Exam Qustion

Explore the different ways audiences respond to your three main texts.

This question relates to Stuart Hall's reception theory, where an audience either has a preferred, negotiated or oppositional response. My three main texts are Skyfall (2012) directed by Sam Mendes, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) directed by Matthew Vaughn and Weekend (2011) directed by Andrew Haigh. Media texts are generally polysemic, meaning that the audience form various responses since the texts can have multiple meanings.

A good example of an audience having a largely preferred reading is when it comes to the James Bond franchise. Skyfall being the 23rd movie, there was no surprise on the popularity of the film as it already has a well established target audience as well as fan base. This can be proven by looking at the James Bond 007 official Facebook page which has over 4 million followers. The fact that Skyfall was the 23rd movie in the franchise, automatically implied that it will receive a largely preferred response. This suggests that the spy theme in movies is majorly enjoyed by the general public, which explains why there's now an infinity of movies consisting of similar themes and genre. Leading onto another one of my studied texts, Kingsman. Matthew Vaughn, the director and one of the writers of Kingsman is well known for his other work such as Kick-Ass (2010) and X-Men: First Class (2011) which also gained generally positive responses from the audience. This is clear as X-Men is a franchise and Kick-Ass got a sequel released. Similarly, it has been announced that a sequel of Kingsman is due to be released this year, "Kingsman: The Golden Circle". This simply highlights the fact that the movie received a preferred response from its audience. However, lower budget movies such as Weekend don't always get the desirable response. Upon it's release in Italy, Weekend was restricted to just 10 cinemas after the country's Bishops described it as "indecent", meaning it received an oppositional response. This had an impact on the audience response as it limited the scope of its release as many people would've been discouraged from watching the movie. On the other hand, others may have been encouraged to watch the movie as according to The Guardian, the movie "has proven a surprise box office smash in Italy" which led to it being shown on 21 screens the following weekend as a result to the audiences preferred response.

Another way of measuring audience response is by looking at the awards movies have been granted with. Skyfall being the most successful of my studied texts, won 2 Oscars along with 64 other wins and 115 nominations. Although Kingsman was more popular due to its larger budget of $81 million, it received less awards than Weekend whose budget was only £120,000. Kingsman received 6 wins and 21 nominations as opposed to Weekend with 20 wins and 18 nominations. Furthermore, Andrew Haigh went on to directing a movie called 45 years which was a huge success being nominated for an Oscar as well as winning 20 awards and having 20 nominations.