Target Audience: Audience Research

This is my research into the thriller genre and its target audience's for different films.

It is now possible to make a target audience profile for our thriller film in production.The age group of the target audience is 30+ females and females around 16-25 years, as 35% of the thriller-viewers sample were students. For our film, this can be related to by the audience, as one of our main characters is a child, and our audience have just come out of childhood into teenagers/young adults, providing a pathway for connection from the audience. Teenagers and young adults also, from the results of various questionnaires, have found the issues of abduction and mentally ill people intriguing. Our thriller is also targeted towards adults, aged 30+, especially parents, as they are able to relate to the trauma of losing a child and get caught up in the action.

The gender of the target audience isn't as specific as age ranges or demographic classification, but is important nonetheless. For our film, the gender of the target audience would mainly be females, though males could be attracted to the film also. This is because, research done into the films we were "inspired" by, showed that females enjoyed the type of film more than males. Sleeping With The Enemy, for example, is also a physcological dramatic thriller aimed at females. Similarly to our thriller, the protaginist is a woman. This shows how the female audience is already attracted to our type of film. I think the demographic choice for us will be young/adults, due to the fact that they can afford luxuries like the cinema, and have the means and time to go see films or buy DVD's, which will increase our revenue. To increase this even more, we could use a method which some large film companies use; for cinema our thriller would be rated 12, as this gets the highest ratings at cinemas, but when we bring it out on DVD, we could make it a 15 by adding a few scenes as this is the most commonly bought DVD rating.