Case Study Question | Audience

'Audiences are becoming increasingly powerful in shaping media output'

With reference to your case study, how far is this true?

I think that to an extent the audience is becoming more powerful in shaping media output. In my case study I am looking at the three following films: Life As We Know It, The Back-Up Plan & I Give It A Year. All of which follow the Romantic Comedy genre and have three different platforms for the film; E-Media, Print & Broadcast to reach a wide audience and promote audience interaction to help shape media output. 

The film 'Life As We Know It' has various social networking sites such as Facebook with over 600,000 'likes' on it and over a 1000 people talking about it, also the institution, Warner Brothers has a Twitter account for interacting with their audience. Facebook can give the audience the opportunity to comment, review, look at pictures/interviews and find exclusive information while Twitter is good surveillance according to the Uses & Gratifications Theory due to it being more informative about their films. Another social networking site that Warner Bros. Entertainment have just announced on the Life As We Know It Facebook is that they have registered on Pinterest, a modern site for 're-pinning' images and information, similar to blogging. On this site they have made 'boards' for trailers, merchandise, images, quotes, film posters and one's for their most popular films (Lord Of The Rings, Harry Potter ect.) This gives the audience a chance to look at exclusive content, there is a section for film screen shots and links to merchandise such as a shot of the family in the film and the baby wearing a Batman costume, Warner Bros. have commented giving a link to where you can buy the exact outfit due to demand from the audience. This film was shown in cinemas and found to be popular making over $100,000 dollars at Box Office, it was then offered on Lovefilm for a period of time due to it being popular to quite a wide spread audience, following this it was released on DVD in the US and sold over a million copies in a month. On Youtube the audience have uploaded fan made trailers or their own versions of the storyline, this is User Generated Content and is also found on sites such as FanPop where there is Forums for discussing the film such as favourite parts, characters and what they would like to see.

Next the film 'The Back-Up Plan' has similar social networking sites, on Facebook the page almost has 300,000 'likes' and over 500 people talking about it. The film also has it's own Twitter account, alongside the institutions one: CBS films. People have the opportunity to look at new information and pictures plus leave comments and reviews, when the film was first released there were plans to release the DVD a few months later as usual however a large proportion of the audience wanted a bonus soundtrack, due to this high demand the institution released a soundtrack a a few months after the DVD. For User Generated Content on YouTube there are some fan made videos for the film and also one for the main male actor Alex O'Loughlin also on FanPop people have created Forums for the film so that people can discuss and leave comments. 

The film 'I Give It A Year' has almost 14,000 'likes' and 600 people talking about it, these numbers are quite low in comparison to the other films however this film has recently been released so has not been so widely spread through social networking. On Twitter the film institution is StudioCanal and has almost 17,000 followers.

 (Unfinished)