Merchandising\Distribution

Merchandising:
I learnt today how important merchandising is for films and how much money they can actually make. When George Lucas made Star Wars he went back to his producers cut his pay in half and managed to convince them to give him merchandising rights, that way he could get a lot of cash out of merchandising and have the rights to go through with making more movies. The producers then thought they would be getting a good deal and did not make much of it because merchandising was not all important, until Star Wars came out. where between 1977 and 2005 Star Wars merchandising has made over 20 Billion and the film has made 2.
Merchandising first came about with Disney and Micky Mouse where he starred in his first film Steam Boat Willy in 1928, they got a merchandising deal of $300 dollars to have the mouse put on a companies tablet.
As an exercise we researched merchandise you can buy for a film which we are doing a essay on and how it was marketed, my films choice is the 'The Hunger Games' and I also had to make some merchandise of my own for it, I made a movie T-Shirt with the Hunger Games Logo on it.

Distribution:

Distribution is what gets the film to its audience. This has changed over time it used to be just cinema and you would have to wait a year or so for it to be re released, until VHS came about and people could rent and buy movies. To begin with the big companies were worried about releasing their films to VHS as they was worried it would stop their income and wont be able to re release a film so small companies took advantage of this by releasing their movies to peoples homes and making a fortune. after this it went on to DVD which killed off VHS completely and followed on to Blu Ray which enhances picture and sound quality like nothing else. But now the use of online and lovefilm and netflix where streaming films online is taking over. And unfortunately video piracy is ruining the movie and film experience. 

The movie I am studying 'The Hunger Games' had a big cinema release making a profit of over 600 million dollars. It was first released with a premier in Los Angeles USA on March 12th but was officially released alongside the UK on the 23rd of March. France managed to have the cinema release two days before on the 21st and Germany on the 22nd. But Japan was the final country to get the movie release on September the 28th.

The theatrical window was between the end of March and and very end of August and beginning of September. USA got a first DVD\Blu Ray release with Netherlands on August 18th and rest of Europe was on September 3rd.