The Woman in Black

1) Who do you think the primary and secondary target audience is for The Woman in Black? Why?


the obvious primary audience is the horror fan base, anyone who loves to watch horror movies and get a jump scare out of it will fall directly into the genre of films that the women in black calls for, the fan base to horror films was studies by Laura Mulvey and she found that it was made up of mostly teenage or older men looking for justice to women who rejected them. however, the secondary audience is based around all the fans of the harry potter series due to the main character being rolled by Daniel Radcliffe, since the harry potter fan base is made of younger females and a small amount of men the target audience for the women in black becomes more varied.

2) How was The Woman in Black marketed? (Think about genre(s), subgenre(s), media platforms, target audience, promotions, size of campaign, etc.).

The woman in black was marketed through a very large number of advertisements, first of all was the trailers, multiple trailers were released to tease the film and then later to show the viewer why they should go and pay to watch it, then there were interviews and posters which were based more around Daniel Radcliffe trying to expand the size of the audience by telling all his fans from harry potter franchise to watch the film and see him pretend to be someone else. the rest that came were merchandising where they sold t-shirts and mugs and even the soundtrack to the movie in an attempt to draw people into the cinema to see the film, the final attempts were the public marketing campaigns where they scared people in the general public then used the viral videos to advertise the movie.

3) Do you think the marketing materials for the film were appropriate? Why?

the marketing materials for the movie were successful but I don't think it was appropriate, this is due to the fact that the woman in black is a horror film and yet it was advertised as this family friendly which meant that when the movie came to DVD there would be a lot of younger kids being scarred by it. the film was rated 12 even though its contents are clearly too much for a 12 year old even for todays standards, the only reason it got away with this is that there are no swear words used and we don't actually see the dead bodies except for the ghosts.

4) What kind of release did the film have? (Big/small? How many cinemas showed the film on its release?)

2885 screens across the world showed the film on the first day of release with 415 of them coming from the UK, this was a huge release film and was almost celebrated on its launch which was only emphasized by the number of people that went to watch the premier of the film. however since the producers spent 1-2 million on advertising the movie it would need to be a success to stop the loss being to large.

5) How much did The Woman in Black cost to make? (Production budget) AND what was the industry impact of The Woman in Black? (Think box office and trends).

the budget for the film was around 17 million with 2 million going into marketing the movie, it made around 55 million back so had a profit of 38 million. that is a lot of money to make from one film and so its obvious that with that kind of profit every other writer wanted to try and do exactly the same thing, this means that movies released soon after the women in black were movies that had been based off popular books or had well known actors in them like the fault in our stars or divergent.

6) Why do you think the film was so successful? (You must come up with at least two reasons)

one reason is the amount of money spent on the advertising, with 2 million on advertising it was almost impossible to forget that the movie had come out and this meant that people were forced to consider whether to watch the movie or not. the other reason it was so popular was that it fell into audiences that a normal horror movie wouldn't even touch, as studied most of the horror audience is the male gender with an occasional female depending on the plot of the movie, the audience for the women in black was more diverse and spread out to people like the younger teen who wanted to see harry potter save the day or the older male who wanted to see how many times the woman in black could make him jump out of his seat.