3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

As a group, we have chosen Miramax Films to be our distributor as we felt it would suit the mood and genre of our opening sequence and the idea that it conveys. Miramax is a leading worldwide film and television studio. Known for distributing either foreign or independent films, Miramax was founded in 1979 by two brothers, Bob and Harvey Weinstein and was based in both New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Miramax Films is a unique kind of Distribution Company because they sell directly and license globally through strategic partnerships such as Lionsgate, Hulu and StudioCanal. This is unusual because most Distribution companies do not sell directly, and this is part of the reason why we decided to choose them. Miramax have a name for distributing films that have had previous rejections from larger and more prestigious companies such as Paramount. These films would generally have a reasonable budget. However, Paramount focus more on pleasing wider range of audiences such as families, and our film doesn’t fit this criteria and our target audience is quite narrow and niche, therefore we thought that Miramax would suit us and our general style, better.

Miramax are neither large nor small, and I wouldn’t say they were ‘indie’ or ‘well-known’ which is another reason why we picked them as although our film is mainly ‘Thriller’ is would contain elements of horror, action and espionage. So like the distributor, it is varied. Some films that Miramax have distributed are Scream, Hellraiser, Pulp Fiction and The English Patient. All of which have been very successful, not just in America but all over the globe. Being successful has been the route which many of Miramax’s films have taken, however it hasn’t necessarily been the route that all of their films have taken.

Miramax Films use similar advertising techniques to many other films when they are first released. This will include billboard advertisements, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, etc. The scale on which this is done however, will be different according to both the film itself (whether it is suitable for advertisement) and the budget that it actually has. The kind of audience that we are targeting is male and female, aged from 16 to 30 year olds.