PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTING & MARKETING

Production & Financing

Of the three tasks, production is chronologically first: You have to make a film in order to distribute and exhibit it. At first, the inventors financed and showed their own films, even renting their own halls

In 2006 Hollywood's box-office receipts totalled $9 billion. Because movies are a major industry and an expensive instrument as well as an art form, money has almost always been of vital importance in determining the meaning of the medium, from Leland Stanford's bet about how horses run—and his 1872 hiring of Edward Muybridge to photograph galloping horses to the latest megamerger that results in a major studio being owned by a multinational megacorporation. Who provides the dough? Who takes it? How is it distributed? How do investors recoup their investments? What strings are attached?
Films may be marketed through adverts on television or at bus stops and on busses themselves, this grabs the publics attention and motivates them to watch the film in cinema's, film distributers are very careful with the area they select to market a certain film, because the film has to apply to the people that live in the area.

Distribution

How does the "product"—the feature film—get from the filmmaker to the theatre? Why do you need a "middleman" in the first place? How did this process start?

Today, distributors remain an integral part of the film industry. Generally, they are the ones who hold the legal right to send out a film. You can't even rent an old 16mm film print (legally) to show to a film class without getting it from one of the distributors for whom this market is a specialty.