Exam Question - June 2015

Explore the different audience appeals of your three main texts.

My three main texts were Skyfall (2012) directed by Sam Mendes, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) directed by Matthew Vaughn and Weekend (2011) directed by Andrew Haigh. These movies have clear differences in the audience appeal, the fact that both Skyfall and Kingsman have been created from a much higher budget than Weekend, automatically means they have a higher audience appeal. This is because the marketisation for the movies was able to extend much further and therefore reaching more people globally. Whereas a low budget film like Weekend is focused on appealing to a more niche target audience.

Firstly, the uses and gratification theory helps to explain the appeal of the texts to the audience. The movie Skyfall being the 23rd movie of the James Bond franchise already had a huge fan base who were looking forward to the movies release. This implies that many people would therefore watch the movie in order to be able to discuss it with their friends/colleagues, which links to the social interaction explanation from the uses and gratifications theory. Moreover, the use of star power with Daniel Craig was likely to be a part of the audience appeal. Similarly, the Kingsman cast also consists of star power, for example Colin Firth who plays Harry Hart and Samuel L. Jackson who plays the antagonist Valentine. These actors are very well known, meaning their fans were attracted to watching the movie. The fact that the movie was based on the comic book "The Secret Service" written by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons who were credited as the writers of the film, along with Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn means that the film will appeal to the fans of the comic book. In reference to uses and gratification, Kingsman offers a sense of personal identity through the character of Eggsy played by Taron Egerton, who is a working class boy with no real opportunities to make something of himself. Some audiences may be able to identify themselves with his character as he is extremely relatable. Weekend however has no such thing as star power included, this is due to the very low budget of the film as well as the niche audience it was aimed at. The movie largely focuses on the issues among homosexuals, allowing the audience to have insight into a world we don't usually have such explicit access to. Just like in Kingsman, the protagonists Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New) are very relatable and the low budget of the film helped to add to the realism of it. All three of the main texts offer the audience entertainment and a form of escapism as well as the things previously discussed.

The actual content of the texts is what also makes them appealing. For example, the action driven story lines in both Skyfall and Kingsman will be appealing to the thrill seeking audience. Kingsman also offers scenes of humour in order to keep the audience entertained throughout, in my opinion the humour included is the reason why so many people loved the movie. Whereas Weekend offers a very exclusive and real insight into issues which we don't usually hear about in our day to day lives. Although Weekend wasn't as successful as Skyfall or Kingsman, the audiences who did watch it gave it much praise. It can also be argued that Weekend wasn't as popular due to its issues revolving homosexuality, however this is disproved by the movie Moonlight (2016) directed by Barry Jenkins which won abundance of awards, including 3 Oscars. However, it did have a much higher production budget of 1.5 billion USD as opposed to Weekend's £120,000. Although it could be suggested that Moonlight had a stronger audience appeal as homosexuality has become more normalised.

To gather a better understanding of the audience appeal of the texts, it's interesting to look at the amount of followers the movies have on social media. I looked specifically at Facebook as it's one of the most popular and longest running social media websites which includes people of all ages. For example, the James Bond 007 franchise has over 4 million followers, while Kingsman has just over 750 thousand and Weekend doesn't even have an official facebook page. This shows us that there is a correlation between the audience appeal of movies and their social media accounts.