What Audiences Want: A Comparative Study of Film Distribution and Subscription Video-on-Demand in Australia

Abstract

Film distributors and streamers are in the business of connecting films with audiences and generating profit from this interaction. The distributor’s perception of the potential audience for a film determines the price it will pay to secure the right to distribute the film, and the scale of release the film receives. Due to the upfront expense involved in both producing and acquiring a film, which can only be recouped upon release, producers and distributors have developed over many years different strategies and practices to gather and utilise audience data to better understand future audience demand. While the streaming era has upended these practices, and seemingly stable business models of commercial film distribution, the use of algorithms in technological systems of delivery and the collection of user data are commonly understood to provide unprecedented insight into audience behaviour and measures of their taste.

“What Audiences Want” proposes that, rather than audience data per se, it is distributors’ conceptualisations of audiences that are crucial to understanding their decisions. These conceptualisations may refer to and interpret data but are just as often independent of, if not in contradiction with, available data. This study posits that industrial logics, narratives and established practices are the means by which distributors parse data in order to construct audiences discursively. The thesis establishes two case studies to investigate these processes, one prior to and the other in the current streaming era. It compares the financing and distribution of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker (2015) with that of Thomas M. Wright’s The Stranger (2022).