COMP LIST
COMP LIST by Laura SouterKezia Williams, of Entertainment One UK, on the FutureLearn Film Distribution by the Film Distributors Association, speaks about how film distributors build a 'comp list' of comparable films that their target audience would enjoy.
She highlights the importance of knowing your target audience. She asks questions like "what drives
them to the cinema" and "what interests do they have". She also says distributors will compare data
of films that are similar in their genre, selling points and story. The target audience and budget is
formulated from what box office take was like with previous films and the types of audience that
saw those films.
The target audience can be analysed to find the gender gap, and which cinemas
the target audience usually frequent.
Today we carried out similar research
KEZIA WILLIAMS: Really important to understand who your audience is and what motivates them and what’s going
to interest them and drive them to go to the cinema. So you start, often, by examining similar films that have been
released in the past– comparable films is a way in which we refer to them in the industry– and create a set that we
can then look back at data so we can look at lots of different data and do research, really, on those comparable
films to identify who the audience was on those films. So it might be that we look at demographic data and think
about, did it skew more male or more female? What’s the age group that it appeals to?
Does it have multiple different audiences that that can appeal to?
And there’s lots and lots of cinema-going trends that you can dig into from that comparable set. We’ll also look at
box office data to understand regionality, to look at the cinema-going skew– so did more people go to a certain
cinema chain to see these comparable films? Right down to which cinemas performed. So it might be that there’s
a cinema in London that had a fantastic box office share, and that’s an important aspect for us to consider. And
then once you really understand who the audience on those comparable films were, you can start to talk about
the differences and similarities between those films and the film that you’re working on.
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PLANNING: TARGET AUDIENCE Excellent quality research, planning and presentation. You have studied the FDA resources and taken on board the reasons why distributors create a list of comparable films (a comp list) before compiling your own. You give very clear reasons for your choices, showing good understanding of both your audience and your genre, the coming of age film.
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