Audience Theory

Through this research we found out that the target audience for Taken, are males aged 15-24 and are mostly in the middle class. It is however also relatively popular with older demographics.  The gender which mostly saw this film were males, this is mainly because they generally like violent and dramatic films. On the contrary, a huge part of Taken’s audience are female viewers, this could have been a result of the stereotypical view that women get more emotionally involved with the film. However, just like the male gaze, I believe the reason that Liam Neeson is the lead character is due to the reason that the mainly older part of the audience of females think he is a very attractive man, especially through his character and personality appeal, which I think has helped massively with challenging the stereotypes that only men enjoy watching action packed films. Similarly to Taken, I also researched Taken 2 and looked at the results in their target audience. The results again showed that the bigger percentage of the audience were male viewers, although since Taken the percentage of female viewers increased which suggests that when Taken 3 is released an even bigger percentage of females will be a part of the films audience. For Taken 2 the age group included the ages 15-24 again which suggest that they kept the same level of violence and scenes which may be inappropriate due to violent content, for children under the age of 15.

The target audience for Ransom, are mostly males, the class is mostly aimed at middle class (c1.).Similarly to Taken, Ransom almost has the exact same target audience. This is because the genre is in fact very similar; Taken is a Action- Thriller film whereas, Ransom is a film which genre is Crime-Fiction & Action. Again, just like with Taken the range of male viewers is much bigger than the female viewers due to the reason that it appears boys/men enjoy more action packed films than women. Furthermore, the results of this research suggests that Ransom is a much more wider enjoyed film as the target audience ages range between 15-24 (38%) and 25-34 (37%). This could also be a factor of the different genre of the two films. 

 The Hunger Games is a film of a completely different genre to the film we want to create, however some of the setting we want to use for our film is included in The Hunger Games. The gender percentages are very similar but there are more males which could show that overall action is more popular with males. Like the other films I looked into, the audience for The Hunger Games has a high percentage as part of their audience of males of mostly 15-24 in the middle class. This connotes that this is mostly what film makers of the genre action/ thriller target their films to.

To conclude, this research helped me begin to see what our target audience will be. I believe that from these target audience research screen grabs we can see what we should include to entice this precise audience. Examples of how we could accomplish this could be by using mysterious music and intense quick shots and a pretty female as the main character to attract the audience through the male gaze theory.