Group 8: Task 11: BFI Statistics Yearbook - Genre and Audience Research

After reading chapters 4 and 15of the BFI Statistics Yearbook, I have found out the following:

GENRE

The top three most successful genres in the UK box office were:

Animation
Action
Comedy

The least successful genres at the UK box office were:

Romance
Documentary
War

The genre with the most films released in 2013-14 was COMEDY, at 153 films. Although they were more successful in the UK box office, there were significantly less films made for ACTION (47) and ANIMATION (33). This tells us that comedy is the most commonly produced genre. Also, the audiences for action and animated films are much larger than comedy films, as they had much less releases, but were still more successful than comedy.

AUDIENCES

The age group that made up the largest proportion of cinema admissions in the UK were 15-24 year olds. The most successful comedy film within this age group was The Hangover Part III. On the other hand, the most popular film with the over 50s was Quartet, a comedy/drama sub-genre.

Genres most popular with men:

Thriller
Action
Comedy

Genres most popular with women:

Documentary
Romance
Animation

UK films appealed most to the 45-54 and 55+ age groups.

Most popular films with the 7-14 age group:

One Direction: This Is Us
Wreck-It Ralph
Despicable Me 2

This tells us that the 7-14 age group prefer animated films. However, an exception was One Direction: This Is Us, which is a documentary.This would have been popular because One Direction are popular within this age range before they had a film, so 7-14 years olds would go and see it. We know that animation is still the most popular genre as all of the other films on the list were animated.

The most popular films with the 35-44 age group were Frozen, The Croods and Jack and the Giant Slayer. This may be because people in this age ranger are often parents and carers who are visiting the cinema with their children. Therefore, animation may be the most popular genre at the box office because larger groups of people buy tickets to see these films.

Most popular films with the 25-34 age groups:

Django Unchained
Fast and Furious 6
Rush

Most popular films with the middle class audience:

C1:

Rush
Captain Phillips
Gravity

C2:

Oz the Great and Powerful
Fast and Furious 6
Despicable Me 2

Popular films in London:

Django Unchained (Western)
Fast and Furious 6 (Action)
Gravity (Sci-fi)

Popular films in Scotland:

Sunshine on Leith (Musical, comedy, drama)
Filth (Crime, drama, comedy)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Sci-fi)

This suggests that Scottish people prefer to watch more light-hearted films/genres compared to Londoners. They prefer films involving action that have more serious genres. We can also see that the most popular films in Scotland had hybrid genres. This implies that they enjoy films with a variety of conventions from different genres, whereas Londoners are more straightforward when it comes to genres.