Audience Research: Taken

The film 'Taken' was released in 2008. Well-known actors and actresses starred in this movie such as, Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen. This brilliant action/crime/thriller was directed by Pierre Morel, written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.

This film carried out extensive market research in order to inform and engage with its target auidence. The film was certificated by the BBFC as a 15, this movie therefore targeted people aged 15 and above. I think this film targeted an audience of 17+ due to the characters abducted are 17-19 years of age. However I believe there is a secondary target audience of 25-40 years of males and females as the film is about how the main character overcomes any obstacles to save his daughter. Therefore this would attract the age range of 30-40 years as it demonstrates the future commitments and an interest in protecting your family. I also think that these genres attract a lot of males due to the amount of action and adventure involved in the film.

'Taken' in 2008 was a huge success, creating a gross profit of $145,000,989 and with an original budget of $26.5 million suggests to me that the market research and the advertising campaign worked extremely well. The use of Web 2.0 helped the directors, writers and actors to get more involved in TV interviews, social networks like Facebook and Twitter and radio interviews to help promote the film to get a larger audience. Other media cross platforms such as posters, trailers featured in cinemas and advertisements on the radio were integrated into the audience's lifestyles which would influence them to watch the movie and build up hype before the release of the film. With the use of social networking such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, enabled the target audience and the fans of the film to follow the cast  on Twitter and Tumblr and to perhaps "Like" the film's Facebook page and the actors/actresses involved in the film.

In November, Fox officially announced that Eurocorp would produce a sequel directed by Olivier Megaton called 'Taken 2'. The film was recently released in 2012 on the 3rd October.