Building Your Audience From Multiple Communities
Pt 13 Of The HFF Invisible Nation Distribution / NonDē Exploration Case Study
Most films have multiple audience groups to target for engagement, ticket sales, promotion, and community participation. Cinema-makers’ initial questions are often about getting people to see your movie: How do you find them? Which ones are addressable? Can you get them to buy a ticket? What will that take? Will they ever actually show up? Which is just a reminder to start with clarification of your goals.
We should always be asking first whether these even are the right questions considering our goals?
Start by recognizing the current reality
With INVISIBLE we had to face facts from the start. Covid ended theatergoing for The Olds; this once reliable group stopped going for the Big Screen and never returned. The Olds were the prior era’s dominant ticket-buyers for docs, and with all of them staying home, a traditional theatrical release was not going to be likely. Meanwhile, the Global Streaming Platforms had all abandoned political content, with the sole occasional exception of Netflix – and even they seemingly steered clear of anything that called out Russia for the Ukrainian invasion or any other wrong, illegal, or immoral going-ons (say what you will about Netflix – and I will and do – but they remain the sole GSP that hasn’t kowtowed to The Orange WannaBeKing). There wasn’t much of a chance for our film for a traditional theatrical or a sale to a Global Streaming Platform.
And then determine realistic goals
I personally think we should try to set our goals within the realities of our moment. If you’ve been reading HFF for awhile now, you likely understand my belief in utopian ideation, but our aspiration needs to be considered in terms of the current situation. While keep an eye on our true desired outcome, I am going to design for the likely scenarios. A large financial return was not very probable for us, but it didn’t mean we couldn’t have a financially successful film.
When large financial returns on not an expectation, it allows you to put more energy into achieving impact. Impact requires a focus on community. And when addressing community, quality also becomes a stronger determinant and thus goal. Box office is not actually driven by quality, but longevity is as it relevance and both influence impact. We worked long and hard to get the film right. And we had to be sensitive of the shifting story and release date to maximize relevance.
Quality matters beyond impact though; it has systemic repercussions, both positive and negative. I am a huge believer that we get where we go on the shoulders of others. One of the reasons I push so hard to help lift the films I participate in higher is that -- particularly when we tackle challenging subject matter -- if we don’t succeed in multiple ways, we actually make it more difficult for all those that come after us. The goal of building a sustainable cinema ecosystem for ambitiously authored work matters a great deal to me, and to do so, we have to take extra precaution not to drag others down with us.
Seek both personal and professional alignment, and then…
I don’t think we would have had the impact or financial success we did on INVISIBLE NATION if we didn’t recognize the business realities of the time we are living in, build our distribution strategy around those realities, and prioritize impact and quality as a result. To keep our drive going as long as we needed to, we had to make sure those goals aligned well with our personal values.
Ultimately, it is this alignment with both personal and professional goals that we use to better understand a community-focused approach to distribution. Our goals have to align well with what our communities’ goals are. Sure entertainment or education may be one of the main drivers for why they show up, but we have to go deeper than those initial aspects if we want to turn possible customers into audiences and those audiences into community. If we want to actually reach the next level and transform our communities into collaborators, we have to up it another notch beyond that.
