‘Entertainment weekly’ this magazine promotes any exciting things the public might want to watch.  Walt Disney had paid for their poster of the film to be on the front cover of the magazine. This method will not only attract the typical weekly readers of this magazine but because the poster is on the front cover, whoever passes by shops will have their eye draw attention to it. This was a smart idea to use. The majority of this magazine readers will be an audience from twenty-five and above. However, the use of ‘Beauty and the beast’ (2017) on the front cover will attract the younger generation also. Moreover, Walt Disney decided to use a very famous icon to the generation of today. This icon is called ‘Emma Watson’. ‘Emma Watson’ starred in one of the best films of all time ‘Harry potter’. Here she was one of the main characters and gained great recognition and popularity over the years. This was another factor how the film was distributed. Using great actors like herself gathers attractions of audiences from all perspectives.

In addition, social media had a big influence on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (2017). The leading role of ‘Belle’, was acted by ‘Emma Watson’ which was mentioned previously. ‘Emma Watson’ used her social media accounts to advertise the release day of this film, with a picture of her waltzing about in her character’s dress. She captioned the image telling her fans that the day of the release was today and she wished them enjoyment to watch it. Overall, her Instagram page has a large twenty-seven point four million followers, therefore, realistically this means around twenty million people from her audience most likely became a ‘Beauty and the beast’ (2017) audience also.

‘Beauty and the beast’ (2017) was mostly distributed using visual components. However, there are other ways things can get distributed. This includes the sound through radio. Many things can get mentioned in radio hours. This is typically new music which is released. Although, there has been cases where films have been mentioned on the more informal radio channels and general other advertisements, lastly any breaking news in usually the primary media that reaches the radio stations first.