Audience Research: Black Swan

Discovering the target audience for Thriller films will give us a further indication into our own target audience when we create our own opening and who we should be aiming it to. We have decided to each look at two Thriller films and the target audiences they are aimed at.

The first film I focused on was Black Swan. This is a Psychological Thriller which is a sub-genre to a Thriller that focuses on the unstable emotional states of a character who in this film is a New York City ballet dancer, Nina. Black Swan’s target audience is specifically females aged 15-29, this is because the certificate of this film is a 15 and as the statistics on IMDb shows, the ratings of the film lowers at the ages 30+ from the 8.0 onwards to 7.9 and below. It is focused on females because firstly that characters are mainly women which will females will me more happier and likely to watch it as they can relate to the characters, I believe that the ballet aspect of the film is also aimed at women more because it is a more feminine dance which men don’t find as beautiful and interesting as the female audience.Although IMDb says differently, its statistics show that men under 18 rating this film the highest may be because of the homosexual  scene between the two main characters Nina and Lily, this has been looked into further by other magazine articles.

The target audience was influenced by the main character Natalie Portman as she had been in previous well know films such as Closer,V for Vendetta and The Other Boleyn Girl. As she has been in many  films before she will have a fan base that will want to see her featured in her new film as they know what to expect from her acting. The film also features Winona Ryder who has previously been in Edward Scissorhands,Girl Interrupted and The crucible, a well known actress like this will also bring in her fans and they recognise a well known good actress.

The film received four out of five stars in EMPIRE magazine, 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and is #167 of the Top 250 films on IMDb. It also won an Oscar for best actress and won another 56 Wins.