DISTRIBUTION - Intellectual Property

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• All forms of intellectual property requires money, which I don't have as a no-budget/low-budgte film company

The term as can be seen above does not just refer to media texts but in general areas of business and economics where there is copyright granted to the creators. In the film industry this will be used in marketing, through trailers and posters, the infamous slogan "based on the book by...". There is an already established audience that the distributors can pander to and don't need to rely mainly in stars, although having both can lead to a box office goldmine.

In the 21st century this has applied to the young adult drama. Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games being the biggest book series that were turned into lucrative film franchises.

It is a natural trend that if a book is well received then a film company will see a potential lucrative opportunity, and a film adaptation can come in just a few years, like The Martian after four years, The Fault In Our Stars in just two years and . These examples are also backed up by stars (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, in the case of The Fault Ion Our Stars more a rising star with Shailene Woodley)

COMIC BOOK ADAPTATIONS:

Before this, it could be seen in the adaptations of comic book characters, in the early cases of Batman and Superman, and now the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a huge audience to market to.

VIDEO GAME ADAPTATIONS:

In recent years the film industry has turned to a new audience for intellectual property, video games. World Of Warcraft, Assassin's Creed,  Angry Birds and even classic Packman have been adapted (sign of running out of ideas if ever I heard one) into box office hits.

The first attempt at this was the commercial failure Super Mario Bros about everyone's two favourite Italian plumbers.

Then came a series of successful Pokemon films along with the still contuining anime series.

NON-PROFITABLE EXAMPLES:

However, IP does not always guarantee that an immediate pull factor for audiences.

If you look at State Of Play (Working Title), which is based on a 2003 BBC miniseries. While Paul Abbott is a respected writer, a film based on one of his works is not going to grab the average moviegoer in Britain, let alone jn the USA. What sells is to American and international audiences is the leading man Russell Crowe as well as co-stars Rachel McAdams and Helen Mirren. 

In fact for the already established audience who do know the source material, it can be an offputting as American remakes do not have a very popular reputation, and are always seen to be dumbing down on the quality of the original, although it also depends on how tw trailer portrays the film, so the choice to have the conspiracy mystery based on the war in the Middle East may give it a twist that that small part of the audience would find intriguing.