Distribution

Essay on Distribution

Paragraph 1 – Disney as conglomerate

Disney is a huge media conglomerate that is part of the Big Six. This means that it is part of the 6 highest media companies in the united states, The Big six include 20 century fox, paramount, Universal, Warner Bros, Sony and 20^th century fox. Disney produces films such as pirates of the Caribbean and toy story it also owns tv companies such as Pixar and Marvel, which allows them to expand further into animation, and make superhero films such as the Avengers.  

Distribution is changing the modern world because it is expanding to many other companies to get their films distributed. Such as getting shops to sell it and food chains for example, to give out gifts to promote it. Overall, Disney have a wide range of channels of which they can use for distributing films and promoting them. For example, as Disney own Fox now, who also own a large stake in Sky, Disney films can be freely promoted on the Sky Digital satellite platform to a relatively wide audience. Furthermore, plans to open their very own streaming service also allow them to freely distribute their films, alongside licenses which may originate from other studios. Disney also have access to more conventional distribution types, such as DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs through their coveted Disney Vault system to gain profits on films released many years ago.

 In 1967 Disney basically promoted its film through TV and Radio and film posters, furthermore after the original premiere and release the film was continually rereleased and even taken of the shelves for short periods of time in order to boost sales around Christmas as Disney released special editions and limited editions of the film to encourage sales and make the product seem limited or rare to the audience and therefore more appealing.

The Disney vault is a policy in which Disney put some of their most popular films in the vault after a period of time, this means the films are not up for purchase. This means that people have to wait to see the film if they haven’t seen it already. This might prevent a young generation from seeing a really good film, by the time the film is out of the vault, that generation will be older and might not want to see the film or will not enjoy it as much as they would have done if they were younger. It also increases the risk of piracy of films because there will be people who are desperate to find a way to watch the film.

Throughout the 1980s/90s, Disney was re-releasing classic films such as Snow White and Bambi through a seven-year cycle. They would release new editions, like bronze or gold editions, improving the quality and adding exclusive behind the scenes footage to the DVDs. Recently, in the 2010s, they have had to become more creative and therefore create live-action remakes of their classic films like Cinderella, Maleficent and Beauty and the Beast.

The Jungle Book was first released on April 15^th 2016 in America, before spreading around to multiple countries around the world. Jungle Book was released on a teaser trailer to encourage the audience to want to go and watch it.
In the opening day the jungle book made $103,261,464 in its first week of showing. The advantages of Imax and 3D versions allows the designers to make much more creative scenes that will blow the minds of kids and will allow adults to enjoy the film just for the effects that are new and never seen before.  The benefits to the IMAX 3D approach is that dual projectors create more screen brightness, and linear polarizers allow more light to reach the eyes - so the picture should be brighter than in traditional 3D projection. Worldwide Box Office sales were $963,901,123 and it made an est. $19,050,838 in Domestic DVD Sales. This made it one of the largest grossing films worldwide. And made it the 35^th largest grossing film of all time

Conclusion

To conclude it is important to stress the importance of distribution to a conglomerate like Disney. Without effective distribution patterns films could easily underachieve profit wise for example but it must be remembered that distribution cannot be seen in isolation because it can quite easily be linked to the principle of synergy, as one business theorist states ‘industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries try to impose scarcity to keep demand high.’ This is very true of Disney who with the original Jungle Book 1967 found himself with limited avenues of distribution – namely TV  and film, thus to keep The Jungle Book characters fresh in the minds of audiences the company created other programmes and ancillary products from 1967  to the early 2000’s to keep alive the idea of the characters so that in the future there could be a potential remake or reboot of the original film, these other programmes included Talespin, a cartoon starring many of the characters from the original film and Jungle Cubs – another cartoon which explored Baloo, Shere Khan and other characters’ lives as children, the aim of these products were to not only to keep audiences entertained but to keep the Jungle Book franchise fresh and active although more importantly , a means by which one media product can promote another media product by the same company, a term called synergy `and one which will only improve with the creation of Disney’s new streaming service in 2019.