What impact does media ownership have upon the range of products available to audiences in the media area you have studied?

What impact does media ownership have upon the range of products available to audiences in the media area you have studied?

Media ownership impacts the range of products available to audiences in film quite substantially. "The Big Six", including Warner Bros Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios, dominate a huge percentage of the film industry. this is because Roughly 9/10 films shown in the UK are produced by The Big Six and 76.5% of the market is dominated by The Big Six. All are famous for creating such action films as Avatar, Iron Man 2 and Captain America. This may be the reason they are so famous within the film industry as 60% of the UK film audience would prefer to watch an action film rather than any other genre.

This fact is quite significant as to what impact they have on the range of audience. This is because The Big Six mostly produce this genre of film. This makes it harder for any smaller companies e.g. DreamWorks to produce films that can make a profit as big as the bigger production companies. This is for two reasons.

The first reason is because if a smaller production company tries to make a film in a genre that is not action/adventure, this is particularly hard for them because The Big Six are not mixing in other genres to their films to make them appeal to more audiences. For example, Avatar which was distributed by 20th Century Fox, has a science-fiction element to it. This is then appealing to a wider audience, as not only is it appealing to the 60% of the audience that likes action/adventure film, it is involving the audience that would normally not go see an action/adventure film, but love the science-fiction genre. This made the $246 million budget film have a box office of $2,782,275,172, just over 11 times its budget. Therefore The Big Six is etching its way into all the other genres as not this many people would have been to see the film if it was just listed under science-fiction and not action/adventure as well, especially as there are not A list stars involved with the film.

The second reason is, even if the smaller production companies make an action/adventure genre film, they are still competing with the bigger budget production companies which can afford the A List stars, lots of marketing and lots of special effects. This makes it harder for the smaller companies as they cannot afford this, and these are the essential items needed for an extremely profitable film. For example, Dredd (2012 version) and Kill List are both action/adventure films. These were distributed by companies such as Entertainment Film Distributors, Screen Yorkshire, Warp X etc. which are substantially less popular. These films could not afford to do the "blanket marketing" method, which many in The Big Six often use, therefore meaning that not as many people knew about and went to go see these films, making them both flop at the box office as they both loose money.


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