AUDIENCE ANALYSIS Star Trek fails to live long and prosper?

This post focuses on the LA Times' box office coverage, which provides very specific audience breakdown and analysis.

The headline above is from Gant's column on the UK box office, matching a more common downbeat view on the film's fortunes and prospects (its still on wide release), noting:

Star Trek Beyond may have suffered from director JJ Abrams’ exit into rival franchise Star Wars (he remains as producer). Or fans might have been more excited by Benedict Cumberbatch as the main villain last time around, with Beyond baddie Idris Elba less proven at the box office. And Paramount may have struggled to persuade broader audiences to see a third Star Trek film.

Critics and audiences have been highly positive, but the film has failed to crossover to a wide US or UK audience (RT)

BoxOfficeMojo provide a comparison of all 13 movies in the franchise; the current release needs a major boost from China and elsewhere to ensure the franchise will continue to ... live long and prosper

The various box office columns (global, US, UK) in the Guardian make for great reading and will teach you a lot about how the industry works, and provide very specific examples that might help you in exam and/or coursework efforts. Variety and many others also provide in-depth, highly informed analysis and commentary - you can keep an eye on these by adding RSS feeds to your own blogs.

This example is from the LA Times, which you'd expect to be highly versed in industry practice as Hollywood is in its turf. The fragment I picked out below comments on:

'71 Distribution and Marketing

This overlaps with other posts, but as there are a lot of images, a new post makes sense.

OVERVIEW: KEY POINTS
This is a film with wider ambitions, and arguably a more commercial approach, than most of Warp's productions - as it should, with its ambitious £5m budget*, twice that of Four Lions. UPDATE, 2016: BUT...It flopped, despite the awards, critical acclaim, and gaining distribution in the US and 10 more territories (12 total including the UK) for a worldwide total of $3m: $1.6m UK,, $1.3m US and just $355k from 10 other territories. *According to this Screen article (cited in Wiki) it was £8.1m

According to IMDB, it is getting theatrical releases in France, Spain, Greece, Germany, Canada, USA, Australia, Middle East (eg UAE, see section below). However, we have seen past Warp films such as Tyrannosaur getting distribution in multiple territories, but not getting any marketing spend to give it a real chance (its specialist LGBT distributor didn't issue a trailer, and it limped to a mere $22k). The absence of any information on its US distributor does not augur well.

IMDB company list.

Boxofficemojo: Not every distributor took up the option for a theatrical release.

OPENING WEEKEND: This has become a key figure - if it is lower than expected a film is likely to be labelled a flop and the odds are high that the public will be deterred from seeing a 'flop', while distributors may hold back on further prints and marketing investment. What is significant about the table above is that almost all of '71's national releases saw most of the entire box office raised in the opening weekend - it failed to get a wider, longer release beyond then. The UK figure, in contrast, is just 21% - in this case it built well by word-of-mouth, as I saw first-hand at Bradfor's National Media Museum, where a low opening night (Friday) turnout would be hugely boosted by a review in that day's Guardian (UK broadsheet/quality) newspaper.

COMMERCIAL? COUNTER-TYPICAL FOR WARP? MAYBE NOT...
The 'commercial' element lies in pushing the action/thriller genre over the setting or any real exploration of the issues raised.